Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would speak to Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, an unprecedented move for a US leader that could roil US relations with China.

“I’ll speak to him,” the US president told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland before boarding Air Force One when asked about Lai. “I speak to everybody … We’ll work on that, the Taiwan problem.”

Responding to Trump’s comments on Thursday morning, Taiwan’s foreign ministry said Lai would be happy to speak to the US leader, according to Reuters.

US and Taiwanese presidents have not spoken directly since Washington shifted diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979. However, as president-elect in late 2016, Trump broke decades of diplomatic precedent when he spoke to then-Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen.

The political fallout from that call saw China’s government lodge a complaint with the US government, while Trump’s transition team played down the significance of the conversation.

Beijing has never renounced the use of force to take control of the democratically governed island. It has been angered by longstanding US military support for Taiwan to deter Chinese military action.

Trump’s comments was the second time in a week he said he intends to speak to Lai, dispelling initial speculation that his first mention of it after meeting China’s leader Xi Jinping last week was a verbal slip.

A call between the leaders had not yet been scheduled, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on when such a call might happen or what would be discussed. China’s embassy in Washington also did not respond immediately.

Trump administration officials have noted that Trump has approved the sale of more weapons to Taiwan than any other US president, but he has also described future weapons sales as a “very good negotiating chip.”

Trump has repeatedly touted his relationship with Xi as “amazing”. After last week’s trip to Beijing, Trump said he has not decided whether to proceed with a major weapons sale worth up to $14bn to Taiwan, adding to uncertainty about US support for the island.

In an attempt to pressure Trump, Beijing is now reportedly withholding approval for a potential summer visit to China by the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defence for policy, Elbridge Colby.

Beijing has signalled to Washington that it cannot approve Colby’s trip until Trump decides on how he will proceed with the weapons sale, according to the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter.

Any direct US-Taiwan conversation would ordinarily anger China, which sees the island as its own territory.

However, Trump’s language has sent mixed signals to Taipei. While Lai has welcomed the chance to speak to Trump, the US president’s reference to the “Taiwan problem” echoes Beijing’s phrasing. Lai, who Beijing views as a separatist, said earlier on Wednesday that if he got the opportunity to speak to Trump, he would say his government is committed to maintaining the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, and that it was China that was undermining peace with its massive military buildup in the Indo-Pacific.

“No country has the right to annex Taiwan. The people of Taiwan pursue a democratic and free way of life, and democracy and freedom should not be regarded as provocation,” Lai said.

Under US law, Washington is required to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, and both Republican and Democratic US lawmakers have urged the Trump administration to continue with weapons sales.

Underscoring Taiwan’s strategic importance to the US, the island of 23 million people is the fourth-largest US trading partner, behind China, which has 1.4 billion people. Much of that trade is based on exports to the US of advanced semiconductors, which fuel the global economy.

The Pentagon is planning to send a high-level delegation to Beijing within weeks to lay the groundwork for a potential visit by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, the South China Morning Post has learned.

Sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to comment publicly, said the delegation was expected to be led by Elbridge Colby, defence undersecretary for policy and a key architect of the 2026 National Defence Strategy.

According to the sources, the trip was aimed at, among other things, finalising arrangements for a Hegseth visit but they did not offer a timeline for when that might happen.

The Pentagon delegation follows US President Donald Trump’s high-profile visit to Beijing last week. Hegseth was part of the entourage, making him the first American defence chief to accompany a sitting president on a state visit to China since relations were normalised in the late 1970s.

Hegseth’s inclusion meant he was also the first US defence chief to visit China in nearly eight years, marking his first trip there since assuming the role last year.

Donald Trump has cautioned Taiwan against formally declaring independence from China.

"I'm not looking to have somebody go independent," the US president told Fox News on Friday, at the end of his two-day summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing.

Trump earlier said he had "made no commitment either way" about the self-governing island - which China claims as part of its territory and has not ruled out taking by force.

The US has long supported Taiwan, including being bound by law to provide it with a means of self-defence, but has frequently had to square this alliance with maintaining a diplomatic relationship with China.

Washington's established position is that it does not support Taiwanese independence, with continued ties with Beijing being contingent on its acceptance that there is only one Chinese government.

Many Taiwanese consider themselves to be part of a separate nation - though most are in favour of maintaining the status quo in which Taiwan neither declares independence from China nor unites with it.

In his interview with Fox News, Trump reiterated that US policy on the matter had not changed.

"You know, we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles (15,289km) to fight a war. I'm not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down."

On the flight back to Washington, the US president had told reporters that he and Xi had spoken "a lot" about the island, but said he had declined to discuss whether the US would defend it.

Xi "feels very strongly" about the island and "doesn't want to see a movement for independence", Trump said.

"The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations," Xi warned during the talks, according to Chinese state media, adding: "If mishandled, the two nations could collide or even come into conflict."

Asked if he foresaw a conflict with China over Taiwan, Trump had said: "No, I don't think so. I think we'll be fine. [Xi] doesn't want to see a war."

China has ramped up military drills around the island in recent years, raising tensions in the region and testing the balance that Washington has struck.

Late last year, the Trump administration announced an $11bn ($8bn) package of weapons to be sold to Taiwan, including advanced rocket launchers and a variety of missiles, which Beijing condemned.

Trump said he would soon decide whether that sale could go ahead, adding that he and Xi had discussed it "in great detail". 

He added: "I'm going to say I have to speak to the person that right now is, you know, you know who he is, that's running Taiwan."

The US does not have formal relations with Taiwan, though it maintains substantial unofficial relations. US presidents do not traditionally speak directly to Taiwan's leader, and to do so would be likely to cause significant tensions with Beijing, which considers Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te a separatist.

Trump told Fox News: "We're not looking to have wars, and if you kept it the way it is, I think China's going to be OK with that. But we're not looking to have somebody say, 'Let's go independent because the United States is backing us.'"

The US has previously provoked anger from China for seeming to soften its stance on independence.

Its State Department dropped a statement from its website reiterating Washington's opposition to Taiwanese independence in February 2025 - something Beijing said "sends a wrong... signal to separatist forces".

US officials in Taiwan said at the time: "We have long stated that we oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side."

Taiwan's Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung said his team had been monitoring the US-China summit, and had maintained good communication with the US and other countries "to ensure the stable deepening of Taiwan-US relations and safeguard Taiwan's interests".

He said Taiwan had always been a "guardian of peace and stability" in the region and accused China of escalating risk with its "aggressive military actions and authoritarian oppression".

The purge China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has inflicted on the military elite was plain to see at a recent legislative meeting. A year earlier, state television footage showed around 40 generals in the room. This time, there were only a handful.

Yet Mr. Xi indicated that an upheaval that rivaled those of the Mao era was not over. Stony-faced, he warned the remaining officers to beware of disloyalty.

“The military,” he said, “must never have anyone who harbors a divided heart toward the party.”

It was a rare public reference by Mr. Xi to one of the worst political crises of his 13 years in power: He had lost faith in the military leadership that he had spent a decade remolding.

“When Xi uses the words ‘divided heart,’ they are heavy with meaning,” said Chien-wen Kou, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. The phrase is found in ancient Chinese treatises that counsel rulers against treacherous generals, including a volume Mr. Xi has kept on his bookshelf.

“Even his most trusted and important confidants have fallen,” Professor Kou said. “Who else can gain his trust?”

The crisis threatens one of Mr. Xi’s great feats: the transformation of the Chinese military into a formidable force with new aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles and an expanding nuclear arsenal. And it comes as China’s rivalry with the United States has intensified, and as the Trump administration has put American firepower, and its limits, on vivid display in Venezuela and Iran.

China’s war readiness may be disrupted for years by the very cleanup that Mr. Xi has said is necessary to purify and strengthen the ranks. What once looked like a limited crackdown on corruption became a sweeping dismissal of dozens of top officers, and culminated in the downfall early this year of Zhang Youxia, China’s top uniformed commander, who had appeared to be a confidant of Mr. Xi’s.

The final break between them came, by some accounts, when Mr. Xi sought to promote the general leading the cleanup to a position rivaling General Zhang’s. General Zhang objected. Months later, he was out.

The gravity of the campaign was on stark display again this past week, when a military court sentenced two former defense ministers to death, suspended for two years, for bribery. They will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison.

“This is Xi Jinping’s military,” said Daniel Mattingly, an associate professor at Yale University who studies China’s politics and military. “Why does he break the thing that he built?

“It’s not what people would have expected of Xi, even five years ago. Something profound changed,” he said.

The corruption Mr. Xi has been hunting is real. But earlier internal speeches by Mr. Xi, not previously reported in detail, reveal another factor: a leader who saw in any sign of disobedience the seed of a political threat to his rule. He became convinced, analysts say, that the commanders he had chosen to modernize the military could no longer be trusted, their loyalty and effectiveness eroded by graft and cronyism.

Analysts say the upheaval has also exposed the tensions between Mr. Xi’s two imperatives — preparing for combat and enforcing loyalty. Ultimately, Mr. Xi ousted a battle-experienced general who helped remake his military and replaced him with an inquisitor, who is now, alongside Mr. Xi, the sole other remaining member of China’s top military council.

“Xi Jinping’s rule is slowly entering its late stage,” Professor Kou said. “His political calculations change in this stage, his anxieties become increasingly about members of his own inner circle.”

Seizing Control of the Gun

Early on, Mr. Xi appeared determined to avoid the fate of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who was widely seen to have failed to establish his authority over China’s military commanders.

Mr. Hu’s weakness was exposed in 2011 during a visit to Beijing by Robert Gates, then the U.S. secretary of defense. Mr. Gates asked Mr. Hu about the test flight of a Chinese stealth fighter jet, news of which had emerged that morning on Chinese websites.

Mr. Hu seemed to have no knowledge of it. “The civilian leadership seemed surprised by the test,” Mr. Gates told reporters later.

Mr. Hu’s directives to army commanders were “more like suggestions they would consider,” said John Culver, a former C.I.A. analyst now at the Brookings Institution. “Basically you had a system that was no longer responsive to the party.”

After coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi launched investigations against commanders who had grown wealthy, and overweening, under Mr. Hu, including some previously deemed untouchable because of their status.

In 2014, Mr. Xi summoned hundreds of senior officers to Gutian, a town in eastern China where, according to party histories, Mao Zedong in 1929 established the fundamental principle that defines the Chinese state today: The party commands the gun.

Mr. Xi used that historical backdrop to warn that the Communist Party’s control of the armed forces had eroded to a dangerous degree.

At Gutian, Mr. Xi laid out the problems he had inherited. Faith in the party’s values had decayed. Corruption, cronyism and insubordination was brazen. He cited training exercises so fake that soldiers used shovels and sticks instead of guns.

The Rot

To Mr. Xi, the rot was exemplified by Gen. Xu Caihou, who was a retired vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, a position that had put him near the top of the People’s Liberation Army. General Xu had been placed under investigation, accused of taking huge bribes, including for arranging promotions for officers.

“Xu Caihou always solemnly professed undying loyalty and love toward the party,” Mr. Xi said, according to a previously unreported version of a speech he made in Gutian that circulated inside the military. “But really, deep in his soul he had long ago fallen away from the party and into corruption and depravity.”

Mr. Xi was also alarmed by events abroad. He cited cautionary stories of leaders in the Middle East and the Soviet Union who were toppled after their militaries abandoned them in the face of insurrections.

Mr. Xi came to the job with a reverence for the People’s Liberation Army. His father was a revolutionary leader who had fought under Mao. In his early career, Mr. Xi worked as a secretary to the minister of defense. Mr. Xi believed that to instill loyalty in the military to the Communist Party and to him, he had to revive “political work” — the indoctrination, vetting and monitoring that made officers and troops trustworthy.

To drive home the new spirit of discipline that he demanded in Gutian, Mr. Xi was shown eating coarse rice and pumpkin soup, the humble, storied meal of the early Red Army.

“Absolute loyalty to the party rests on the word ‘absolute’,” Mr. Xi said. “It is a loyalty that is singular, total, unconditional and free from any impurities or fakery.”

The Chairman Is in Charge

From his first years in power, Mr. Xi also began entrenching a “chairman responsibility system,” an overhaul that tightened his control over the military by giving him intelligence and control deep into its ranks. He declared his confidence in his own ability to spot the right commanders for promotion.

“The key to building a strong military lies in picking the right people,” he said in an internal speech in 2016, describing how he vetted and spoke to prospects for promotion. “Senior and mid-ranking officers are the backbone for building and running the military, and as chairman of the Central Military Commission, I should personally handle this.”

He also replaced decades-old military regions with new theater commands and he dissolved central People’s Liberation Army departments that he saw as barriers to effective control. His goal was to give China the ability to combine land, air and sea forces to project power abroad, while ensuring that this modernized force stayed unflinchingly loyal.

Gen. Zhang Youxia was among the commanders entrusted with executing Mr. Xi’s vision. General Zhang was a gruff, charismatic officer who had distinguished himself on the frontline of China’s yearslong border war with Vietnam from 1979. He was the son of a revolutionary general who had fought alongside Mr. Xi’s father.

Mr. Xi had earlier promoted him to the Central Military Commission and made him head of the military’s general armaments department. The department was in charge of acquiring new weapons, which are vital to Mr. Xi’s modernization plans, but had also become a mire of corruption, fed by its control over funds and contracts.

“He came from a privileged Communist Party background, and it showed,” said Drew Thompson, who was working at the Pentagon and met General Zhang in 2012 when he took part in a Chinese military delegation on a visit to the United States. “I think that combination of his background, his combat experience, his self-confidence, his comfort with weapon systems and his openness to change made him attractive to Xi.”

By 2018, Mr. Xi appeared satisfied that his overhaul was paying off. While he acknowledged to the Central Military Commission that problems remained, he said the changes were a “historic transformation” that had “saved the military.”

When Mr. Xi won a third term as leader in 2022, he unexpectedly retained General Zhang in the military commission. At 72, the commander had been expected to step down. Mr. Xi instead made him China’s top general, tasked with pursuing Mr. Xi’s goal of a breakthrough in military capabilities by 2027.

China faced an increasingly perilous world, Mr. Xi said two weeks later during a visit to the Joint Operations Command Center. “Direct all our energies to combat readiness,” he said.

Last Man Standing

But just over half a year later, in 2023, the veneer of stability cracked. Mr. Xi abruptly replaced the Rocket Force’s top commander and his deputy — an extraordinary move in the arm of the military that controls nuclear and conventional missiles. The purge was never publicly explained. Then China’s defense minister was dismissed without explanation.

Suddenly, Mr. Xi’s transformation of the People’s Liberation Army looked plagued by the same problems of corruption and disobedience that he claimed to have excised.

This time, Mr. Xi brought his commanders to Yan’an, the hallowed base of Mao’s revolution, where Mr. Xi called for a deepening campaign of “political rectification.” In the two years that followed, dozens of high-ranking officers were removed or disappeared from public view.

As the campaign widened, so did the power of Gen. Zhang Shengmin, the commander steering the investigations. He had risen through the ranks despite having little experience in military operations. In the Rocket Force, he was a political commissar, enforcing party loyalty. He was known for his love of Chinese brush calligraphy.

He was later promoted to a newly created agency that investigates graft and disloyalty in the military. His ascent reflected the importance Mr. Xi gave to ideological control and political loyalty, even as he also called for battlefield readiness.

“In Xi’s analysis, failures of readiness stemming from corruption are merely an outgrowth of ideological impurity,” said Joel Wuthnow, a senior fellow at the National Defense University in Washington who studies China’s military. “The rot was perhaps deeper than Xi imagined in 2023, and so he needed to take more drastic steps.”

Gen. Zhang Shengmin’s powers were most likely enhanced by pervasive surveillance technologies that gave investigators more tools to spy into the lives, and financial flows, of officers and their families, said Mr. Culver, the researcher at Brookings.

By late 2025, the purges were reshaping not just the ranks but the balance of power among remaining commanders. Analysts suggested that as the investigations deepened, there was growing turbulence inside the military elite, including between commanders focused on warfighting goals and officers tasked with enforcing political loyalty.

“Xi is trapped in a red versus expert contradiction,” said Mr. Thompson, the former Pentagon official, referring to “red” as loyalty to the party.

With China’s next leadership transition due at a Communist Party congress late next year, in this reading, Mr. Xi appeared more sensitive to perceived threats to his authority. His top commander, Gen. Zhang Youxia, seemed more dominant, with many potential rivals toppled. But he was not untouched: The investigations had also brought down other generals linked to him, potentially implicating him.

And the chief investigator, Gen. Zhang Shengmin, was rising.

The final straw came when Mr. Xi moved to promote Gen. Zhang Shengmin to vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, said Christopher K. Johnson, a former U.S. government intelligence officer who is now president of China Strategies Group, a consultancy firm.

Gen. Zhang Youxia, backed by his second-in-command, Gen. Liu Zhenli, objected to that proposal because placing an investigator in such a powerful position risked painting the People’s Liberation Army as an unserious combat force, Mr. Johnson said.

Modern Chinese history offers examples of commanders who overestimated how far they could push their leaders. General Zhang appears to have done the same. “Zhang Youxia thought, ‘I’ve got the credentials to say this,’ and it turns out he didn’t,” Mr. Johnson said.

When he and his deputy were removed early this year, the official military newspaper accused them of having “gravely trampled on” the chairman responsibility system, which Mr. Xi had built up to cement his control over the military.

Mr. Xi is not stopping there. In April, he launched a program of “ideological rectification” and “revolutionary forging” within the military — an indoctrination drive, in other words. Mr. Xi addressed the assembled senior officers, described as the first batch of attendees in Beijing, suggesting that the campaign to instill loyalty would roll on.

Television footage of the meeting showed rows of officers diligently taking notes as Mr. Xi spoke. Sitting next to him was Gen. Zhang Shengmin, the enforcer.

BEIJING, May 7 (Reuters) - Former Chinese defence ministers Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu were both sentenced to death with ​a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua ‌reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military.

The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered ​by President Xi Jinping after coming to power in 2012. ​The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear ⁠weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023.

Earlier this year they escalated further, ​resulting in the removal of the top general in the People's Liberation ​Army, Zhang Youxia, who was a Politburo member and was long seen as an ally of Xi.

Past reports in Xinhua said Li had been suspected of receiving "huge sums ​of money" in bribes as well as bribing others, and an investigation ​found he "did not fulfil political responsibilities" and "sought personnel benefits for himself and others".

An investigation ‌launched ⁠into Wei in 2023 found that he had accepted "a huge amount of money and valuables" in bribes and "helped others gain improper benefits in personnel arrangements", Xinhua reported in 2024, adding that his actions were "extremely serious in ​nature, with a ​highly detrimental impact ⁠and tremendous harm".

A death sentence with reprieve in China is typically commuted to life imprisonment if the offender commits ​no crimes during the period of reprieve.

After the commutation, ​they ⁠will be imprisoned for life without the possibility of further commutation or parole, Xinhua said.

China's ongoing military corruption purges are leaving serious deficiencies in its command ⁠structure ​and are likely to have hampered the ​readiness of its rapidly modernising armed forces, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said this year.

So I'm a new immigrant to the States, I have several years of working exp back home and now looking to get a MS degree to hone my skills and to make my resume more attractive. Anyway, I got accepted into MS of Financial Management at BU and MS of Finance at NEU. I know BU MET program is more geared toward working professionals, while the NEU program at D'Amore-McKim is more "traditional" master program. BU is more reputable, but MET is no Questrom, while NEU is lower ranked / less reputable, but it's a full fledge B-school, and I heard they have been working hard at improving their program lately. And from what I see, the curriculum at NEU is more theoretical than the one at MET, though I could be wrong.

So my question is: Which one is better in term of learning exp / curriculum and reputable ? Thanks for your replies in advance.

So I'm a new immigrant to the States, I have several years of working exp back home and now looking to get a MS degree to hone my skills and to make my resume more attractive. Anyway, I got accepted into MS of Financial Management at BU and MS of Finance at NEU. I know BU MET program is more geared toward working professionals, while the NEU program at D'Amore-McKim is more "traditional" master program. BU is more reputable, but MET is no Questrom, while NEU is lower ranked / less reputable, but it's a full fledge B-school, and I heard they have been working hard at improving their program lately. And from what I see, the curriculum at NEU is more theoretical than the one at MET, though I could be wrong.

So my question is: How's the teaching quality at BU MET ? Is the degree at BU MET reputable ? Which one has better learning experience or curriculum? What do you guys think ?

Thanks for your replies in advance.