Taiwan welcomed its third U.S. congressional visit this month, as Sen. Marsha Blackburn began a three-day trip to the island that’s likely to further test Washington’s tense ties with Beijing.

Blackburn, a Republican on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee that oversees defense policy, met Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Friday morning, after landing in Taipei the previous evening. Days earlier, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb also stopped in Taiwan, overlapping with a delegation of lawmakers from Japan.

“The United States and Taiwan are bonded by common goals of democracy, freedom, and shared economic interest. Communist China’s goals are anything but,” Blackburn said in a statement. The senator said the two discussed the role allies can play in checking China’s ambitions in the region.

“Together, we will proudly stand up to the New Axis of Evil,” she said.

Tsai welcomed the visits from lawmakers as an “active show of strong support of the U.S. Congress,” adding they had “reinforced Taiwan’s determination to defend itself.”

Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking U.S. official in a quarter century to visit Taiwan, prompting Beijing afterward to fire missiles over the island for the first time. The U.S. accused China of using Pelosi’s trip as a pretext to ramp up military pressure on the island Beijing claims as its own territory.

Two weeks later, U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, also defied Beijing to lead a bipartisan delegation to Taipei, saying he wanted to bolster support for Taiwan against “growing authoritarian pressure from Beijing.”

At least 150 U.S. senators and House members have traveled to Taiwan over the past decade, according to Taiwanese government statements and congressional travel records, including 34 so far under President Joe Biden. While the White House argues such trips have no bearing on the U.S.’s 50-year-old agreement to cut formal ties with Taipei, Beijing sees them as a threat to its claims on Taiwan.

Growing bipartisan calls in Congress for the U.S. to deepen its support of Taiwan, including through military sales and a bilateral trade initiative, threaten to destabilize relations between the world’s two largest economies.

Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping were preparing for their first in-person meeting before Pelosi’s visit, which upended talks on tariffs, climate change, defense and other topics. It is unclear whether plans for the meeting are still progressing.

On Friday, Blackburn told Tsai she wanted to defend Taiwan’s freedoms and help the world’s largest chipmaker secure supply chains. In a later call with reporters, she said she and Taiwanese officials she met with also discussed Taiwan’s desire for more military aid from Washington.

“They are definitely looking for more, and they’re beginning to talk in terms of what they would need to stockpile,” she said. Asked about whether the US should alter its long-standing “One China” policy that deems the question of Taiwan sovereignty as undetermined, she said she already views Taiwan as an independent nation.

“I feel like Taiwan is a country,” she said. “If Taiwan were not a country, then why would China be talking about reunification?”

Blackburn’s stop in Taiwan is part of a swing through the Indo-Pacific region, where the U.S. is jostling with China for greater influence. She earlier visited Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea.

The Tennessee senator is a longtime China critic who has courted controversy for her conservative views and a Twitter spat with a Chinese state-media journalist. She lobbied the U.S. to block technology shipments to Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies Co. over national-security concerns and blasted Beijing for its handling of the initial COVID-19 outbreak.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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