Pelosi met with Japan's prime minister Fumio Kishida Friday morning, with their attention focused on the Taiwan Strait, where China is staging air and sea drills to protest the US speaker's visit to Taiwan earlier this week.
China previously fired missiles into waters surrounding Taiwan, a democratic island of 24 million that the Chinese Communist Party regards as its territory despite having never controlled it - most notably during the Taiwan Strait Crisis in the 1990s.
It was a significant escalation, with US officials warning there may be more to come.
The US National Security Council spokeswoman John Kirby said on Thursday that we anticipated that China might take steps like this - in fact, I described them for you in quite some detail the other day.
He told reporters at the White House that these actions will continue and that the Chinese will continue to react in the coming days. China fired several missiles at the island's waters near northeastern and southwest Taiwan on Thursday. China fires live-fire drills near Taiwan in live-fire drills as PLA encircles island A Chinese military expert confirmed on state broadcaster CCTV that the conventional missiles flew over Taiwan's main island, including airspace covered by Taiwanese defense missiles. The Chinese military has solved the difficulties of hitting long-range targets on the waters, according to Maj. Gen. Meng Xiangqing, a professor of strategy at the National Defense University in Beijing. Taiwan's Defense Ministry said late Thursday that the missiles had traveled above the atmosphere and therefore posed no risk to the island. The ministry said that authorities did not trigger air raid alerts because they predicted the missiles would land in waters east of Taiwan. The ministry said it wouldn't release further information about the missiles' trajectory to protect its intelligence-gathering capabilities. China's People's Liberation Army PLA conducts missile tests from an unidentified location on August 4, 2022 in waters off the eastern coast of Taiwan. Five ballistic missiles are believed to have landed within Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone, including the four believed to have flown over Taiwan, according to Japan's Defense Ministry on Thursday. It is a serious problem that concerns Japan's security and the safety of its citizens. "We strongly condemn it," said Japan's Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, speaking to reporters at a news conference.