Over the past two decades, Taiwan has slipped from its top position on the list of flash points in the complex relationship between the US and China. In meetings between US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), it has typically come up after half a dozen more pressing issues, like trade, cyberattacks and Beijing’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea.
Now, though, in a single protocol-shattering telephone call with the president of Taiwan, US President-elect Donald Trump has thrust it back on the table. Not since US president Richard Nixon met with Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) in 1972 — when the two issued the Shanghai Communique on the status of Taiwan — has a US leader so shaken up the diplomatic “status quo” on the issue.
“Taiwan is about to become a more prominent feature of the overall US-China relationship,” said Jon Huntsman, who served as US ambassador to China during Obama’s first term. “As a businessman, Donald Trump is used to looking for leverage in any relationship. A president Trump is likely to see Taiwan as a useful leverage point.”
Photo: AFP
In the short run, Trump has rattled the entire region. Representatives of several Asian nations on Saturday contacted the White House to express concern, according to a senior administration official.
And in the longer term, officials in the Obama administration worry that the episode could not just ignite tensions across the Taiwan Strait, but also inflame trade relations and embolden China in the South China Sea, where it has clashed with the Philippines, Vietnam and other neighbors over competing claims to reefs and shoals, which are also claimed by Taiwan.
Trump expressed no misgivings about taking the call from President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), which was arranged beforehand.
He bridled at suggestions that he had committed a faux pas, writing on Twitter on Friday evening that it was “interesting how the US sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”
Nor did Trump or his aides make a gesture to reaffirm the “one China” policy, much to the chagrin of the White House and it fell to a spokesman for the US National Security Council to affirm that the US was not changing the policy.
Under that policy, the US formally recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1979, abrogating its ties with Taiwan, as the then-Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), sought to bolster China’s economy and create closer ties to the West.
Whether Trump views the call as the beginning of a change in approach toward Taiwan is not clear.
A person close to him said that he was just being polite in taking Tsai’s call.
His aides did not respond to a request for further explanation.
Among hard-line Republicans, there has always been a push to confront China by reaching out to Taiwan.
In a statement on Friday, Republican US Senator Tom Cotton, who was briefly believed to be a candidate for Trump’s defense secretary, praised him for taking the call, saying it “reaffirms our commitment to the only democracy on Chinese soil.”
Some China experts said that shaking up the cross-strait relationship would not be the worst thing in the world.
“We have had a ‘status quo’ of sorts in the Taiwan Strait that has kept the peace, but it recently has not looked all that durable, nor was it very agreeable to most citizens of democratic Taiwan,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society.
“Whether a new kind of Trumpian brinkmanship will now cause China to reconsider its hard-line position toward Taiwan or to respond in a dangerous and militant way, remains to be seen,” he said.
Trump spoke harshly about China before and during the US presidential campaign, accusing it of concocting climate change as a hoax to undercut US manufacturers, branding it a currency manipulator — when it in fact is trying to prop its currency up — and threatening to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods.
Trump’s trade advisers have also advocated punitive responses to what they portray as unfair Chinese actions.
However, a few days after he was elected, Trump spoke with Xi and released a statement afterward that said the two men had a “clear sense of mutual respect.”
Taiwan is also likely to seek a closer relationship with the US. After many years under the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government, which pursued closer ties with China, Taiwan elected Tsai as its second president from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.
Analysts said that Tsai, though not a firebrand, was seeking to diversify Taiwan’s economic partners and carve out more space for it in international affairs.
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