President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) phone call with US president-elect Donald Trump on Dec. 2 was a logical continuation of a slowly evolving process of improved Taiwan-US relations, said John Pomfret, a former China correspondent for the Washington Post.
However, the major concern is that China will use the call as an excuse to further bully Taiwan and that Trump will stand by, Pomfret said in an article titled “Five myths about US-China relations” published on Friday in the Post.
One of the myths is that the phone call threatened the “status quo,” Pomfret said.
When Trump took the call, US foreign policy advisers had a minor nervous breakdown, while media outlets warned of “disarray” in US-China relations and the increased specter of a “diplomatic disaster,” he said.
However, the “status quo” between Taiwan and the US has been evolving for decades, he said.
In exchange for Chinese promises to help ease the US out of Vietnam and counter the former Soviet Union, officials from the former US presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter promised China that the US would walk away from Taiwan, allowing China to absorb the nation, Pomfret said.
However, since then, especially as US presidents have come to understand that China’s political system has not moved toward democracy, successive administrations have worked to improve ties with Taiwan, he wrote.
Weapons sales to the nation remain robust despite a promise to China in 1982 to slow them, he said adding that diplomatic contact has been upgraded. Washington now supports granting Taiwan observer status at a variety of international organizations. Most Taiwanese can come to the US without a visa, Pomfret said.
In that sense, Trump’s call was a logical continuation of a slowly evolving process of improved relations, he said adding that the perception that trade and engagement would set China free is a myth.
This idea has been the foundation of US engagement with China since Nixon visited China in 1972 and it has been used to justify decades of interaction, Pomfret said.
China’s economy has become more open and personal freedom has expanded over the past few decades, he said.
However, China’s one-party state represses dissent even more severely than it did 30 years ago in the run-up to the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square, he said.
Meanwhile, Western businesses are banned from investing in a swath of China’s economy, while Chinese firms can often invest energy and telecommunications, overseas, he said.
Another myth is that the US has tried to contain China’s rise — China is much stronger than the US economy and China’s anti-US propaganda does not matter, Pomfret said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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