The elections have returned the Democratic Progressive Party to power. Rolling over the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the DPP won both the presidency and a legislative majority, giving it control of both elective branches for the first time.
President-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) did not center her campaign on attacking the KMT’s policy of closer relations with China, focusing instead on Taiwan’s lagging economy, but neither did she reject the bedrock DPP platform of independence. Her rhetoric, including her victory statement on Saturday last week, has been cautious. However, her party’s base knows what it wants. Inevitably, therefore, warning flags are being raised in East Asia.
Of course, the US is also to have presidential elections this year and most US Republican candidates are determined to replace the vacuum that exists where the US’ China policy should be. This might involve modifying or even jettisoning the ambiguous “one China” mantra, along with even more far-reaching initiatives to counter Beijing’s rapidly accelerating political and military aggressiveness in the South and East China seas.
Repeatedly met with passivity from Washington and impotence in the region, Beijing has declared much of the South China Sea a Chinese province, designated a provincial capital, and is creating not merely “facts on the ground,” but the ground itself, in the form of artificial islands on which it is constructing air and naval bases.
Predictably, China’s partisans in the West contend that Beijing’s economic troubles mean that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) will not move first to provoke trouble with the Tsai administration. However, Beijing’s ongoing reckoning with economic reality does not necessarily mean it will be less assertive internationally.
Authoritarian governments confronted with domestic problems have historically sought to distract their citizens by rallying nationalistic support against foreign adversaries. Who better to blame for China’s economic crash than the US and pesky Taiwan?
How Tsai would react to Xi’s provocations remains unknown. Of course China would prefer for Taiwan to fall into its lap like a ripe fruit, with its economic infrastructure and productivity intact, rather than to risk hostilities, but in the period to come Beijing must consider not merely a less pliant Taiwanese government, but also the next US president.
Beijing knows that the weak, inattentive US President Barack Obama will be in office for only one more year. Whereas even former US president Bill Clinton ordered US carrier battle groups to Taiwan’s aid in the 1996 cross-strait crisis, few Americans today believe that Obama would do the same.
How could Beijing’s leadership not draw the same conclusion? Washington’s unwillingness to stand firm against Chinese belligerence in Asian waters only encourages Beijing to act before Jan. 20 next year, perhaps especially before Tsai is inaugurated in four months. For now, observers can only monitor East Asia’s geopolitical space, involving not just Taiwan, but also the South and East China seas, until inauguration day in Washington, praying that the Asian situation is not hopeless by then.
For a new US president willing to act boldly, there are opportunities to halt and then reverse China’s seemingly inexorable march toward hegemony in East Asia. Playing the “China card” in the times of former US president Richard Nixon made sense, but the reflexive, near-addictive adherence to pro-China policies since then has become unwise and increasingly risky.
An alternative now would be to play the “Taiwan card” against China. The US should insist that China reverse its territorial acquisitiveness, including abandoning its South China Sea bases and undoing the ecological damage construction there has caused. China is free to continue asserting its territorial claims diplomatically, but until they are peacefully resolved with its neighbors, Asian nations and the US are likewise free to ignore such claims in their entirety.
If Beijing is not willing to back down, the US has a diplomatic ladder of escalation that would compel it to pay attention. The new US administration could start by receiving Taiwanese diplomats officially at the US Department of State; upgrading the status of US representation in Taipei from a private “institute” to an official diplomatic mission; inviting the president to travel officially to the US; allowing the most senior US officials to visit Taiwan to transact government business; and ultimately restoring full diplomatic recognition.
Beijing’s leaders would be appalled by this approach, as the US is appalled by their maritime territorial aggression. China must understand that creating so-called provinces risks causing itself to lose control, perhaps forever, of another so-called province.
Too many foreigners continue echoing Beijing’s view that Taiwan is a problem only resolvable by uniting the two sides as “one China,” but Taiwan’s freedom is not a problem. It is an inspiration. Let Beijing contemplate that fact.
John Bolton is a former US ambassador to the UN and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This article first appeared in the Asia Wall Street Journal.
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