Today’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Florida was long anticipated. The Taiwan Strait, the North Korean nuclear crisis, the South China Sea sovereignty disputes and the US trade deficit with China will top the agenda.
However, the outcome of this first meeting will be more symbolic than substantial. Both nations have increasingly found each other to be geopolitical competitors at all levels.
Ever since former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) launched economic reforms in 1978, the US-China relationship has been stable. Deng adopted a pro-US foreign policy and incentivized multinationals and overseas Chinese investors to establish joint ventures. China was eager to join the IMF, World Bank and WTO to attract more foreign investments.
In the 1980s and 1990s, China benefitted immensely from the US-dominated international order, using it to drive the country’s modernization. For Deng, economic concerns took precedence over ideological and political concerns. His successor, Jiang Zemin (江澤民), continued on the same path of reform and pro-Western foreign policy.
However, that all changed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on US soil. Under former US presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, US military power around the world was spread thin as Washington fought several regional wars at once. Worse, the US’ failure to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq, and to denuclearize North Korea and Iran, undermined its image as the hegemonic superpower.
Meanwhile, China quickly repositioned itself to fill the leadership vacuum left by the US. In 2013, Xi launched the “One Belt, One Road” initiative as a new international strategy, building a multilateral world and integrating neighboring states into a China-centric economic system. The “One Belt, One Road” plans have not only energized local Chinese officials and entrepreneurs to explore new commercial opportunities in the developing world, but also strengthened Chinese ties with Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Against this backdrop, the North Korean nuclear crisis enabled China to play a larger role in regional politics. China supported North Korea because of the necessity to defend its northeast frontier against US forces in South Korea and Japan.
In response, the US pursued a two-pronged strategy of military containment and diplomatic engagement of China. Seeking to create room for a constructive partnership, Bush and Obama often turned to Beijing for diplomatic assistance in an effort to marginalize Pyongyang. Yet this partnership failed to make North Korea suspend its nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid.
Apparently feeling confident that the US is now better positioned to manage a fractured world, Trump has put the military option back on the table and is testing Chinese tolerance of threats of use of force against North Korean nuclear facilities. If China cannot bring the US and North Korea to the negotiating table, it might have to deal with the negative spillover effects of another Korean war on its northeastern border.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has been striving to replace the Cold War international order with a new order in Northeast Asia, at the expense of US power. Beijing appears to support US sanctions against North Korea in return for the suspension of US military aid to Taiwan. In this perspective, the Chinese response to the North Korean nuclear crisis has been part of a wider negotiation with the US over Taiwan. The challenge facing Trump is whether the US is willing to let Asia drift toward an emerging Chinese hegemon.
The complexity of the US-China relationship is therefore shaped as much by North Korean issues as by the situation across the Taiwan Strait. Like any other Asian country, Taiwan needs a stable and benign environment for its social and economic growth.
US-Taiwan relations are deep and multifaceted, and it is important for both sides to work on strengthening them. Taiwan ought to prioritize its own agendas in this highly fluid landscape of geopolitics. While the nation prides itself as an irresistible model of democratization for China, Hong Kong and Macau, it has to establish more formal and informal channels of communication with US policymakers, and convey its political and strategic concerns to Washington more effectively.
Joseph Tse-hei Lee is professor of history at Pace University in New York City.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS