Before US President Donald Trump’s trip to China, Beijing tried hard to promote a “new model of great power relations” with the US.
In Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) own words, “the Pacific Ocean is big enough to accommodate both China and the US.”
A Chinese military officer has proposed that the US and China share the responsibility of managing the Pacific region, with Washington managing areas east of Hawaii and China areas west of it.
Although the plan hinges on a good deal of wishful thinking, it reveals Beijing’s ambition to create the impression that it is the equal of the US, while playing down the international status of Japan and India and driving a wedge between the US and its key allies, including Japan and India.
Over the eight years under former US president Barack Obama, the US approach of sharing information with China instead of confrontation has given Beijing significant advantages.
During Trump’s 48-hour visit to Beijing, he was given extraordinarily lavish treatment, as Beijing tried to win him over with flattery. Xi did his best to heap praise on Trump and play down the two countries’ mutual suspicions and rivalries.
Saying that it is “only natural” that the two countries have different views on some issues, Xi expressed hope that the two sides would nevertheless respect each other and focus on promoting their common interests, while properly handling and managing their differences.
However, Trump’s national security team knows full well that Beijing has a history of weaving beautiful lies and making empty promises.
Although Xi has emphasized that China will be a responsible “great power,” it has for a long time tolerated the nuclear arms threat posed by its ally North Korea. Trump has been urging China to use its influence to keep North Korea in check, but China has never fully cooperated.
Although Beijing has agreed to keep up the pressure on North Korea, this time it might simply be a matter of paying lip service while not following up on the promise with action.
Xi has said that the two countries have far more interests in common than issues that divide them, and that “it is important to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
He also told Trump that “the Taiwan issue is the most important, most sensitive core issue in China-US relations and concerns the political basis of the China-US relationship,” adding that China “hopes the US continues to scrupulously abide by the ‘one China’ principle and prevents disturbances to the broader picture of China-US ties.”
Reading between the lines, Xi said that China is opposed to the US selling arms to Taiwan.
However, Trump, who came prepared, simply said that the US will not stop selling arms to Taiwan, adding that it will continue to provide weapons of a defensive character to Taiwan in accordance with the Three Joint Communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act.
This part of the exchange between the two was not reported by Chinese media.
A senior White House official told a US media outlet that the US and Chinese officials did not mention the signing of a fourth communique in Beijing, adding that they also did not use the Taiwan issue as a bargaining chip to reach any deals.
Beijing has spent large sums of money to get former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger to persuade the White House to make a deal on Taiwan with China, but that effort has failed.
Some war hawks and extreme leftists within the Chinese Communist Party who have little understanding of international realities have been blindly urging the Chinese government to urgently annex Taiwan by force.
Despite the pressure they have placed on Xi, he has insisted on his policy of “peaceful unification” and “one country, two systems,” while promoting the peaceful development of relations across the Taiwan Strait, as he worries that attempts to annex Taiwan by force will prompt the US to carry out a military intervention based on the Taiwan Relations Act.
If war breaks out between China and the US, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army would not win. Moreover, Xi’s goal of creating a well-off society by 2020 and ultimately achieving “the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation” by 2050 would fail.
Trump’s national security team is aware of Xi’s plans to improve China’s economy and army over the long term — in particular his plan to build the world’s most powerful military by 2050, which would be capable of defeating the US military and help China replace the US as world leader.
To counter that, Trump’s national security team has devised a new strategy to set up an alliance to counterbalance China, the Indo-Pacific regional strategy, a creative application of an ancient strategy used by Chinese states to jointly defeat new powers during the Warring States period.
Since the US, Japan, India and Australia all share the values of democracy, freedom and human rights, they will collaborate to curb China’s hegemony, and in the past several years the US has carried out several trilateral military drills with these countries.
How these four allies strengthen and integrate their weapons systems and military interoperability will be an important challenge. At the moment, the US has pledged to improve India’s aircraft carrier capabilities and to provide high-tech weapons systems to India and Japan in order to strengthen their war capabilities.
Although Xi has called his project to build artificial islands in the South China Sea his greatest achievement of the five years since he took office, it has had many negative consequences. Many neighboring countries, upset and worried over China’s militarization of the area, have sought to cooperate with the US on regional security to obtain better protection.
In response, Trump has ordered the US Navy to carry out routine freedom of navigation operations to challenge China’s claimed sovereignty over the South China Sea, while also collaborating with Japan, India and Australia to counter Beijing’s expansion. This is a new state of affairs that Beijing probably never expected.
Parris Chang is president of the Taiwan Institute for Political, Economic, Strategic Studies, a former deputy secretary-general of the National Security Council and professor emeritus of political science at Pennsylvania State University.
Translated by Tu Yu-an
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