President William Lai (賴清德) sat down for an interview with Time magazine on May 30. It was published on Wednesday.
Lai’s responses were a study in the carefully configured presentation of himself as a rational, non-partisan and measured elected head of an already sovereign state, and of Taiwan as a reliable member of the international community.
He consistently steered the conversation away from a focus on cross-strait relations, situating the context of Taiwan’s relations with China as being an engagement with just another country.
Although there was recognition that China presents a unique problem to Taiwan, there was little mention of war, even versing China’s threat in terms of lawfare, angling away from the threat of military invasion. Lai’s answers were carefully considered. When one reads between the lines, the overarching theme was evident: The global conversation around Taiwan must move beyond an obsession of the country in terms of its relationship to China.
Of the 16 questions in the main interview that made it into the published text, 12 directly referred to China, and one was a question about the actions of opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators which provided context for follow-up questions referring to visits by KMT figures to Beijing.
Still, Lai remained insistent on speaking of Taiwan within the wider global context.
Asked about reports of a discussion about Taiwan by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Lai urged Xi to understand that “conflict in the Taiwan Strait and disruptions to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region” would not be accepted by the international community.
On China’s economic problems, he chose not to mention China’s economic coercion against Taiwan, saying instead that economic relations between the two countries are the result of divisions of labor within global supply chains. He then turned the discussion to a comparison of the problems of the authoritarian model of state control over the economy, and blaming the drying up of foreign direct investment into China on Beijing’s military expansionism, which has impacted regional peace and stability.
On the KMT legislators’ visit to China, Lai said that they should recognize and respond to China’s core objectives of annexing Taiwan, which was the only time he mentioned those objectives.
The idea of “recognition” emerged as a sub-theme. The interviewer broached this initially with reference to the shifting of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing by Nauru only 48 hours after Lai’s election victory. Lai remained magnanimous, refusing to blame Nauru, but more importantly subtly leveraged the meaning of “recognition,” implying that China’s diplomatic theft would have no bearing on “Taiwan’s status as a beacon of freedom and a bastion of democracy in the world.” This is the point: While Taiwan’s number of diplomatic allies is falling, Taiwan’s profile, recognition and acceptance in the international community as a whole are increasing.
Lai used the interview to reiterate significant points from his inaugural address, but in a forum that would likely reach an audience outside of Taiwan: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) must recognize that the Republic of China (ROC) exists, and it should be sincere in building exchanges with the democratically elected government of Taiwan; that the ROC and PRC are not subordinate to each other; and that according to international law, irrespective of official recognition by individual states, Taiwan is already a sovereign and independent country.
His measured responses were a careful iteration of the approach Lai intends to maintain in office.
His calm, reasonable delivery will no doubt be in stark contrast to Beijing’s inevitable histrionic response.
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.
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