Beijing attempted to use last week’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to cement China’s position on Taiwan as a key part of the framework shaping US-China relations, an article published on Friday by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) said.
“For Xi, [the meeting] was an opportunity to lay down a marker on Taiwan and to offer up a new framework for the bilateral relationship,” CFR president Michael Froman wrote in the article titled “Beyond Taiwan, a ‘Decent Peace’ at the Trump-Xi Summit.”
While the summit was “short on major concrete deliverables,” the two nations are at least “not fighting” and Xi appears to want to secure a “truce” favorable to China, he said, citing CFR China specialist Rush Doshi.
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“Taiwan was clearly top of mind for Xi,” Froman wrote, quoting China’s state-run Xinhua news agency as reporting that Xi said the “Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations,” and that mishandling it could lead to “clashes and even conflicts.”
Froman wrote that on his way back to the US, Trump told reporters that he and Xi “talked a lot about Taiwan” and discussed “in great detail” the pending US$14 billion arms sale to Taiwan, adding: “I think the last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles [15,288km] away.”
How Trump handles pending US arms sales to Taiwan would be an important indicator for assessing the summit’s longer-term impact, Froman said.
“Whether Trump ultimately approves the package, slow-walks it or uses it as a bargaining chip in broader negotiations will be one of the summit’s most consequential outcomes,” he wrote.
He also said that Xi’s reference to the “Thucydides trap” implies that “China’s rise is unstoppable, and that the United States must accommodate it, lest the two stumble into a Peloponnesian War with nuclear characteristics.”
While Beijing acknowledges the US-China relationship as competitive, it “talks about keeping it within acceptable limits,” the article quoted Doshi as saying.
Xi said he and Trump had agreed on a new vision for a constructive and strategically stable US-China relationship, which China hopes will serve as a guiding framework for bilateral ties for the remainder of Trump’s presidency and beyond, the article said.
Xi made Taiwan a key part of that framework, and “any US actions to reckon with excess capacity or deter conflict could be framed by Beijing as a violation of this new frame,” the article quoted Doshi as saying.
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