Taiwan leader’s visit exposes US-China schism

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen leaves for the United States on Thursday after a eventful journey that seemed to shore up his island’s relationship with Washington, but prompted threats of a “showdown” from Beijing.

But he arrives home just in time to meet another US congressional delegation, this time led by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, who landed in Taipei on Wednesday night. and compared Chinese President Xi Jinping to Adolf Hitler.

“This global power struggle, the balance of power we find ourselves in today, often reminds me of my father’s generation, often referred to as the greatest in America,” said McCaul, a Texas Republican. , in a meeting with Tsai. vice president, Lai Ching-te.

“Then we had Hitler and today we have Putin and President Xi,” he said, also referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Tsai is scheduled to meet with McCaul and his bipartisan delegation on Saturday, her third such meeting in just over a week, following talks with a multi-party group led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries last Thursday in New york and your high profile meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Then Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin arrives in Taiwan on April 24 for a six-day trade mission, which also includes a meeting with Tsai.

The trips are meant to further anger Beijing, which considers the self-governing island a province and has vowed to “reunify” it with the mainland, by force if necessary. In August, it cut all cooperation with Washington later the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, visit.

soft release lock

Tsai would likely consider her visits to the United States a success, said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the US German Marshall Fund, even if it meant the US-China relationship is now “dangerously tense.” ”

“US-Taiwan relations are stronger than ever. Support for Taiwan in the US Congress is at an all time high,” Glaser said. “For these reasons, President Tsai is likely to view the transit as a success.”

However, “mistrust runs deep” between Beijing and Washington, he noted, and Tsai’s “warm reception” in the United States was not helped. “Not only is a thaw unlikely, but the risk of conflict is growing,” he said.

Efforts to repair ties between the United States and China have failed since Pelosi’s trip.

Hours before Secretary of State Antony Blinken left Washington to visit Beijing in February, canceled the trip after an alleged Chinese spy balloon was found in US airspace.

Then, in the week before Tsai’s March 29 arrival in New York, Rick Waters, US Assistant Secretary of State for China and Taiwan and head of the State Department’s “China House,” He met with Chinese officials in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing to revive negotiations.

But Tsai’s trip appears to have undone détente again.

When the Taiwanese leader met with McCarthy, China’s navy launched aircraft carriers into the western Pacific, just south of Taiwan, and Beijing accused the United States of “Crossing the Line” with Tsai’s trip.

In apparent evidence of a blockade of the island, which some US military planners consider Beijing’s most important likely first move in a conflict: Chinese officials also Announced over the next three weeks they will stop and board ships in the Taiwan Strait for “on-site inspections.”

Taiwan, in turn, ordered any ships to refuse to cooperate.

european supervision

There is a saving grace for peace across the Straits.

While McCaul and other US lawmakers are in Taiwan, China has its own visitors: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanual Macron arrived in Beijing and on Thursday met with xi as Tsai prepared to fly home.

In the midst of such a visit, “it would not be in Beijing’s strategic interest to use outrageously outrageous military action,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a professor in the Taiwan Studies program at Australian National University.

“If Beijing seriously increases military tension at this time,” Sung said, “it would make life very difficult for von der Leyen and Macron, and it would take the wind out of the sails of European China’s dove voices.”

“Europe would prefer that the Taiwan Strait situation not escalate, because they are already busy with Ukraine and the post-COVID economic recovery,” he added, explaining that McCarthy and Tsai appeared to have read the room by moving their meeting away from Taiwan. .

“In other words, Taiwan and the United States are already choosing the relatively less provocative option,” he said. “If in response, Beijing still chooses to retaliate…then the US and Taiwan will paint a picture of an insatiable Beijing that no one can work with.”

There is also the recent mirror image visitation by Tsai’s predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, to mainland China while Tsai was in the United States.

Ma’s Kuomintang party, which campaigns for its greater willingness to cooperate with Beijing in seeking peace than Tsai’s party, hopes to regain the presidency in elections in January 2024, and Lai, the vice president, is expected to win. carry the baton of the ruling party. .

“If Beijing escalates militarily, it will waste this rare opportunity to underscore cross-strait friendship, in exchange for very slightly undermining the success of President Tsai’s trip to the United States,” Sung said.

One country, two systems

In the long run, Tsai’s trip has exposed a chasm between Beijing, on the one hand, and the United States and Taiwan, on the other.

Ja Ian Chong, a professor of international relations and an expert on Chinese foreign policy at the National University of Singapore, said Taiwan’s appetite for a rapprochement with Beijing was waning.

In Taiwan, he said, “efforts to portray Tsai’s visits to the United States as unnecessarily risky by the opposition Kuomintang also don’t seem to have gained much traction.” That failure, Chong added, was largely “in keeping with a broad popular acceptance in Taiwan of the current direction of Taipei-Washington relations.”

Beijing, meanwhile, has not minced words. xi himself promised in october never renounce the use of force in Taiwan, and US military leaders have predicted an invasion at the end of the decade.

“We will not allow any foreign force to intimidate, suppress or enslave us,” Hua Chunying, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said after Pelosi’s trip last year. “Whoever wants to do it will be on a collision course with the steel Great Wall forged by the 1.4 billion Chinese.”

Coupled with ever-closer ties between the US Congress and Taiwan’s leadership, all of that is a problem for the US’s “one China” policy, which holds that the island should govern itself while negotiating with Beijing a peaceful reunification with mainland China.

The idea is for the United States to “kick the can down the road” until one day “the people of Taiwan actually support some sort of deal that would unify China,” said Dennis Wilder, a former CIA deputy assistant director for East Asia. and the Pacific.

But that seems increasingly unfeasible.

“One of the very clear messages you get when you go to Taiwan these days is that they don’t accept ‘One country, two systems‘” Wilder said. “They have seen the way Beijing behaved with hong kong – they think that Beijing betrayed the people of Hong Kong.”

“At this point, they don’t want to be part of any kind of deal where Beijing makes promises that they don’t think they’ll keep,” he added. “The big concern I have is: Will Beijing lose patience?”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.