Last week, Chinese President Hu Jintao (
The single-ally strategy was chosen by Mao Zedong (
Mao felt that to stop Soviet hegemony from spreading across the globe, China should help build a global "front line" alliance with Japan, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the US, and also unite the surrounding countries in one "defense area."
After 1982, China no longer emphasized this anti-Soviet alliance. Instead, it adopted a strategy of keeping the US and the Soviet Union at an equal distance.
In the 1990s, following the end of the Cold War, China adopted another strategic direction in its pursuit of a Great Nation strategy -- the circle, line, area and point approach. The circle meant building friendly relations with the surrounding countries, the line meant taking a friendly approach toward the line of nations willing to assist China's development through financial and technical assistance, the area meant the area that would share in China's prosperity when its economy is fully developed, and the point meant the competitive and cooperative relationship China is forced to maintain with the US following its post-Cold War rise to unipolar hegemony.
Against the backdrop of this Chinese strategy, the US and Japan held a security meeting in February this year during which the two nations identified security in the Taiwan Strait as a joint strategic concern. The reaffirmation by the US and Japan of their military alliance made China feel a new urgency to counter the US threat.
Hu then returned to Mao's strategy of depending on a single ally, as if that is once again the only way to handle US threats. To deal with the unilateral threat posed by the US, Hu chose to embrace Russia and build a closer strategic partnership between the two nations. Last week's statement firmly established an anti-US bilateral defensive relationship.
In addition to repeating the two countries' opposition to the US' invasion of Iraq, China and Russia's joint statement also recognizes that the recent theoretical developments relating to the UN system have introduced concepts such as global governance, global democracy, comprehensive security and world citizenship.
Given the strengthening and reform envisioned for the UN, the organization stands a greater chance of providing multilateral solutions to global conflicts. China's decision to pin its hopes on the UN to help resolve potential conflict between China and the US is therefore dictated by necessity.
History shows that China has never gained any advantage by allying with Russia. This time around, China has already experienced setbacks, by making big concessions on Sino-Russian border issues. It will be interesting to see if Hu will lose even more when China moves closer to Russia to oppose the US.
Wang Kun-yi is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies at Tamkang University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS