After US President Joe Biden and Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) met in San Francisco last month, US media accounts, encouraged by administration officials, were quick to proclaim a “warming” of US-China relations.
Easing of bilateral tensions, heightened ever since then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August last year, was the announced purpose of the west coast mini-summit.
As evidence that the goal had been achieved, the US administration cited agreements on resuming military-to-military communications, stopping the flow of fentanyl components from China and making progress on reducing climate-warming emissions.
China has long been derelict in all three areas and it remains to be seen whether these latest “commitments” will be honored any more faithfully than earlier ones were.
Off-and-on military contacts have usually been the first to be abruptly cut off whenever Beijing was annoyed by some US action, precisely the time when communications are most needed, even when the crisis was precipitated by an act of Chinese aggression. Pelosi’s visit followed months of escalating Chinese air and naval exercises threatening Taiwanese sovereignty.
The EP-3 incident in April 2001 is the perfect example of China’s perfidy in this realm. A reckless Chinese pilot flew his fighter jet too close to an unarmed, slow-moving US reconnaissance plane, clipped its wing, and caused both aircraft to go down, killing the Chinese pilot and forcing an emergency landing of the US plane on China’s Hainan Island. The crew and plane were kept for weeks until Washington was forced to make two humiliating apologies and the plane was disassembled and returned in crates.
During that period, the Chinese refused to accept calls from then-US ambassador to China Joseph Preuher who had been Pacific commander and spent years cultivating good relations with his counterparts so that he would know who to call “if the balloon ever went up.”
China’s initial compliance on the latest military-to-military agreement struck by Biden and Xi, and a reduction in its provocative exercises in the South China Sea, are consistent so far with the narrative of warming relations. Time will tell whether the immediate lull will survive the next crisis, which could erupt at any moment given China’s reckless conduct toward Taiwan and the Philippines, a US treaty ally.
Last week, a belated, and still partial, readout of the Biden-Xi meeting raised new questions about the earlier cursory reference from the White House that Taiwan was one of the issues they discussed.
According to press reports, Xi “bluntly” told Biden that China “will” unify with Taiwan, but apparently dismissed the 2025-2027 timetable that has been a matter of speculation in the Western press and among US naval commanders. Xi reportedly said the timing has not been decided yet. The timing of what? An amphibious invasion? An aerial bombing and/or missile and/or cyberattack? A naval blockade, embargo or quarantine?
Or could Xi have meant some face-saving device, a rhetorical unification by which Taiwan would agree to Beijing’s view of the “1992 consensus,” that it is juridically part of “one China,” but nothing would be changed on the ground in Taiwan, except possibly the raising of the Chinese flag over government buildings in Taipei?
Since such a fundamental concession would be anathema to the Taiwanese population, Xi could only have been talking about an attack or other kinetic action against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Taiwan. He could hardly have been expected to disclose the timing of China’s war plans, so the dates suggested by successive Indo-Pacom Commanders might well be the operative ones in Chinese planning.
However, what is more concerning is the critical other missing part of the meeting readout: what Biden was saying to Xi and how he responded to Xi’s face-to-face declaration of war against Taiwan and probably against the US.
How did they get on the subject of a scheduled Chinese invasion, blockade or other attack in the first place? Did Biden ask when it would occur? Or did he respond to Xi’s statement with a clear warning against it, by repeating what he has said publicly four times — that the US is committed to defending Taiwan?
Hopefully, he did not repeat privately to Xi the invitation he gave Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly on Ukraine, that “a limited incursion” would be acceptable or that economic sanctions would be imposed only after a fait accompli and with so many loopholes that a loyal ally — as Communist China is to revanchist Russia — would be able to evade them and keep the war machine functioning, destroying and killing.
If Biden repeated to Xi his multiple declarations of intent to defend Taiwan, how did Xi respond? Did Biden make clear that a US defense of Taiwan would not be a one-off pinprick or minimal show of force hoping to deter Chinese escalation? Did he emphasize that the US would do “whatever it took,” as then-US president George W. Bush put it 2001, seeing it through to the end to ensure that Taiwan remained free and independent — not only de facto, but that the US would formally recognize Taiwan? Did Biden reverse the old Beijing warning that independence means war and tell Xi instead that war means independence?
Finally, did Biden remind Xi that the Taiwan Relations Act, passed overwhelmingly by the US Congress, stated that the switch of diplomatic relations from the Republic of China on Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.”
A resort to war, to “non-peaceful measures” as China’s Anti-Secession Law euphemistically threatens, would automatically break the implied PRC commitment to a peaceful resolution.
Then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s winks and nods apparently gave Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and his successors the mistaken impression that Washington was not serious about Taiwan. Kissinger delivered Beijing’s message to Taiwan when he publicly warned in 2007 that “China will not wait forever.”
When Xi took power in 2013, he adopted that warning from “China’s great friend” and said the Taiwan question “cannot be passed from generation to generation.”
Hopefully, Biden told Xi that a Chinese war against Taiwan means China will be at war with the US and the threat of such a war must end with this generation.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the US secretary of defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010.
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