During a meeting in April, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that the US was trying to provoke China to invade Taiwan, the Financial Times reported on Sunday last week.
War with the US would destroy many of China’s achievements and undermine his goal of achieving China’s “great rejuvenation,” Xi was quoted as saying.
If Xi genuinely believes the US is goading China, it shows that “concerns that Xi has created an information vacuum” or is getting bad council are “worryingly, true,” Center for Strategic and International Studies Freeman chair in China Studies Jude Blanchette said.
Analysts have long been concerned that Xi might not be getting accurate information from his subordinates that might displease him, which is often the case in personalist, authoritarian dictatorships. Subordinates might be telling Xi only what he wants to hear — that US-Taiwan ties are deepening because Washington wants to halt China’s rise — rather than it being a reaction to Xi’s own belligerent and intimidatory policies.
A positive reading of Xi’s comments would be that if he genuinely believed the US was using Taiwan to draw him into a strategic blunder, it would engender self-restraint and boost deterrence. If he believed his mortal enemy was goading him, there is a good chance he would not act. In other words, Xi believing his comments might not be all that bad.
However, he sounds worryingly like Russian President Vladimir Putin, who on the eve of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 said that the US was trying to pull Russia into armed conflict that Moscow did not want, but it could not stand by and let the US threaten Russia and harm Ukraine.
“It seems to me that the US is not so much concerned about the security of Ukraine ... but its main task is to contain Russia’s development. In this sense, Ukraine itself is just a tool to reach this goal,” Putin said on Feb. 1, 2022.
Xi could be cultivating grounds to justify an invasion of Taiwan. He would be relying on the EU holding back on full-scale sanctions, as it did when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014.
Brookings Institution China Center director Ryan Hass, who writes for the On Taiwan column in this newspaper, said that based on his experience of being in meetings with Xi, “he rarely is casual with comments. They’re usually calculated for effect.”
Xi could be sending calculated threats and assurances to the EU, Hass said.
The assurances would include indications that China does not want to invade, while among the threats would be that if accommodationist policies are not forthcoming, conflict could arise. Xi could be attempting to pull the EU away from the US by convincing it that the Taiwan Strait is destabilizing because of Washington’s actions.
Europeans, Americans and Taiwanese should not fall for Xi’s tricks. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a long history of deceit and subterfuge, from convincing the US Dixie Mission in 1944 that the CCP only wanted to bring democracy to China — in a bid to get the US to abandon its support for Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) — to Xi’s promise to then-US president Barack Obama in 2015 that he would not militarize the South China Sea.
Xi’s comments to Von der Leyen, if true, are a careful ploy to get Europe to see Taiwan from China’s warped perspective.
Europeans should not fall for it.
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