In a recent interview with Center for Strategic and International Studies researchers Jude Blanchette and Mike Green on President William Lai’s (賴清德) China strategy, Financial Times Taiwan correspondent Kathrin Hille said Lai believes that being clear in his rhetoric is the best way to manage Beijing. Presumably, Lai thinks China would relent some of its pressure if it truly understood Taiwanese do not want to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“He believes… that if he spells out the truth and… his position, that would give him a good basis from which to move forward,” Hille said Lai’s aides told her.
It is disquieting if this really is Lai’s thinking on China, as it suggests a slightly naive approach to managing the nation’s international relations, demonstrating a lack of awareness of how Beijing sees international politics.
The CCP’s foreign policy research community views international relations fundamentally through a realist lens, where the greater power a nation accrues relative to other nations, the more say and influence it should and would have.
This is the theory behind Beijing’s nuclear buildup, Carnegie China Nuclear Policy Program senior fellow Tong Zhao (趙通) said in a recent Foreign Affairs essay.
“Chinese leaders seem to have embraced the untested belief that nuclear weaponry grants them greater geopolitical leverage,” Zhao said.
It is also how Beijing’s foreign policy community views what they call the “Taiwan issue,” and reading what these practitioners say can give insight into how the Chinese leadership views these matters.
Although Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has centralized foreign policy decisionmaking, “Chinese leaders still seek a range of expertise from the country’s wider strategic community — including academics, policy experts and former officials — to inform decisionmaking,” London-based researcher Yu Jie (于潔) said in a recent report for Chatham House on how Beijing views its rivalry with the US.
Chinese academics do not view Xi, Taiwanese politics or even the US as being the root cause of the rise in tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Rather, they believe the fundamental source is the increase in China’s strength relative to the US and Taiwan.
“The conflict in the Taiwan Strait has become unbalanced and the risk of conflict is rising … [due to] China’s rapid progress in military modernization,” Renmin University of China academic Zuo Xiying (左希迎) said in 2021.
They also believe that Xi’s increased pressure on Taiwan is simply China’s responsibility as a great power to assert its national interests when the material factors allow it, and the natural logic of international politics taking its course.
“The escalation of the situation is inevitable,” Zuo said.
Many Taiwanese politicians believe Beijing can be managed with words and meetings. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) supporters continue to say that dealing with the CCP should be “70 percent politics, 30 percent military.” Not only is this becoming a riskier strategy as Beijing’s power increases, it is also based on a misreading of how the CCP views international relations and power.
To restore the balance and bring stability back to the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese leaders must talk less and do more. This can be done through increased defense spending, the acquisition of more asymmetric weapons to undercut Beijing’s scale and the implementation of whole-of-society initiatives to bolster the nation’s resilience.
Diplomatic overtures or linguistic formulations would not address the root cause of the CCP’s behavior, which is a belief in the Chinese strategic community and political leadership that the material balance of power in the Taiwan Strait has tipped in its favor.
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