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.
Would China attack Taiwan during the American lame duck period? For months, there have been worries that Beijing would seek to take advantage of an American president slowed by age and a potentially chaotic transition to make a move on Taiwan. In the wake of an American election that ended without drama, that far-fetched scenario will likely prove purely hypothetical. But there is a crisis brewing elsewhere in Asia — one with which US president-elect Donald Trump may have to deal during his first days in office. Tensions between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea have been at
A nation has several pillars of national defense, among them are military strength, energy and food security, and national unity. Military strength is very much on the forefront of the debate, while several recent editorials have dealt with energy security. National unity and a sense of shared purpose — especially while a powerful, hostile state is becoming increasingly menacing — are problematic, and would continue to be until the nation’s schizophrenia is properly managed. The controversy over the past few days over former navy lieutenant commander Lu Li-shih’s (呂禮詩) usage of the term “our China” during an interview about his attendance
Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), the son of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee Politburo member and former Chongqing Municipal Communist Party secretary Bo Xilai (薄熙來), used his British passport to make a low-key entry into Taiwan on a flight originating in Canada. He is set to marry the granddaughter of former political heavyweight Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政), the founder of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital in Yilan County’s Luodong Township (羅東). Bo Xilai is a former high-ranking CCP official who was once a challenger to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for the chairmanship of the CCP. That makes Bo Guagua a bona fide “third-generation red”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hypersonic missile carried a simple message to the West over Ukraine: Back off, and if you do not, Russia reserves the right to hit US and British military facilities. Russia fired a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik,” or Hazel Tree, at Ukraine on Thursday in what Putin said was a direct response to strikes on Russia by Ukrainian forces with US and British missiles. In a special statement from the Kremlin just after 8pm in Moscow that day, the Russian president said the war was escalating toward a global conflict, although he avoided any nuclear
RSS