Trump questions why US must adhere to ‘one China’ policy

US PRESIDENT-elect Donald Trump said the United States did not necessarily have to stick to its long-standing position that Taiwan is part of “one China”, questioning nearly four decades of policy in a move likely to antagonise Beijing.

Trump’s comments on Fox News Sunday came after he prompted a diplomatic protest from China over his decision to accept a telephone call from Taiwan’s president on December 2.

“I fully understand the ‘one China’ policy, but I don’t know why we have to be bound by a ‘one China’ policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade,” Trump told Fox.

Trump’s call with President Tsai Ing-wen was the first such contact with Taiwan by a US president-elect or president since former president Jimmy Carter switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 1979, acknowledging Taiwan as part of “one China”.

Beijing considers Taiwan a renegade province and the subject is a sensitive one for China.

Chinese officials had no immediate to Trump’s remarks.

After Trump’s phone conversation with Taiwan’s president, the Obama administration said senior White House aides had spoken with Chinese officials to insist that Washington’s “one China” policy remained intact. reaction

The administration also warned that progress made in the US relationship with China could be undermined by a “flaring up” of the Taiwan issue.

Following Trump’s latest comments, a White House aide said the Obama administration had no reaction beyond its previously stated policy positions.

In the Fox interview, Trump criticised China over its currency policies, its activities in the South China Sea and its stance toward North Korea. He said it was not up to Beijing to decide whether he should take a call from Taiwan’s leader.

“I don’t want China dictating to me and this was a call put in to me,” Trump said. “It was a very nice call. Short. And why should some other nation be able to say I can’t take a call?” I think it actually would’ve been very disrespectful, to be honest with you, not taking it,” Trump added.

Trump plans to nominate a long-standing friend of Beijing, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, as the next US ambassador to China.

But Trump is considering John Bolton, a former Bush administration official who has urged a tougher line on Beijing, for the number-two job at the US State Department, according to a source familiar with the matter.

In a Wall Street Journal article last January, Bolton said the next US president should take bolder steps to halt China’s military aggressiveness East China seas.

Bolton said Washington should consider using a “diplomatic ladder of escalation” that could start with receiving Taiwanese diplomats officially at the State Department and lead to restoring full diplomatic recognition.

In the Fox interview, Trump brought up a litany of complaints about China that he emphasised during his presidential campaign.

“We’re being hurt very badly by China with devaluation, with taxing us heavy at the borders when we don’t tax them, with building a massive fortress in the middle of the South China Sea, which they shouldn’t in the South and be doing, and frankly with not helping us at all with North Korea,” Trump said.

“You have North Korea. You have nuclear weapons and China could solve that problem and they’re not helping us at all.”

Economists, including those at the International Monetary Fund, have widely viewed China’s efforts to prop up the yuan’s value over the past year as evidence Beijing is no longer keeping its currency artificially low to make Chinese exports cheap.

The Global Times, an influential tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily, said in an editorial that Trump was “naive like a child on diplomacy” and that the ‘one China’ policy “could not be bought or sold”. — Reuters