China warns Trump about Taiwan contact
President-elect seen as trying to secure leverage in future.
BEIJING — China warned President-elect Donald Trump on Monday that he was risking a confrontation over Taiwan, even as Trump broadened the dispute with new messages on Twitter challenging Beijing’s trade policies and military activities in the South China Sea.
A front-page editorial in the overseas edition of People’s Daily, the official organ of the Communist Party of China, denounced Trump for speaking Friday with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ingwen, warning that “creating troubles for the China-U.S. relationship is creating troubles for the U.S. itself.” The rebuke was much tougher than the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s initial response to the phone call, which broke with decades of U.S. diplomatic practice.
F o r h i s p a r t , T r u m p seemed to take umbrage at the idea that he needed China’s approval to speak with Tsai. In two posts on Twitter, he wrote: “Did China ask us if it was O.K. to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!”
China often uses the overseas edition of People’s Daily to test-run major policy pronouncements. In a pointed rejoinder to Trump, the editorial said that pushing China on Taiwan “would greatly reduce the chance to achieve the goal of making America great again.”
By going after China’s policies on trade and security, Trump appeared to be confirming his intent to take a tougher line with the Chinese leadership ac ross a b r o a d e r r a n ge o f i s s u e s — and further dampened hope s i n B e i j i ng t hat he might step back from the campaign rhetoric he has used, including threats of punishing trade tariffs.
That could put President Xi Jinping in a difficult position, forced to choose between p l a y i n g d o w n T r u m p ’s attacks and risking a backl a sh a t home, o r r a i s i ng the stakes by pushing back more forcefully and setting China on a potential collision course with the United States, its most important trading partner.
The Chinese government’s initial reaction to Trump’s call has already faced a torrent of criticism on social media from Chinese who complained it was not tough enough. The statement from Foreign Minister Wang Yi, which was relatively lowkey given the unprecedented nature of the call, refrained f r o m c r i t i c i z i n g Tr u mp, instead accusing Taiwan of playing a “little trick” on the U.S. president-elect.
T h a t o f f e re d Tr u mp a face-saving way out of the imbroglio, and a chance to de-escalate. But the messages he posted on Twitter late Sunday stepped up the pressure on China’s leaders instead.
Some Chinese analysts see Trump as striking out early on a starkly different path from President Barack Obama’s, determined to strenuously compete with China on economic issues.
I n t h e l a s t f o u r ye a r s , Obama has stressed cooperation with Beijing, particularly on the Paris international climate accord, which the Chinese government saw as being in its own interest because of its public’s anger over pollution..
By contrast, Trump is looking like a negotiator from the start, some Chinese analysts said.
“By showing strength at the beginning, he may hope to gain advantages in bargaining later with the Chinese on many key issues,” Zhang Baohui, a professor of international relations at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, said of Trump.
“He is a businessman, and he could be bringing his business bargaining tactics to interstate relations.” Thus, he said, there was “strategic logic” to Trump’s actions in the past few days.
Another Chi nese s t ate newspaper, the hawki sh Global Times, called Trump a “neophyte” in diplomatic affairs, and some Chinese reports have suggested that the president-elect did not understand the import of his phone call with Tsai. But Trump’s follow-up messages on Twitter seemed to show he had been well-briefed on Taiwan and questions of trade and the South China Sea.
The c a l l wit h Tsai a nd the Twitter posts reflected the views of Trump advisers with Asia experience, such as John Bolton, whom Trump is said to be considering as his secretary of state. Bolton served during the administration of George W. Bush in the early 2000s as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, and in the mid-1990s he wrote research papers for the Taiwan government.