Has the Military Status Quo of Taiwan/the Taiwan Strait Shifted?
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent controversial trip to the self-governing island nation of Taiwan created the latest Taiwan Strait crisis.
The leadership in Taipei welcomed her promise of U.S. support, as Pelosi sought to polish up her foreign policy legacy, especially her longstanding antiChina stance in what may be the swansong of her political career. After all, it was the most significant visit of a U.S. official to Taiwan, claimed by China as integral part of its sovereign territory, in a quarter-century. China considered the visit a blatant violation of the “One China Policy”, also accepted by the U.S. and most of the world. China was an insignificant power then, now it is the equal of the U.S. as “Super-Power”.
But as the columnist of The Washington Post (WaPo) writes: “the symbolism of the moment gave way to a fiery response from China” (Today’s World View, Aug. 9).
Beijing cast Pelosi’s visit as a dangerous provocation and evidence that Washington was undermining its formal position on Taiwan.
Its so-called policy of “strategic ambiguity” means that it does not recognize or encourage the formal independence of Taiwan – it accepts the fiction of a united China, but at the same, supports and encourages quasi-formal political, economic and military links with Taipei.
A U.S. Congressional resolution even supports the supplying of military hardware to Taiwan. And U.S. President Joe Biden has famously (inadvertently) said on several occasions that the U.S. would come to the aid of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack! Pelosi’s visit was followed by four days of mainland live-fire naval exercises, ballistic missile launches and aircraft maneuvers around and even over Taiwan. Chinese naval forces took up positions that effectively encircled Taiwan and simulated what amounted to a naval blockade of the island.
It was announced that Chinese forces would conduct “regular” exercises on the eastern side of the median line in the Taiwan Strait – the informal maritime boundary between the mainland and Taiwan.
According to experts, Beijing has used the occasion to up the ante and accelerated efforts to establish a “new normal” – or new status quo – in its military posture around Taiwan.
Meng Xiangqing, a professor at the PLA-affiliated National Defense University, said in an interview that the drills aimed to “completely smash the so-called median line and demonstrate China’s ability to prevent foreign intervention in a conflict by blockading and controlling the Bashi Channel, an important waterway between the western Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea” [between southern Taiwan and northern Luzon island in the Philippines]. U.S. Viewpoint
U.S. Ambassador in Beijing, Nicholas Burns said China’s actions in and around the Taiwan Strait threatens the status quo of many decades.
“There is no justification for this extreme, disproportionate and escalatory military response”. The world should hold Beijing accountable to maintain the peace.
Chinese Perspective
Chinese Ambassador in Washington, Qin Gang countered that the ‘One China Principle’ is part of the post-war international order and a general international consensus.
As a country that thinks of itself as a champion of the “rules-based international order,” the U.S. should naturally abide by the One China Principle.
Expert Opinion
“The U.S. and China are seriously talking past each other. This is not just about Pelosi,” wrote Evan Feigenbaum, vice president at the “Carnegie Endowment for International Peace” and a veteran U.S. diplomat.
“The U.S. thinks this is about Chinese coercion. The Chinese think this is about a drift from ‘one China’ to ‘one China’, one Taiwan.’ That disconnect will lead to a very unstable new baseline.’
Views from the Asia-Pacific Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien-Loong warned that “a storm is gathering” around his prosperous island city state, in part because of spiking U.S.China tensions.
Relations between the two powers are “unlikely to improve anytime soon,” Lee said. “Furthermore, miscalculations or mishaps can easily make things much worse.” In Japan and Australia, Beijing’s reaction to Pelosi’s visit has hardened attitudes about the threat posed by a Chinese navy that increasingly sees the Pacific as its ‘sphere of influence’. London’s Financial Times wrote: “Whatever fears many had about Pelosi’s trip, the dramatic missile launches and live-fire drills have created a negative outcome for Beijing, by galvanizing an increasingly united chorus of critics.”
Situation in Taiwan
A few decades ago, a considerable proportion of the island’s population looked favourably upon the prospect of reunification with China. Many were excited by the possibility of economic prosperity through closer embrace with the booming mainland.
This rosy future has almost disappeared. Most Taiwanese now claim a separate identity and are convinced that their future lies on a different, own democratic path – come what may – with only six percent of the entire population recently surveyed supporting unification with China.
“The attractiveness of the carrots in China’s Taiwan policy – economic inducements – has now fallen to its lowest point since the end of the Cold War,” Wu Jiehmin, a political scientist at the Taiwanese research institution Academia Sinica, told The New York Times.
“The card it holds presently is to raise military threats toward Taiwan step by step, and to continue military preparations for the use of force until, one day, a full-scale military offensive on Taiwan becomes a favourable option.”
Xi Jinping had pinned his legacy in part on his ability to bring about reunification, ideally through peaceful means. Now military force seems to be the only path towards this goal.
The die is cast.
Has Russia Been Degraded to China’s “Junior Partner”?
For all intents and purposes, the supreme leaders of Russia and China seem to be withdrawing further into the same corner – by personal volition and/or force majeure.
The unprovoked and brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine has made Russian President Vladimir Putin persona non grata or virtual pariah throughout Europe and North America and isolated the Kremlin from Western capitals, where governments have imposed a series of sweeping anti-Russian sanctions.
China under President Xi Jinping, however, stands on a different footing. As leader of a super-power, he interacts worldwide.
However, its escalation of military exercises voicing their shared expanding naval footprint throughout the Pacific – and now also in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea – and its from the West perceived crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang are all pushing Beijing toward a geopolitical collision course with the United States and its allies, both in Europe and Asia.
A few weeks before Russia launched its imperialistic war, Putin and Xi met at a summit and declared a partnership with “no limits”. Still, this was not a military alliance.
Now, after a spring and summer of spiraling tensions, the two governments are locked in a tighter embrace, voicing their shared animosity toward the struggling American hegemon that looms over their own perceived spheres of influence (WaPa, Aug. 12).
China & Russia: Mutual Support Last week, Zhang Hanhui, China’s ambassador to Moscow, attacked the United States for stoking the conflict in Ukraine: “As the initiator and main instigator of the Ukraine crisis, Washington, while imposing comprehensive unprecedented sanctions on Russia, continues to supply arms and military equipment to Ukraine.”
Zhang told Russian state news agency Tass: Their ultimate goal is to exhaust and crush Russia with a protracted war and the cudgel of sanctions.”
Earlier, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, had reprimanded Washington for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan: “This is not a line aimed at supporting freedom and democracy. This is pure provocation.”
State of the Sino-Russian Relationship
Analysts are starting to point out that the Sino-Russian relationship is developing into an unequal partnership.
Putin may be possessed by neoimperial dreams of Russia’s unique dominant place in Europe. But he is presiding over an international state of affairs that has steadily shifted more leverage to Beijing over Moscow. During the days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union considered Communist China just a ‘poorer cousin’. Just so, Mao Zedong rebelled against Moscow and instituted the ‘Sino-Soviet Schism”.
Today, Russia is getting isolated and enfeebled and sliding inexorably into the role of Eurasian junior partner to the
Asian behemoth.
This is the argument made in a recent Foreign Affairs essay by Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Gabuev argues that Putin’s war on Ukraine has rendered Russia increasingly dependent on China: Sanctions have curtailed the global market for its exports and thinned out possible suppliers for its imports.
Enter China, whose imports from Russia have surged, jumping 80 percent in May compared with last year, largely in the form of oil and other natural resources. The Russian market, left bereft of many European products, may get all the more flooded by Chinese goods and technology in the months and even years ahead.
Gabuev suggested that current trendlines could see China’s Renminbi, which has already outperformed the Euro on Moscow’s stock exchange, becoming “the de facto reserve currency for Russia even without being fully convertible,” and thereby “increasing Moscow’s dependence on Beijing.” Imbalances that already existed between both countries are only magnifying.
China is edging closer to Russia as a leading arms supplier to developing countries.
Russia was compelled to significantly discount oil sales to China [as also to India], while Chinese car manufacturers – recognizing the lack of options now facing Russian consumers – have in some instances hiked prices for their vehicles in Russia by 50 percent!
Beijing has up to now avoided falling afoul of Western sanctions on Russia but still has plenty of scope to tighten its stranglehold around Russia’s economy.
The inequalities in the SinoRussian economic relationship is now emerging and confirming Russia’s subservience to Beijing.
Geopolitical Ramifications of Russia’s Supplication to China
Gabuev speculates: “To keep China happy, Russian leaders will have little choice but to accept unfavorable terms in commercial negotiations, to support Chinese positions in broader Nations, and even to curtail Moscow’s relations with other countries, such as India and Vietnam.
It is hard to imagine broader tectonic realignments taking place: “Russia is turning into a giant ‘Eurasian Iran’: fairly isolated, with a smaller and more technologically backward economy thanks to its hostility to the West but still too big and too important to be considered irrelevant.”
With China as Russia’s biggest external partner and major diplomatic ally, Gabuev concludes: “the aging ruling elite in the Kremlin, myopically fixated on Washington, will be even more eager to serve as China’s handmaidens as it rises to become the archrival of the United States.” Considering that China’s own clout in Europe is sinking, Justyna Szczudlik, a China analyst at the Polish Instutute of International Affairs chalks out the European perspective: “The best way for the West to deal with the China-Russia alignment is to acknowledge that these bonds are strong and to improve its own resilience and deterrence capacities.”