San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
U.S. cautions China over Taiwan as defense chiefs seek to ease tensions
SINGAPORE — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned China on Saturday against what he called “provocative and destabilizing” activity near the disputed island of Taiwan, following talks with China’s defense minister, Gen. Wei Fenghe, that focused on preventing regional tensions from escalating into crises.
Taiwan — a self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own — was one of the topics of the talks between Austin and Wei in Singapore, along with disputes in seas around China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Austin amplified his warnings in a speech to the ShangriLa Dialogue, a security meeting in Singapore, while asserting that Washington did not support an independent Taiwan.
“Our policy hasn’t changed, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be true for the PRC,” Austin said Saturday, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “We see growing coercion from Beijing. We’ve witnessed a steady increase in provocative and destabilizing military activity near Taiwan.”
Austin said increasing People’s Liberation Army flights near Taiwan reflected a pattern of rising Chinese pressure on neighbors, including India, Japan and Southeast Asian countries that dispute China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea. But he suggested that the most volatile issue was the future of Taiwan, the island of 24 million inhabitants just off the Chinese coast.
Since 1949, when Nationalist forces fled China for Taiwan, the status and future of the island has been disputed. Beijing claims it as its sovereign territory; most people on Taiwan reject that claim and want to stay separate — in fact, if not in law — from the People’s Republic of China. Washington has long maintained that neither side should unilaterally try to change the status of Taiwan, but U.S. legislation also allows for supporting the island’s defenses and possibly intervening if war breaks out.
Austin indicated that U.S. policy on Taiwan remained unchanged, notwithstanding speculation about recent comments by President Biden.
“We categorically oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We do not support Taiwan independence,” Austin said, adding that the United States would maintain its “capacity to resist any use of force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security or the social or economic system of the people of Taiwan.”
On Friday, Wei put responsibility on the United States for worsening tensions over Taiwan, telling Austin that U.S. weapons sales to the island “gravely damage China’s sovereignty and security interests,” the Chinese Ministry of National Defense said in its summary of their talks.
“Using Taiwan to contain China will never succeed,” Wei said, according to China’s official summary.
A meeting between Austin and Wei was only their second bilateral encounter, following a phone call in April, despite the increasing rivalry between the two countries and worries that miscalculation might spiral into crisis.