The ongoing furor over the political future of #PO1135809 has the effect of drowning out information about other things that are going on in the United States and across the world. One of those stories that came to public attention this week was a conversation between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the November APEC Summit meeting in California. NBC news reported this week that President XI bluntly told President Biden that Beijing expects to reunify Taiwan with mainland China sometime in the next few years. Other news organizations have since confirmed NBC’s reporting.
To understand the significance of this, I want to review a little of the history of this issue.
The modern story begins in 1912 with the fall of the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty in China. The revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, became the President of the newly-fashioned Republic of China. After a period of instability and shifting allegiances, Sun resumed leadership in China and set out to unite the fragmented nation. After Sun’s death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek seized control of the Nationalist Party (KMT) and was initially successful in bringing most of China under his control.
In 1927, a new challenge emerged as the Chinese Community Party (CCP) attempted to subvert Chiang’s efforts. In 1934, the CCP undertook the iconic Long March to a new base in the northwest part of the country; it as during this march that Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong) emerged as the party’s leader. Mao would remain in power until his death in 1976.
Despite a notional alliance between these two factions during the time of Japanese occupation of various parts of China (193-1945), this period featured a bitter Civil War in China.
By 1949, the CCP had gained control over most of the country and the Nationalist government retreated to the island of Taiwan (Formosa). Until the early 19702, the Taiwan-based Republic of China (ROC) was recognized as the sole legitimate government of China, despite the fact that Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC) was the de-facto government over mainland China.
This changed in 1971 when the PRC replaced the ROC in the United Nations. You may remember the role of Henry Kissinger and the “ping-pong diplomacy” in that year, paving the way for President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972 – a turning point in relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.
Mao’s China was a tumultuous and unsteady actor on the world stage. When I taught about China in my high school Comparative Government classes, I used to emphasize the Capital Letter periods associated with Chairman Mao – the Long March of the 1930s, the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. These various crusades propelled China through a series of contradictory and confusing initiatives that impeded China’s economic development and diminished its potential significance among the nations of the world.
After Mao’s death in 1976, the country went through a period of de-Mao-fication as subsequent leaders tried to move China forward while avoiding alienating the cult that had developed under the Great Leader. We remember the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, a student-led pro-democracy movement that was repulsed by the increasingly repressive Chinese government.
Note: For several years (2018-2021 or thereabouts) I taught a Current Events Class for Literacy for Life, an extended-learning program at William & Mary. Every semester, I had a half-dozen or so class members who were International Students at the college, many of them sponsored by the Confucious Institute, a cultural exchange program sponsored by the PRC. These highly educated individuals were either visiting professors or students at the business school, law school, or other departments of the college. Because of their affiliation with the increasingly aggressive government of China, the Confucius Institutes have been suspected of sponsoring Chinese espionage and infiltration of American universities. I bring this up because during one class, when I talked about news relating to China, I mentioned the 1989 events at Tiananmen Square.
My highly educated Chinese students were puzzled, seeming not to know about these events. I couldn’t believe they didn’t know what I was talking about, so I quickly found video footage of the events online and played it for them. They had clearly never seen this footage and knew nothing of these events. They quickly decided that these were doctored videos.
They also took exception to the person who took the video – they thought that the photographer was intent on making China “look bad” and he should not have been allowed to film the event. They were more concerned that the video existed than they were about the event itself.
This who discussion was . . . interesting . . . to say the least.
Anyway.
The current tension between the PRC and ROC is not new. For decades, as Taiwan continued to assert itself as a nation independent of Mainland China, the PRC has continued to insist that Taiwan is a part of China. What is new is that the political understandings that preserved peace for decades are fraying under the pressure of US-China competition, a stronger and more assertive China, and the growth of a Taiwanese identity that sees itself as separate from the mainland. The formal policy of the United States has been, at best, wishy-washy. While not accepting China’s claim that Taiwan is part of its territory, the US holds that the island’s status is undecided. Under its longtime “One China” policy, the U.S. recognizes Beijing as China’s sole legal government but maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory. Most of the island’s 24 million people favor maintaining the status quo, neither unifying with China nor formally declaring independence.
It is on this background that the recent statements from President Xi are troubling. While emphasizing that his goal remains the peaceful reunification of the PRC and the ROC, he is not ruling out a plan to take Taiwan by force – perhaps as early as 2025, although Xi denies a specific time frame for the event.
Xi’s statement got the attention of U.S. officials because it was delivered at a time when China’s behavior toward Taiwan is seen as increasingly aggressive and ahead of a potentially pivotal presidential election in the self-governing democratic island in January. Over recent years, China has taken more aggressive actions to pursue its territorial claims in the 100-mile-width Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, including encroaching on other nations’ exclusive economy zones, increasing its general military presence, seeking the deny the United States and other countries navigational and other freedoms of the seas, and escalating its militarization of islands and atolls it already occupies. These actions have allowed China to gain military advantages in the event of conflict. Perhaps more importantly, they have allowed China to gain significant non-military advantages in situations short of outright conflict, by deterring other claimants from putting up a strong resistance to Chinese incursions and undermining US credibility in the region.
During his presidency, Xi has focused on doubling the size of the Chinese economy by 2035, leading some experts to doubt that China would attack Taiwan if it does not declare independence because a military conflict would likely prevent Beijing from reaching its economic goals. This is why the January election is important; the parties in Taiwan do not agree on the future of their country’s relationship with China. Public debates among the candidates are scheduled for the end of December and early January, and the relationship with the PRC is expected to take center stage.
In light of the current problems the United States is facing as #PO1135809 and his acolytes continue to sow public mistrust in the country’s political and judicial processes, it is also notable that Xi was hesitant to promise to respect the outcome of the election in Taiwan, saying that peace is “all well and good” but that China needs to eventually move toward a resolution. At last year’s Chinese Communist Party Congress, Xi stated publicly that China would attack Taiwan militarily if it declared independence with foreign support. The Chinese leader said the threat of force “is directed solely at interference by outside forces and the few separatists seeking" Taiwanese independence.
We all recall that #PO1135809 claimed a close friendship with President Xi, famously calling him a “brilliant guy” who governs China’s 1.4 billion with an “iron fist,” going on to note “there’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy.” Sounds like a deeply analytical and well-thought-out basis for a relationship between the United States and China.
It’s important to note as well that President Xi and other world leaders are watching closely as the United States opposes Russian territorial expansion in Ukraine and supports its formal ally, Israel, in the current Hamas-Israel War. President Xi will calculate – given recent actions, how likely will it be that the United States would come to the aid of Taiwan if Xi launched a military attack on Taiwan? The 2024 election may tip the scale for Xi – if #PO1135809 returns to power, he and his America-First, no-foreign-wars acolytes will give Xi a clear go-ahead to attack Taiwan – putting at risk the 24 million citizens of an Asian democracy and the productivity of the 20th-largest economy in the world.
The world is a very connected place. We ignore that at our peril.
Yeah. Really. Thanks. This is very important and your maps showing boundaries is helpful. Also, thanks for referring to it as the Hamas-Israel War. It was called that on October 7 and a day or two later it became the Israel-Hamas War. Who started that?