Xi combines UN ploy, Trump talk with military pressure on Taiwan

China is adding new diplomatic moves to justify its military threat to coerce Taiwan into submitting to rule from Beijing.

In a formal position paper delivered to the United Nations last month, China declared that China’s sovereignty over Taiwan was guaranteed by the 1971 UN resolution that recognized the Peoples Republic of China as the country’s sole government.

“Any attempt to challenge Resolution 2758 constitutes not only a challenge to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also a challenge to the authority of the UN,” Beijing statement declared.

China may believe it can get a groundswell of UN support for its position. One hundred and nineteen UN member countries – 62 per cent of the organization’s total membership—endorse Beijing’s One-China policy with a corollary that it includes Taiwan.

Defining the issue in existential terms fits with China’s newly intensified efforts to put its desired takeover of Taiwan at the center of Beijng’s foreign policy. In part, the move was prompted by Taiwan’s insistence that it is de facto an independent country.

Beijing’s move is also an effort to preempt any notion that the United States can rightfully defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion because it is a sovereign country. Foreign Minister Wang Yi telegraphed China’s attitude in a speech to a Communist Party conference in which he declared, “Taiwan has been a part of China since ancient times, and it has never been a state. Nor will it ever be. A clamor for Taiwan independence is an effort to split China.”

If China’s legalistic claim was just talk, it might be dismissed as bluster. But Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who took power in 2013, has put significant military muscle behind the rhetoric. Under his reign, the size of China’s naval force alone rivals those operated by the US and its allies in East Asia.

After last year’s election of Taiwan President Lai Ching-te, a promoter of independence, Xi ordered up a series of intensified naval and air activity around and over Taiwan.

Beijing has also unilaterally claimed as its own a string of islets and shoals that frame the Taiwan Strait, the waterway that separates mainland China from Taiwan. Chinese air force jets recently buzzed a pair of Western naval ships traversing the Strait, while its coast guard has tried to block boats from the Philippines from supplying food to Filippino sailors guarding an offshore outcropping.

Last April, military maneuvers took place around all sides of Taiwan. The People’s Liberation Army announced that they focused on “sea and air combat readiness patrols, … sea and land strikes and blocking key areas and roads.”

The PLA also released an animated cartoon that called President Lai a “parasite poisoning Taiwan.”

Observers are at odds over whether these activities are rehearsals for an impending invasion or just efforts to frighten the vastly outmanned and underequipped Taiwan military. Perhaps both: the recent drills included sophisticated live-fire practice in advance of a real invasion, but were also designed to send a “stern warning and forceful deterrence against ‘Taiwan Independence’ separatist forces,”the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command stated.

Foreign observers offered a third guess: that a drill could be a clever cover for launching the real thing. “If the Chinese are planning to launch an assault under cover of a training exercise, they need to prepare for that by having regular real training exercises so that the invasion cover doesn’t look odd,” said David Silbey, a military history professor at Cornell University in the United States.

Taiwan responded to China’s words and actions by increasing the length of mandatory military service, beefing up weapons purchases, developing its own new missiles and armed drones and holding civil defense drills.

Chiu Chui-cheng, who heads Taiwan’s policy-making Mainland Affairs Council, warned an audience in Washington that China’s military drills mean China “has been actively preparing for war.” He predicted that a takeover of Taiwan would “trigger a domino effect” that would “undermine the regional balance of power, and directly threaten the security and prosperity of the United States.”

US President Donald Trump has played down the dangers of China’s threats to Taiwan. He has said that having a strong US “military capability” and being “present” in the Indo-Pacific is the best way to deter China.

That answer was in line the policy of strategic ambiguity, a strategy that has been a staple of US policy regarding the China-Taiwan issue for decades. It means the US should not commit to Taiwan’s defense, but keep China guessing. Recently, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, awkwardly walked the policy tightrope: “We have a longstanding position on Taiwan that we’re not going to abandon, and that is: We are against any forced, compelled, coercive change in the status of Taiwan.”

Which is not the same as explaining what the US would do if China invaded.

A key member of Trump’s national security team suggested that Trump ought to take a distance from defense of Taiwan. Elbridge Colby, Trump’s new undersecretary of defense for policy, has written that the US should not try to resolve every global problem that comes its way.

Taiwan is one of the lesser problems, he told a Congressional committee in March.Colby acknowledged that “Taiwan’s fall will be a disaster for American interests” – but flatly added, “It is not an existential interest for the United States.” He repeated the existentialist phrase during his September confirmation hearing.

Colby is also a fan of making friends pay more for their own self-defense and not count on the US for everything. “To make Taiwan defensible,” he wrote last year, “Taiwan must do more.” That put him in line with the Trump’s bookkeeper-like attitude on relations with allies: Trump has said Taiwan should not only increase its own military spending but also pay for US defense guarantees. He once called Taiwan a defense “freeloader.”

With all that in mind, it may come as no surprise that China might think that American support for Taiwan is shallow.

Xi Jinping apparently thinks that he can persuade Trump to replace strategic ambiguity with a kind of strategic retreat. Xi is apparently dissatisfied with the formal American position on Taiwan, which says Washington does “not support Taiwan independence.” Instead, Xi has demanded that the US declare it “opposes” Taiwan independence, the Wall Street Journal reported.

That change would suit China fine. “It would signal a shift in US policy from a neutral position to one that actively aligns with Beijing against Taiwanese sovereignty – a change that could further cement Xi’s hold on power at home,” the Journal article said.

The payoff for Trump? Xi believes he can persuade Trump, ever interested in doing business, to alter US policy in return for making a favorable trade deal with China. Negotiations on trade are currently underway.