David Mahon says the US is being reckless in stirring up the Taiwan issue and although China has few good options, it will still defend its long term interests

By David Mahon*

Despite Speaker Pelosi’s professed aim to support Taiwan, her visit to Taipei on 2 August in fact weakened the Taiwanese people’s struggle to maintain the ambiguity of their coexistence with China, provoked Beijing unnecessarily, and dramatically increased tensions between China and the US. It is hard to fathom why Speaker Pelosi thought this trip would serve American or Taiwanese interests. Perhaps it will help the Democratic Party appear ‘tough on China’ and win votes in the upcoming mid-term elections, but it looks more as though the US is acting recklessly in risking a military confrontation with China. In escalating mutual tariffs, embargos and condemnations, the two nations are increasing the possibility of a real conflict in the future.

’Strategists in Washington only wanted to make China look bad. Now they can point out China’s military exercises to their allies and say, “See, we told you China was dangerous.” America will push China at every opportunity so it can fight it soon, before it becomes too powerful, and now it is creating the environment in which that will be ok.’
Australian sinologist in Shanghai.

Russia is being bled white in Ukraine, and even if it consolidates the invasion, it will face a protracted guerrilla conflict and become a weaker nation, alienated from the West and increasingly economically dependent on China. Some in Washington seem now determined to use Taiwan as a proxy for conflict with China as Ukraine has become a US proxy conflict with Russia. Beijing seems readily provoked, playing into the hands of Washington lawmakers who frame China as militarily aggressive when in fact China has not been involved in an international military conflict since its 40 day incursion into Vietnam in 1979, a conflict in which both sides claimed victory.

The United States views China spuriously as a direct challenge to its global dominance and the architect of its domestic economic imbalances. Beijing realises that Washington is determined to contain it and coerce its allies to do the same. China is not seeking global hegemony but rather regional influence and security, presently denied it by the US. The US has over 200 military bases in Asia, compared to China’s handful of politically provocative but strategically ineffectual installations on rocks and reefs in the South China Sea. China has no Monroe Doctrine, but wants instead to tip the balance of the present regional status quo in its favour and reduce US coercion. If the US continues to try to damage the Chinese economy and alienate it from its trading partners, China will eventually become more aggressive and act as the political adversary that Washington now falsely imagines it to be. It is not so much China’s rise that is the threat to global prosperity and peace, but the United States’ responses toward its own decline.

The present tensions in the South China Sea and latterly the Pacific between the US and China reflect China’s desire to push back against US attempts to contain its rise, and Washington’s reluctance to concede any political or military ground. Xi was frustrated that President Obama would not agree to a demilitarised South China Sea. Washington claims that it was China that rejected Obama’s offer of the same.

The US and most Western countries assume that the potential flashpoint with China will be Taiwan, and that China is preparing for an imminent invasion, largely due to President Xi Jinping’s stated aim to ‘resolve the Taiwan question’ during his tenure. Every Chinese leader since 1949 has stated a similar aim. China established formal relations with the US when it signed the Shanghai Communiqué in February 1972 that stated Taiwan ‘is China’s internal affair in which no other country has the right to interfere.’ It also stated ‘all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.’ These principles have underpinned not just the US’ but most nations’ terms of diplomatic and commercial relations with China since. Nations trading with China accept that Taiwan is a part of China, but there is an inference all parties accept Taiwan’s autonomy and independence in a de facto sense. This is well coined in the term ‘strategic ambiguity’. Over the last seven years both the US and China have undermined this ambiguity with coercive and usually empty postures.

‘We are puzzled to understand what benefit our government gets from this visit. I guess most middle-class families in Taipei would rather that Pelosi had not come. China can make our lives more difficult than it already is and after this they will, but we just want to keep the strategic ambiguity. It works for everyone. If Washington tells President Tsai to do something, she has no choice. The [military] exercises are being broadcast live on TV in Taipei but most people seem pretty matter-of-fact about them. We are not scared. We are used to this and know it’s really not about Taiwan.’
Taiwanese importer

Taiwan is a pawn in Washington’s manoeuvrings to maintain power in Asia, and in the last 40 years the US’ commitment to Taiwan has been often shallow and inconsistent, depending on shifting American domestic political agendas. The Chinese Government frequently misunderstands American political culture, initially welcoming Trump as a ‘business president’ with whom they could cooperate in 2016, and then following Trump’s relentless attacks on China, seeing President Biden as a peacemaker in 2021. Like most large nations, China struggles to see the world outside the prism of their own domestic challenges. Beijing has failed to accept that many of Washington’s recent statements about Taiwan have been for American domestic consumption, made by a government under pressure and keen to demonstrate an appearance of power to distract its population from disillusionment and divisions at home. In the last 20 years Beijing has over-reacted to American naval posturing in the Taiwan Strait, playing into the hands of the anti-China lobby with its bellicose rhetoric and military exercises. The days of diplomatic dumbshows are over. Beijing now accurately sees that Washington would risk provoking a conflict before China’s military becomes too powerful. War is not imminent, but it is now not as unthinkable as it was. Both nations would do well to stop feeding their people nationalistic rhetoric and dehumanising the other side.

Xi has been an effective domestic president in many ways, reforming the economy, increasing the depth of the private sector, alleviating poverty and curtailing monopolies, and remains arguably China’s most popular leader since Mao, despite the current stringent zeroCOVID polices. But Xi has not always been an effective regional diplomat, frequently alienating Japan and South Korea and galvanising their anti-China political cultures, and increasing tensions with India dramatically. Xi has had some regional successes, such as the resolution of long-standing border tensions with Vietnam and changing negative public perception of China in Malaysia and Singapore, but like US leaders Xi has tried to consolidate domestic support at home by demonstrating that he is fighting for China’s national interests abroad. This nationalism may be hard to defuse in the future.

The Chinese foreign ministry seemed surprised at the widespread eagerness expressed on Chinese social media for a harsher and more specific response to Pelosi’s visit than military exercises and embargos on some Taiwanese food imports. There were even some who called for an immediate invasion of the Island. Others thought that Beijing could at least prevent her plane from landing. Washington may be prepared to sleepwalk into conflict with China, but it will need more artful strategies than theatrical harassment to trigger China. For all the firepower used in the recent Chinese miliary exercises around Taiwan, Beijing was relatively restrained, and for all Washington’s rhetoric about policing ‘international waters’, it made no counterdemonstrations of military power.

Beijing sees Taiwan as an inalienable part of China, the recovery of which was interrupted by US participation in the Chinese Civil War, backing Chiang Kai-shek when he took refuge on the island in 1949. Chiang killed tens-of-thousands of people in Taiwan consolidating his power as a warlord like any other of the era. Martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1987 after 42 years. The social and economic miracle of Taiwan since then, so admired around the world for how swiftly and smoothly it moved from dictatorship to a thriving free market democracy, has made Western support for its relative autonomy reasonable and understandable. To preserve this, it would be best that Taiwan exists in a state of political ambiguity, avoiding declaring independence and pushing China to enforce its claim.

If there were those in the Chinese Government who thought China could invade Taiwan at will, their confidence would have been shaken after observing the West’s sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Beijing knows that commensurate sanctions could drive its economy into recession, creating national penury to the extent that the Communist Party might be threatened by social unrest. It is not that China could not invade Taiwan, for it has significant airborne troop capacity, advanced fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships, but the oft touted Washington statistic that China now has more ships in its navy than the US is an artifice. Much of the PLA’s fleet is defensive, carrying inferior firepower to that of the US Navy. Washington inflates the size of the Chinese navy by including coastguard and small fisheries monitoring craft, many of which are launches and dinghies. It is clear however that the potential air superiority that Taiwan enjoyed up until around ten years ago has gone, for many of its aircraft are outdated, and the Taiwanese military has invested too much in expensive hi-tech weaponry of questionable practicality. Taipei’s army is also poorly trained, and conscription is no longer than four months.

China knows that while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had a major impact on the world through the inflation of food and energy prices, a Taiwan invasion would destroy a critical tech supply centre (particularly in microchip production) with the ensuing worldwide recession blowing back on China. Both Beijing and Taipei are likely to work to preserve the status quo, as neither government has a predilection for war, preferring peaceful diplomacy.

China also trusts that its growing arsenal of sophisticated ICBMs and existing tactical nuclear weapons will be a firm deterrent to the US goading Taiwan to conflict in the future.

Since Pelosi’s visit, China has recognised that Washington will continue to push past the redlines China has long set. Pelosi’s visit was one of many probes over the years to test the depth of China’s commitment to resist the US’ incremental extraction of Taiwan from the strategic ambiguity of the past 40 years. Taiwan knows it is little more than a pawn in Washington’s dangerous game, one the US has lost repeatedly since 1945. For all the vows of support from American politicians, Taipei also knows that the US is not a reliable ally.

China can prevent a war of scale with the US by not allowing itself to be drawn into conflict. No matter to what degree China and the US’ interests may conflict in the region, without shared borders and with vast oceans upon which both countries may demonstrate their miliary power while avoiding each other, military confrontation is difficult to foresee in the near-term.

The continued decline of the United States is also not an inevitability. It can renew its divided and unbalanced society, and repair its broken democracy as it has done in the past. A more confident and stable United States would likely still see China as a competitor, but also in many fields as a partner. For all China’s outward confidence, it knows its limitations and that working with the US is preferable to a protracted power struggle. Many in China are sure that only a return to a partnership with the US will provide China with all it needs to fulfil its economic and political potential.

As China becomes stronger economically and continues its Belt and Road initiatives, it will increase its influence in Africa, Southeast and Central Asia, and the Pacific, lifting its own common wealth and that of its trading partners, and thereby ultimately undermining Washington’s attempts to contain it. The US is accelerating China rise instead of slowing it, and forcing China to become more technologically independent, while causing little damage to the domestic Chinese economy. Washington’s trade war against China has instead inflicted considerable damage on the American economy, and delivered booms in manufacturing exports from Vietnam, Bangladesh and India. The US can break China’s stride but not its inexorable rise.

Where troops have be quartered, brambles and thorns spring up. In the track of great armies there must follow lean years.
Lao Zi, 5th century BCE

*David Mahon is the Executive Chairman of Beijing-based Mahon China Investment Management Limited, which was founded in 1985. This article is here with permission.