President-elect’s
willingness to antagonise Beijing over trade and Taiwan indicates a shredding
of 45 years of US-China relations
By Simon Tisdall
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A
Taiwanese newspaper depicts the US president-elect with a makeshift crown
following his
apparent dismissiveness toward Beijing’s ‘One China’ policy.
Photograph:
Ritchie B Tongo/EPA
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By once again testing China’s nerves over
Taiwan, Donald Trump is injecting a dangerous element of uncertainty and
unpredictability into US relations with Beijing – the exact opposite of what
American presidents usually try to do when dealing with potentially hostile
rival superpowers.
Trump’s public questioning of the
long-established One China policy, under which Washington accepts that Taiwan
is part of China, is a knife in the troubled heart of the US-China relationship
established by Richard Nixon’s famous “opening to China” and his groundbreaking
meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972.
At the same time as riling China, Trump is
fomenting a triangular strategic upheaval by building bridges to Russia. His
expected choice of Vladimir Putin’s buddy and Exxon Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson
as secretary of state is the latest straw in the wind. In effect, Trump is
playing Nixon’s “China card” in reverse. His approach can be summed up: make
nice with Russia, talk tough to China.
Trump’s willingness to upset the global
balance of power and roll the strategic dice so dramatically heralds a new age
of uncertainty in international relations. It potentially affects ongoing
crises and looming controversies from Syria and Ukraine to Tibet and the
Arctic, where US and Russian oil companies have shared interests.
The symbolic importance to China’s communist
leaders of reunification with Taiwan – the last bastion of Chiang Kai-shek’s
nationalists in the civil war that followed Japan’s defeat in 1945 – cannot be
overestimated. They regard Taiwan as a renegade province and its sovereignty as
non-negotiable.
Trump’s statement on Sunday linking continued
US adherence to the One China policy to other problematic issues, such as trade
and currency, will be deeply alarming for Beijing.
In its toughest riposte to date, Geng Shuang,
foreign ministry spokesman, said “the sound and steady growth of China-US
relations [was] out of the question” were Trump to persist with his approach.
“We urge the incoming US administration … to properly deal with Taiwan-related
matters in a prudent manner,” Geng said.
Trump and prudence are not traditional
bedfellows. Far from soothing Beijing’s fears following his protocol-shredding
telephone call with Taiwan’s president, he deliberately escalated the row.
Maybe Trump was trying to justify his earlier gaffe; maybe his sense of
self-importance was punctured. Nobody could tell him who he may and may not
speak to, he said.
Or maybe Trump was placing China on notice
that unless he obtained more balanced trade and jobs, the US would deem all
aspects of the bilateral relationship – including regional security, China’s
military buildup and cooperation over the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear
weapons programme – up for review.
“We’re being hurt very badly by China with
devaluation, with taxing us heavy at the borders when we don’t tax them, with
building a massive fortress in the middle of the South China Sea, which they
shouldn’t be doing, and frankly with not helping us at all with North Korea,”
Trump said. “You have North Korea, you have nuclear weapons, and China could
solve that problem and they’re not helping us at all.”
Chinese leaders – from the president, Xi
Jinping, down – have not yet decided how to deal with Trump. His post-election
outbursts have evidently caught them off-guard. State media and tame
pro-government academics are increasingly aggressive in their response. But
party bosses still seem to be hoping things will calm down as Trump settles
into office.
That may be a serious misreading. Trump is
already engaged in a furious battle with his own intelligence community,
notably the CIA, and moderate Republican and Democratic members of Congress.
There is little reason to believe he will tread more gently with with his favourite
campaign target, China – at least in the short term.
But there could also be method in the
apparent madness. By seeking warmer ties with Russia, Trump may be hoping China
catches a cold. This is the identical gambit, played backwards, that was employed
by Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, to clip the wings
of the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. On this reading, Trump is
playing the “Russia card” against Beijing.
The risks that this strategy will backfire
are huge. Xi is not the sort of leader to appease Trump; China has its own
pragmatic, business-like relationship with Putin’s Russia; the two countries
will not be easily estranged. And in any case, China does not accept the
justice of Trump’s claims about currency manipulation and unfair tariffs. And
then there is Taiwan.
Xi may decide instead to meet fire with fire.
Threatening Chinese military air manoeuvres close to Taiwan and the Ryukyu
islands at the weekend – the second such event in two weeks – led to a rapid
mobilisation of Taiwanese and Japanese air and missile forces. A connection
between this and Trump’s verbal provocations is not proven. But it seems
likely. In the coming age of uncertainty, nobody knows what comes next.
