Before this week’s summit between the Chinese and US presidents, Taiwan had been cast as the anxious bystander.
Observers suggested that Taipei feared the unpredictable and transactional Donald Trump might overturn Washington’s longstanding support for the island democracy, which Beijing claims as a breakaway province, during Thursday and Friday’s talks.
But while the US president hailed his “great” meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, when the leaders emerged on Thursday afternoon, he took an uncustomarily muted approach as he sidestepped questions on Taiwan. A White House readout of the meeting published later also omitted mention of the country.
Trump may have been reading the room. Shortly before the meeting, Xi took a firm tone, declaring that “Taiwan independence” and peace in the Taiwan strait were “incompatible”.
“If it is handled properly, the relationship between the two countries [China and the US] will remain generally stable,” Xi said. “If it is not handled well, the two countries will collide or even conflict, pushing the entire Sino-US relationship into a very dangerous situation.”
Wen-Ti Sung, a non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, said Xi’s tone was “surprisingly firm for summit diplomacy”. That was intended to signal to Trump that the “Taiwan issue remains the reddest of red lines” for Beijing. Xi’s message was “get Taiwan right and we are friends; get Taiwan wrong and we might become foes before you know it,” Sung said.
Taiwan’s ministry of foreign affairs issued a swift and firm retort to Xi, saying that: “The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to one another.”
But beyond this customary sparring, Taipei will be quietly pleased at the meeting’s outcome, not least the silence from Washington, according to William Yang, a senior analyst focusing on China for the Crisis Group.
While Trump and Xi are to meet again on Friday, Yang believes that will be focused on trade and investment deals, and Taipei may have already breathed a “sigh of relief”.
“[Taipei] would welcome Taiwan being mentioned as little as possible,” he said. “They’d rather have Taiwan not mentioned than Taiwan mentioned in a way that marks a departure from longstanding US policy.”
Before Trump’s arrival in Beijing on Wednesday evening Xi had been expected to press him on arms sales to Taipei. Beijing regards Taiwan as a breakaway province, despite never having ruled it, and refuses to renounce the right to use of force to take it. Washington acknowledges China’s claim without endorsing it, and maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity in which it says it could – but may not – intervene to protect Taiwan should it be invaded.
The US also supplies Taiwan with the means to defend itself, through arms sales.
Before the meeting, China’s Taiwan affairs office reiterated its “consistent and unequivocal” opposition to these arms sales, condemning Washington’s “military ties with China’s Taiwan region”.
In December, the Trump administration angered Beijing when it announced an $11bn weapons package for Taiwan. Another package worth about $14bn has reportedly been awaiting Trump’s sign-off for months, with a bipartisan group of US last week senators urging him to move forward with it.
The president now faces added impetus to do so, after Taiwan’s parliament ended a 16-month impasse on Friday when opposition groups backed the ruling Democratic Progressive party’s much-reduced $25bn defence budget financing those purchases.
Before Trump’s meeting with Xi, commentators speculated the US president’s need for Beijing’s support to end his intractable war with Iran could set the stage for some kind of “grand bargain”, in which he made concessions on US support for Taiwan.
But the tenor of Xi’s statement suggests the Chinese leader “may not want to place Taiwan within that framework”, said Alexander Huang, chair of the Taiwan-based thinktank the Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies.
“Xi did not openly ask Trump to say or commit something on Taiwan. This is because Xi believes the Taiwan question should be handled strictly between [Taipei and Beijing],” he said. “Openly asking Trump for specific words or actions would give the impression that Taiwan is a bargaining chip up for trade.”
