By Simon Korner

The island of Taiwan is part of China. One China means exactly what it says: that there is only one country called China, including the province of Taiwan. It is a principle agreed upon by the UN and 181 countries in the world, including the USA, UK, Europe, Japan and Australia.

The official US position as stated in the State Department Bilateral Relations Fact Sheet ‘U.S. Relations with Taiwan’ is as follows: “The US recognises the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China [and] there is but One China and Taiwan is part of China.” The official British position, as set down in a Memorandum of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is similar: “HMG acknowledges… that Taiwan [is] a province of the PRC and recognis[es] the PRC Government as the sole legal Government of China. We do not deal with the Taiwan authorities and we avoid any act which could be taken to imply recognition.” 

INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS

International law is clear: the 1943 Cairo Declaration signed by the US, UK and China, stated that all Chinese territories occupied by Japan, including Taiwan, should be restored to China. The Potsdam Proclamation of 1945 restated this commitment, and Japan promised to abide by it after its surrender. Even Taiwan’s own Constitution of 1991 accepts that China is one single country – with Taiwan laying claim to the whole of mainland China, including Mongolia, and the South China Sea. Authoritarian ruler Chiang Kai-shek – leader of the defeated Nationalists who fled to Taiwan in 1949 – refused the UN’s 1971 offer of dual Chinese representation at the UN, saying: "The sky is not big enough for two suns." a refusal that led to the Republic of China’s expulsion from the UN.

Only thirteen countries (plus the Vatican) recognise Taiwan diplomatically – down from twenty-eight in 2008. The latest country to change its affiliation was the Solomon Islands, which established closer ties with China this year, much to western fury. Many of the countries that previously recognised Taiwan were in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region under longstanding US domination. The fact that Costa Rica (2006), Panama (2017), Dominican Republic (2018), El Salvador (2018) and Nicaragua (2022) have all dared defy the US by recognising China demonstrates the shifting balance of power between the US and China.

While the US and UK officially support the One China principle, they are doing all they can to destroy it in practice. The August visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, who is Speaker of the US Congress, a hugely influential politician and second in line to the presidency after Vice-President Kamala Harris, broke decades of US diplomacy in its relations with China and served no other purpose than to challenge One China. Representing the strategic aims of US foreign policy, Pelosi was trying to goad China into a response that could serve as a pretext for future war in the Far East.

Further western provocations are now planned, including a visit by a delegation from the US Congress and a similar one from Britain’s foreign affairs select committee.

CHINA RESPONDS TO PELOSI

After Pelosi landed in Taipei, the Chinese Foreign Ministry warned that her arrival would have “a severe impact on the political foundation of China-US relations, and seriously infringes upon China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It gravely undermines peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for ‘Taiwan independence.’…These moves, like playing with fire, are extremely dangerous. Those who play with fire will burn themselves,” it continued.

China’s response was restrained. It did not as some trigger-happy commentators on Twitter called for, intervene to divert Pelosi’s flight, or even shoot it down. That would have given the US what it wanted. As the Chinese People’s Daily newspaper commented: “China's countermeasures will not be one-off but a combination of long-term, resolute and steadily advancing actions” (3/8/22).

China’s first response was to stage live-fire drills in the seas around Taiwan. These measures established its presence in the waters off its own coast, through which western navies, including Britain’s, frequently sail warships as they have ever since the Opium Wars of the 19^th century. The drills were unprecedented in scope - the first time live-fire missile tests crossed Taiwan, flying over densely deployed US Patriot anti-missile batteries. The drills were also the closest to Taiwan ever conducted and the first time the island had been encircled. They established actual Chinese control over the Taiwan Straits, ensuring that this narrow stretch of water, so vulnerable to enemy disruption of Chinese trade, cannot be choked off by western navies. Similarly, the drills ensured that the airspace between Taiwan and China cannot be monopolised by Taiwan. This is airspace claimed by Taiwan as part of its so-called Air Defence Identification Zone, and extends over a huge area of the south-eastern Chinese mainland, far beyond Taiwan’s internationally recognised airspace. China’s drills have challenged such expansionism.

China also suspended imports on around 100 Taiwanese food and agricultural firms (Politico, 3/8/22). Chinese natural sand exports to Taiwan – used to make Taiwan’s computer chips as well as in construction – were also suspended (China Daily, 3/8/22). As China supplies around a third of Taiwan’s sand requirements, the Pelosi visit will hit the Taiwanese economy, and beyond it the rest of the world which relies heavily on Taiwan’s semiconductors.

In short, China demonstrated its readiness to defend itself in a series of carefully calibrated measures in response to rash western provocation.

WORLD REACTION

World reaction was not wholly favourable to the US. The ten member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – a bloc consisting of Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Brunei –expressed concerns over rising tensions over Taiwan. The Straits Times newspaper in Singapore (3/8/22) reported that “political watchers in Singapore” believed Pelosi’s visit “was unnecessary and did not serve any strategic or foreign policy goal.” Leading Indian newspaper the Hindu Times similarly called the situation an “Avoidable Crisis” (3/8/22). South Korea’s president was away ‘on holiday’ when Pelosi visited the country after she was in Taiwan. Pakistan condemned the visit outright, saying that it supported “China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”. Regional powers of whatever political stripe are understandably wary of the US bringing war and ruin to east Asia as it has to Ukraine and Europe.

Others expressing their longstanding commitment to the One China principle were Russia, Belarus, Serbia, North Korea, Syria, Iran, the Arab League, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Palestine.

Even some in the western media were equivocal about Pelosi’s visit – worried, like Henry Kissinger, about the US waging war against China and Russia at the same time. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian called it “blatantly provocative” (3/8/22). One prominent New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, called Pelosi “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible” (1/8/22). These criticisms don’t reflect major cracks in US bi-partisan strategy on China, but more a question of tactical differences and timing. After all, Trump drew up the $7 billion arms deal which Biden continued, as part of an effort to “draw closer to Taipei” according to the Wall Street Journal (16/9/20). The $7 billion deal was on top of the $15 billion worth of arms already sold while Trump was in office, and in addition to Obama’s $14 billion of arms during his two terms. Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State, openly supported Pelosi’s visit and even offered to go with her.

TAIWANESE REACTION

The majority of Taiwanese regarded Pelosi’s visit as destabilising and would like the status quo to continue. Protestors shouted outside Pelosi’s hotel: “We don’t need America to treat us as a pawn.”

Though the current Taiwanese government of President Tsai Ing-wen is against unification and for secession, this hard line is a recent development in the island’s politics. The main opposition party the Kuomintang (KMT), which did well in local elections in 2018, has had a long-held policy of dialogue with China and has traditionally favoured close ties with Beijing (Reuters, 7/6/22). However, the KMT lost the 2016 national elections to Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party. The KMT represents in part the interests of those Taiwanese capitalists who have the closest business relations with China. There are around one million “taishang”, wealthy Taiwanese businessmen with vested interests in China (Pulitzer Centre, 24/7/20). The party more broadly favours economic ties with China, spearheaded by Taiwan’s influential elected mayors.

Clearly there is room for diplomacy between China and Taiwan. The island’s rapid economic rise, after decades of crushing authoritarian rule from 1949 to 1992, is closely bound up with that of China. Cross-strait trade in 2018 was worth $150 billion (Taiwan gov.tw). Up to 1.2 million Taiwanese live on the mainland (Economist, 19/11/20) – one city near Shanghai, where 100,000 Taiwanese Chinese live and work, is known as Little Taipei. For 73 years, China has allowed the close economic, cultural and family ties to strengthen the bonds between it and Taiwan in the knowledge that peaceful reunification will eventually come. China has stated that it will not send in troops unless Taiwan declares independence or acquires nuclear weapons. Pelosi’s visit was clearly an attempt to boost the pro-independence forces in Taiwan to the point where they become emboldened enough to act.

Peace and diplomacy are the last thing the US wants. The US government’s 2017 National Security Strategy stated that China poses a threat to “American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity”. As Alexander Huang, the KMT’s head of international affairs, put it: “We have to understand that the sole standard of the US’s Taiwan policy is based on American interests, not those of Taiwan” (The Diplomat, 8/2/22).

TAIWAN MATTERS TO THE US

For the US, Taiwan provides a vital land base from which to launch an attack on mainland China. On a regional scale, Taiwan is key to the US’s “first island chain” military strategy which was developed during the Korean War in 1951 by renowned anti-Communist John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under Eisenhower. This strategy, strengthened by the recent AUKUS alliance between the US, UK and Australia, is designed to maintain US control over the chain of islands along the Chinese mainland from Japan in the north down to Borneo in the south, in order to contain China’s access to the South China Sea – the sea through which almost all its trade passes.

Control over Taiwan is also vital for maintaining US hegemony over its own East Asian allies, in particular, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Losing its hold over Taiwan would signal to these powers the unravelling of US domination of the whole region.

Another crucial element is Taiwan’s semi-conductor production, which supplies vital computer chips to Silicon Valley. The US will do all it can to prevent China from acquiring Taiwan’s cutting-edge semi-conductor technology and thus gaining control over global chip production.

Elbridge Colby, who was formerly in charge of US defence strategy in his role as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy at the Pentagon envisages a Ukraine-style proxy war over Taiwan. In his influential book Strategy of Denial, Colby suggests that China should be “tempted” to strike Taiwanese civilians, whose deaths would provide an excellent pretext for a western-backed military response. The book calls for a coalition of countries in Asia to help execute this strategy, just as European countries are now backing NATO in Ukraine. Colby spells out US policy in no uncertain terms: “Physical force, especially the ability to kill, is the ultimate form of coercive leverage. While there are other sources of influence... they are all dominated by the power to kill.”

Colby’s “coercive leverage” – the “power to kill” – is provided by the massive US Pacific navy (200 ships/submarines, 1,200 aircraft, and over 130,000 personnel), which patrols China’s territorial waters under the banner of Freedom of Navigation. It regularly sends guided missile-armed destroyers through the narrow 81-mile Taiwan Strait – just as a century ago its gunboats encroached on the Chinese coast and rivers to plunder the country in the name of freedom of navigation and free trade (Sara Flounders, Covert Action, 18/8/22). On the day Pelosi visited Taiwan, the US navy carried out major military exercises involving all the G7 countries – as part of RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific Amphibious Assault Training), the world’s biggest training programme.

PROVOKING WAR

For its part, China has always made clear it wants to reunite with Taiwan peacefully. But if Taiwan were to develop nuclear weapons or declare independence, it would pose an existential threat to China, marking the removal of all constraints on the US using Taiwan as its main forward base against the mainland. China stated officially in 2014: “China will never seek hegemony or engage in military expansion now or in the future, no matter how developed it becomes.” China’s nuclear arsenal is a fraction of the size of America’s – around less than a tenth. The US vastly outspends China on arms: $738 billion a year, compared to China’s $252 billion. But China has made it clear that it will defend itself, if its sovereignty is attacked.

An empire in crisis, the US is provoking war after war as it seeks to preserve its world domination at any cost. Its war in Ukraine is killing thousands of people. In Kosovo, an entity carved out of Serbia by NATO’s Yugoslav war, the US has been provoking skirmishes on the border with Serbia, in part to warn Serbia off its pro-Russian stance. Most serious of all would be a US war with China, begun by encouraging secessionist politicians in Taiwan to cut off the island from its natural partner on the mainland.

 

Shanghai - Photo by Legolas 1024

Further western provocations are now planned, including a visit by a delegation from the US Congress and a similar one from Britain's foreign affairs select committee.

Nancy Pelosi and Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen - Photo by Wang Yu Ching