Trump’s talk with Tsai a ‘wake-up call’ for Beijing

BEIJING — China’s leaders have been markedly reticent about what kind of leader they think Mr Donald Trump will be. A pragmatic dealmaker, as his business background might indicate? Or a provocateur who tests the ways of statecraft?

By talking with Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen over the weekend, Mr Trump answered that question in stark terms, Chinese analysts said early Saturday (Dec 3). Breaking decades of United States diplomatic practice, he caught the Chinese government off guard by lunging into the most sensitive of its core interests, the “One China” policy agreed to by President Richard Nixon more than four decades ago.

“This is a wake-up call for Beijing - we should buckle up for a pretty rocky six months or year in the China-US relationship,” Associate Professor Wang Dong at the School of International Studies at Peking University said. “There was a sort of delusion based on overly optimistic ideas about Trump. That should stop.”

Chinese leaders covet stability in their relationship with Washington, and perhaps for that reason, they have allowed fairly rosy assessments of Mr Trump to appear in the state-run news media. Many of those accounts have depicted the President-elect as a practical operator devoid of ideology, the kind of person China might find common ground with despite his threats of a trade war.

In the hope of maintaining a relatively smooth relationship as Mr Trump begins his administration, Beijing will probably take a wait-and-see attitude despite his phone call with Ms Tsai, said Prof Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at Renmin University.

Indeed, China’s first official reaction, from Foreign Minister Wang Yi, was fairly benign - though it was firm in reiterating the One China policy, under which the US formally recognised Beijing as China’s sole government in 1978 and broke ties with Taiwan a year later. No American President or President-elect had spoken to a Taiwanese president since then.

Mr Wang blamed Ms Tsai’s government for arranging the call. “It won’t stand a chance to change the One China policy agreed upon by the international community,” he said.

A follow-up statement from the Foreign Ministry on Saturday, noting that the ministry had filed a formal complaint with the US government, was similar in tone. It urged “relevant parties in the US” to “deal with the Taiwan issue in a prudent, proper manner.”

China’s leaders disdain Ms Tsai, of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, who was elected president this year after pledging to wean the island off its economic dependence on China, a policy that won enthusiastic support from younger Taiwanese.

China favoured her opponent, Ms Hung Hsiu-chu of the Kuomintang, which has sought closer ties with mainland China. Before the election, President Xi Jinping of China met with Ms Tsai’s predecessor, Mr Ma Ying-jeou, also of the Kuomintang, in the first encounter between the leaders of the two governments, a rapprochement that Beijing had long sought.

Mr Trump broke a Chinese taboo merely by using Ms Tsai’s title. The Chinese state news media refer to the Taiwanese president as the “leader of the Taiwan region”, to indicate that Beijing regards Taiwan not as a sovereign nation but as Chinese territory to eventually be brought under its control.

A basic tenet of the Chinese government is that Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s forces fled in 1949 after losing China’s civil war, will be brought back into the fold.

Mr Trump’s phone call also violated a long-standing principle of US policy: that the President does not speak to the head of Taiwan’s government, despite selling arms to it. “Interesting how the US sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call,” Mr Trump said on Twitter after the stunned reaction to his conversation with Ms Tsai.

Though Beijing vehemently protests the arms sales, it also warily acknowledges them as part of long-established practice. Since the mid-1990s, Washington has signalled to Taiwan that it will not support any military effort to gain independence from China.

The Obama administration’s last arms sale to Taiwan, in 2015, was relatively modest - consisting of anti-tank missiles, two frigates and surveillance gear, worth US$1.8 billion (S$2.5 billion) in total - but it still provoked a bitter denunciation from Beijing.

Mr Douglas Paal, a former director of the American Institute in Taiwan, which represents American interests on the island, said it would not be surprising if the US sold arms to Taiwan early in the Trump administration. Beijing’s reaction would depend on the price tag, the kinds of weapons sold and how the administration informed China of the sale, Mr Paal said.

While it broke diplomatic precedent, Mr Trump’s conversation with Ms Tsai could be seen in some ways as following a pattern of Republican presidents reaching out to Taiwan, although others did not do so before taking office.

Though Mr Trump has received generally favourable coverage in the Chinese state news media, some Chinese analysts have expressed irritation with him, and some have suggested that his administration will offer China opportunities to show strength.

Prof Yan Xuetong, an international relations specialist at Tsinghua University and a foreign policy hawk, said the overall tenor of the China-US in the coming years would depend a great deal on the personal chemistry between Mr Trump and Mr Xi. He said China, with its growing military and the second-largest economy in the world, could largely afford to act as it liked.

Prof Shen Dingli, who specialises in international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, took a contrarian view of Mr Trump’s call with Ms Tsai: He said it was not a problem because Mr Trump had yet to take office. “He is a private citizen,” he said.

But if such contacts continue after Inauguration Day, Prof Shen said, China should end diplomatic relations with the US.

“I would close our embassy in Washington and withdraw our diplomats,” he said. “I would be perfectly happy to end the relationship. I don’t know how you are then going to expect China to cooperate on Iran and North Korea and climate change. You are going to ask Taiwan for that?” THE NEW YORK TIMES