U.S. Embraces Taiwan’s President as China’s Shadow Looms Large

• The flying visit of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California this week will set back U.S.-China relations, the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles has said.
• Taipei, which relies on America for arms and protection from its much larger neighbor, has insisted Beijing’s repeated complaints are “increasingly absurd.”
• Tsai is performing a skillful diplomatic high-wire act, experts say, by deepening ties with the island’s most important ally while trying not to further inflame tensions with China.

Officials in Taipei, Washington and Beijing have all said their piece about President Tsai Ing-wen in the week since she departed Taiwan for Central America, a trip that has involved stopovers on both coasts of the United States.

Tsai, 66, embarked on the seventh such transit of her two-term presidency to underscore seven years of foreign policy aimed at closing the gap between Taiwan‘s national interest and that of the U.S. and its allies. Now, her American friends are happy to help her cement this legacy.

Washington has no formal relations with Taipei, and its “one China” policy acknowledges, but doesn’t recognize, Beijing’s decades-long claim to Taiwan, which counts the U.S. as its strongest international backer in the postwar era as well as its main supplier of defensive arms to deter Chinese adventurism.

Since democratizing in the 1990s, the island’s public has grown more averse to a future political union with China’s ruling Communist Party across the Taiwan Strait. Beijing brands leaders like Tsai, who have largely sought to honor the popular preference for the status quo, as proponents of “Taiwan independence”—or separatists—for turning Taipei’s diplomatic attention elsewhere.

On Monday, after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced plans to host Tsai on April 5 for bipartisan talks in his home state of California, the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles said the meeting would “greatly hurt the national feelings of the 1.4 billion Chinese people” and undermine the “political foundations” of the U.S.-China relationship.

The consternation in Beijing relates to McCarthy’s office as the most senior Republican lawmaker and No. 2 in the presidential line of succession. China’s leaders were equally unequivocal last August when California Democrat Nancy Pelosi became the first sitting House speaker in 25 years to visit Taipei.

McCarthy may have boxed himself into a corner last year when he backed Pelosi’s high-profile trip and promised to do the same in her position. Then in March, he explicitly delinked Wednesday’s meeting with Tsai from his pledge to visit the island in the future.

As the U.S. plays down and China plays up Tsai’s presence in America, Taipei’s choices ultimately may prove to be decisive in the days to come as Beijing weighs up its response, which last year included a quasi-blockade of Taiwan, ballistic missile tests, and the suspension of U.S.-China cooperation in eight areas including counternarcotics to address the fentanyl crisis.

Tsai has made a deliberate decision to keep her engagements with U.S. elected representatives out of the public eye, or at least not announced beforehand or broadcast in real time.

This applied to separate meetings last week with Rep. Hakeem Jeffriesthe New York Democrat and House minority leader, and Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Joni Ernst (R-IA). It will also apply to her summit with McCarthy and over a dozen members of Congress at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in southern California.

In return for her caution, Taiwan’s lawyer turned leader will once again be accorded the appropriate level of “dignity” while in the U.S., officials say.

Larry Diamond, a political sociologist and leading scholar in democracy studies, told Newsweek that Taiwan had been “mercilessly isolated” on the international stage by the People’s Republic of China.

“The effort is to humiliate Taiwan and beat it into submission by saying you’re not a legitimate government, you’re certainly not a country, and you don’t really exist,” said Diamond, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, both at Stanford.

“Countries do have a need for dignity, and collectivities have a need for dignity the same way individual human beings do. For Taiwan, the morale of the people is a very important factor in generating a will to survive and a will to resistand that is intimately related to the reason why the PRC is doing this,” he said.

“And so every gesture and symbolic initiative that might seem substantively unimportant has the import of raising the morale of the Taiwan people, and that’s not a trivial thing,” Diamond said.

Geopolitical Juggling

Eagerness in the U.S. to overtly demonstrate support for a like-minded democracy may in part be driven by the volume of China’s preemptive protests. But Tsai, whose bookish demeanor masks what American interlocutors have called a “tenacious negotiator,” will be keenly aware of the White House’s penchant for caution.

The Democratic administration of President Joe Biden is managing three dynamics: an interparty rival with the GOP; animosity between Taipei and Beijing; and the broader U.S.-China competition that impacts both.

At home, where the protocols surrounding Tsai’s “transit diplomacy” are being scrutinized by political pundits on television each day, Taiwan’s leader also is weighing her decisions with a view to minimize domestic blowback resulting from another Chinese overreaction—a tough ask when Beijing frequently opposes Taipei’s public steps, big or small.

“Dictators are always surrounded by henchmen, and they can easily misjudge the situation. Many sources show that Russia’s Vladimir Putin made a serious mistake in judging the international situation before invading Ukraine. The international community must not repeat the same mistakes when facing China’s Xi Jinping,” said Taiwanese legislator Freddy Lim, a Taipei independent.

“Therefore, the international community’s support for Taiwan must be made clearer for China to fully understand, including by allowing Taiwan to have increasingly fair and open international rights. And one of the best ways is to allow President Tsai Ing-wen to enjoy fair exposure as head of state,” Lim told Newsweek.

That Tsai was said to have convinced McCarthy to indefinitely postpone what would have been a highly charged visit to Taiwan in favor of contact on U.S. soil would seem to put the onus on China to climb down the escalate ladder, experts say, although it wouldn’t preclude more military signaling with warplanes and warships around the island.

Also of potential convenience for Beijing is an ongoing private visit to China by Taiwan’s former President Ma Ying-jeou, who was scheduled to arrive in Shanghai on Wednesday. Ma’s presence, especially if complemented by a public engagement with a senior Chinese official, could provide sufficient political cover for a relatively muted response to events across the Pacific.

Taiwan’s foreign ministry on Tuesday described China’s repeated criticism as “increasingly absurd.” It said: “Even if the authoritarian government continues to expand and increase its coercion, Taiwan will not back down, and neither will U.S. friends who support Taiwan and U.S.-Taiwan relations.”

Tsai’s government has for years stressed the bipartisan nature of U.S. support for Taiwan. A closed-door meeting with congressional leaders could limit attempts to use her transit as part of any party political campaign, said Yeh-chung Lu, a professor and head of the Department of Diplomacy at National Chengchi University in Taipei.

Tsai herself was likely to use the occasion to demonstrate to Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s current vice president and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s would-be presidential successor, how best to earn America’s trust, Lu told Newsweek.

“For Tsai, it is also important to signal that she is willing to maintain this low-profile, non-provocation strategy vis-a-vis China. By making this trip to the United States, I think she will come back and convey a message to Lai that he needs to follow her strategy when it comes to dealing with China.”

Fruits of Tsai’s Labor

Tsai’s domestic approval rating of roughly 50 percent is virtually unheard of among Taiwan’s democratically elected presidents who have managed a second term, and yet she’s likely to leave office in May 2024 having not held a single round of formal dialogue with counterparts in Beijing.

Most in Taiwan would see that as unfortunate, but not all would blame her for failing to restore relations with Xi’s China, which is pushing the envelope with almost all of its neighbors in the East China Sea, the South China Sea, and along its disputed border with India.

Each Taiwanese leader this century has claimed to enjoy unprecedentedly close relations with Washington, though some were more convincing than others. In her final year as president, observers say, Tsai can point to the U.S.’s frequent arms sales to bolster Taiwan’s self-defense—$21 billion since 2019—and the Biden administration’s effective multilateralization of the long-standing status quo.

Two years ago this month, Biden and Yoshihide SugaJapan’s then prime minister, jointly called for “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” a first by leaders of the two countries in more than 50 years. The ripple effect of a potential cross-strait clash was made clear to other major economies in the West, which have been reaffirming the status quo in talks with American counterparts and—perhaps most crucially—even among themselves.

For Taiwan’s public and its traditionally China-dependent business community, there may soon be tangible gains, too, according to Lu: “In the months to come, the Biden administration could do something that requires political will to materialize to enhance and improve U.S.-Taiwan relations.”

One closely watched development, he said, was a possible agreement under the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade, a bilateral trade and investment framework that has produced months of talks since it was launched last June.

“There are a variety of ways in which the ties between Taiwan and the United States are deepening. These include the weapons sales and various forms of security cooperation as the U.S., Taiwan and others in the region have to think about how to respond and prepare for what are obvious escalations in the PRC’s campaign of military intrusion and intimidation,” said Diamond.

Also part of Tsai’s legacy, he said, was Taiwan’s elevated standing among other democracies in the world, almost all of which don’t have official ties with Taipei. It has led to a string of parliamentary and cabinet-level visits to the island from North America, Europe and Asia in recent years.

One striking example played out in public view on March 27 when Tsai welcomed a 150-member delegation led by Marketa Pekarova Adamova, the speaker of the Czech Parliament’s lower house, one day after Honduras ended an 82-year relationship with Taiwan in favor of China, leaving Taipei with just 13 formal diplomatic partners.

“This administration is committed to bringing Taiwan closer to the global community while also enabling the world to engage with Taiwan. And our determination to engage with the world will not be diminished by the pressures of expanding authoritarianism. Rather, we will remain calm and confident. We will neither yield nor provoke,” Tsai said last week before departing for Guatemala and Belize.

“The deepening architecture of consequential ties between Taiwan and democracies around the world—military, economic and so on—I think will still offer a safety net and some degree of compensation,” Diamond said.

Tsai arrived in Los Angeles late on Tuesday and was scheduled to reach Taiwan by Thursday, the same day bipartisan members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the committee’s Republican chair, are expected to arrive for their own three-day visit as part of a swing through East Asia.

As Tsai prepares to meet McCarthy and others on Wednesday, Washington and Beijing have already laid down their respective markers on the appropriateness scale. The former argues Tsai’s transits should be uneventful; the latter warns it could further degrade the already fragile relationship.

Here, it’s Taiwan’s oft-omitted agency that can complete the circle of reassurance between the three capitals, by demonstrating America’s support for Taipei while at the same time signaling its implicit understanding of Washington’s need to play it cool and Beijing’s own necessity to bluster.

Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about Taiwan? Let us know via worldnews@newsweek.com.