Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned China to restrain its military operations around Taiwan in order to avoid the “unintended consequences” of a crisis following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit this week.
“I hope very much that Beijing will not manufacture a crisis or seek a pretext to increase its aggressive military activity,” Blinken said Thursday while traveling in Cambodia for a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. “We, and countries around the world, believe that escalation serves no one and could have unintended consequences that serve no one’s interests, including ASEAN members and including China.”
CHINA SIGNALS PLANS FOR GRADUALLY AND CONTINUOUSLY RAISING PRESSURE ON TAIWAN
Chinese forces have sprung into motion over this week in an ominous martial display designed to punish Taiwan for hosting Pelosi. Their maneuvers include the firing of ballistic missiles and naval drills that infringe on the waters controlled by the island democracy, in a preview of a potential blockade — prompting a flurry of dialogue between the United States and China, as well as between Taiwan and its “like-minded regional and neighboring countries,” per Taiwanese officials.
“China’s continued, deliberately heightened military threats, especially military activities conducted in busy international flight and shipping routes, have unilaterally undermined the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region, and impeded international freedom of navigation and normal global trade operations,” Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s office said in a Thursday bulletin.
The mainland regime also flew drones over an outlying Taiwanese island, according to Taiwanese officials and Chinese state media — a development that prompted Taiwanese forces to fire warning shots, according to Taiwan.
“We immediately fired flares to issue warnings and to drive them away. After that, they turned around. They came into our restricted area and that’s why we dispersed them,” Taiwanese Army Maj. Gen. Chang Zone-sung told Reuters. “We have a standard operating procedure. We will react if they come in.”
Western experts and former Chinese military officials generally have agreed that Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping wants to offer a show of force that signals severe displeasure over Pelosi’s visit but stops short of initiating a conflict. Some American analysts suspect that the mainland regime’s bellicose posture is designed to satisfy Chinese public opinion at a moment in which the Chinese population is frustrated with a number of other domestic issues related to the pandemic and the economy.
“Chinese leadership is always careful about public perceptions of the possibility of unrest … because once a protest starts in China, it’s hard to control where it goes,” Atlantic Council senior fellow John Culver, a former CIA senior intelligence officer, said Thursday during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Culver, the National Intelligence Council’s top analyst for East Asia from 2015 to 2018, suggested that “even the inklings of public protests about insufficient toughness in response to Taiwan and the United States” could spur Beijing to take even more theatrical actions, despite the risks that such steps might entail, in order to stamp out the sparks of discontent.
“Because with all these pressures and lack of outlets, when things rise to the top where it puts people in the street, it becomes an outlet for everything that’s been aggravating 1.4 billion people — or especially the hundreds of millions who live in major cities — for about five years now,” he said.
That line of reasoning might account for the taunt that Pelosi directed at the Chinese Communist dictator, as she brushed off the significance of China’s military threats.
“And that there are certain insecurities on the part of the president of China as to his own political situation that he’s rattling a saber, I don’t know,” Pelosi told reporters in Taipei. “It doesn’t really matter. What matters to us is that we salute the successes of Taiwan, we work together for the security of Taiwan, and we just take great lessons from the democracy of Taiwan.”
Blinken, speaking from Cambodia, paired his warning to the Chinese military with a statement affirming that “nothing has changed” about the U.S. position on the territorial dispute at the heart of the Taiwan tensions. This message was designed to allay Beijing’s apparent fear that the U.S. might explicitly challenge its unresolved claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, a strategically important island that has been home to the government that was defeated when the Chinese Communist revolutionaries seized power in 1949.
“The United States continues to have an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Blinken said. “We oppose any unilateral efforts to change the status quo, especially by force. We remain committed to our ‘one China’ policy, guided by our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Communiqués, and the Six Assurances.”
U.S. officials have been careful to strike a delicate balance on the Taiwan question over the decades since the establishment of diplomatic relations with the mainland regime. Presidents in both parties neither dispute nor endorse Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over the island, while federal law requires Washington to maintain a relationship with Taiwan that is technically unofficial, even though it includes arms sales designed to help the island fend off a communist invasion.
“The U.S. has not matched its words with deeds,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Wednesday. “It has been distorting, altering, obscuring, and hollowing out the one-China principle and trying to cross red lines and pushing the boundaries.”
Those complaints point to a growing danger of an eventual conflict, according to some American analysts.
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“So when you have the president say things like, ‘We don’t support Taiwan independence and we still adhere to our One China policy,’ — if that rings hollow in Beijing, then we are at a very difficult point,” CSIS’s Bonnie Glaser said Thursday morning. “So I think the Chinese took these set of actions … to shore up their red lines, to signal that future incremental actions by the United States — as they would say — to slice the salami, will be extremely dangerous and that the United States and Taiwan have to stop here, that we are sort of looking over the precipice.”
