Mass protests against Chinese President Xi Jinping’s attempt to encroach on Hong Kong’s judicial system have fortified neighboring Taiwan and other U.S. allies, according to lawmakers and analysts.
“It’s at least a tactical victory,” Patrick Cronin, the Hudson Institute’s resident scholar for Asia-Pacific security issues, told the Washington Examiner. “In the larger U.S.-China policy, it’s a protracted political war with Xi Jinping.”
The struggle between Washington and Beijing is unfolding across a variety of interconnected theaters. The Chinese technology giants that U.S. officials regard as spy threats provide the regime with high-tech tools for domestic repression. China has long regarded Taiwan as its property, but Xi sees dominating the island as crucial to enhancing his regime’s ability to project power in the Indo-Pacific region.
“They have global designs,” New Jersey congressman Chris Smith, a Republican on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, told the Washington Examiner. “This is about hegemony on their part for the region and the world.”
Those ambitions could be hampered by pressure closer to home, if the Chinese Communist party can’t bring an end to decades-old power struggles. Xi has consolidated power on the mainland in recent years while asserting sovereignty over vital shipping lanes in the South China Sea and using a controversial economic development program to expand influence around the world.
At the same time, he has chipped away at the semi-autonomy Hong Kong has enjoyed since the United Kingdom relinquished sovereignty over its former colony in 1997 and pushed to gain influence over Taiwan, the island refuge of the government overthrown in the 1949 Communist Revolution, which has emerged as a functioning democracy even as Beijing insists that it is a renegade province.
Xi reiterated in January that Taiwan “must and will be” reunified with mainland China, calling it “an inevitable requirement for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.” In that same address, he invoked Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model to indicate how Taiwan could be governed from afar.
The millions of people who turned out in the streets in defiance of police tear gas to denounce a bill that would allow China to take custody of people charged with a crime in Hong Kong provided a vivid warning that Taiwanese people should not accept those terms.
“That courage is like a beacon for Taiwan,” Smith told the Washington Examiner. “The idea of being more complicit with Beijing becomes less desirable and less easy to do.”
The Hong Kong controversy is pushing Taiwan’s political leaders to take a more hawkish position against Beijing, as the island’s campaign season in full swing. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has been warning against a “one country, two systems” arrangement for months, but the protests have forced even her pro-China political opponents to take a hard-line position against Xi’s plan.
“It’s sort of a loss of face for him to have both [major political parties in Taiwan] dismissing, almost in perpetuity, the relevance of ‘one country, two systems,’ to Taiwan,” Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “So this has a profoundly negative impact on China’s interests.”
And that has a positive influence on U.S. interests, according to Cronin, because Taiwan’s independence keeps China’s People’s Liberation Army preoccupied. The physical location of the island — east of the mainland, south of Japan, and north of the Philippines — means that unification would be a boon for Xi’s military planners.
“If they have to make a bad deal for reunification, this will fundamentally change the ability for the United States and its allies to defend our interests,” Cronin said. “You get Taiwan and you have really unimpeded access to the South China Sea, and that gives you tremendous ability to project Chinese military power into both the Indian and the Pacific Ocean.”
The U.S. Navy has sent ships through the Taiwan Strait eight times in less than a year, saying each time it demonstrates “the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.” Last week, Canada had two warships transit the strait, becoming the latest Western country to send a message to Beijing.
American presidents of both parties have sold weapons to Taiwan for decades, in part to help deter China from using force, despite not officially recognizing the island as an independent country.
“The fear would be that they wouldn’t fire a shot, someday, if the intimidation got so high or a complicit government, fully complicit, were to get freely elected in Taiwan and … invite them in,” Smith said.
That might be less likely after Hong Kong protesters succeeded this month in forcing the government to suspend plans to pass the extradition bill. But Xi won’t abandon his ambitions in Taiwan or Hong Kong.
“Their designs don’t change,” Smith said, predicting that Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed leaders will revive the extradition bill eventually. “This is just a part of it all. If they back up for a couple weeks — three weeks, four weeks, a month — they come right back.”
