Chinese officials have suspended a series of military dialogues designed to minimize the risk of conflict with the United States amid an uproar over the visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to Taiwan.
That announcement from Beijing came hours after Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed that U.S. warships will continue to chart their “standard” courses through the Taiwan Strait despite a surge in Chinese military operations asserting Beijing’s sovereignty in the area. Blinken accused China of taking the Pelosi trip as “a pretext to increase provocative military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait,” in furtherance of its desire to bring the island under the mainland regime’s control.
“I’m guessing we will wait a bit and not seek to escalate,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said. “This is sort of the U.S. playbook whenever China does something of this sort. China will announce or suggest that it’s adopting new policies on the South China Sea or East China Sea, and the U.S. always says … it’s not going to affect our behavior.”
China announced it would suspend diplomatic and interpersonal exchanges on a range of topics that President Joe Biden’s team has hoped to insulate from the wider tensions with Beijing — even climate change and cooperation against drug cartels. Blinken, for his part, couched the continuation of the U.S. military presence as an exercise in standard operating procedure, which he contrasted with China’s posture of late.
“We’ve seen how Beijing has attempted to change the status quo on Taiwan for some time,” Blinken told reporters Friday in Cambodia. “Now they’ve taken dangerous acts to a new level. … The fact is the speaker’s visit was peaceful. There is no justification for this extreme, disproportionate, and escalatory military response.”
The allegation that Chinese Communist Party officials are “chang[ing] the status quo” is a charged one, given the delicate diplomatic balance that has allowed the U.S. to have a government-to-government relationship with Beijing and minimize the risk of a war over Taiwan.
“Our countermeasures are necessary as a warning to the provocateurs and as a step to uphold our sovereignty and security,” Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Friday. “The U.S., as the provocateur and the one that caused the crisis, should and must assume the entire responsibility for it.”
China’s retaliation includes the cancellation of “China-US theater commanders talks, China-US defense policy coordination talks (DPCT) and China-US military maritime consultative agreement (MMCA) meetings” that exist in part to minimize the risk of stumbling into a conflict, according to state-run Global Times.
The acrimony signaled by the suspension of those dialogues was manifest in the East Asia Summit in Cambodia, where Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi reportedly walked out of a meeting in a show of contempt for Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa, whose government has joined Western powers in condemning China’s response to the Pelosi visit. Chinese forces also fired missiles that reportedly fell in waters near Japan, which drew a protest from Tokyo and a rebuke from Blinken.
“We’ll take further steps to demonstrate our commitment to the security of our allies in the region, including Japan,” Blinken said. “We stand in strong solidarity with our partner and ally Japan, including with regard to the very dangerous actions that China has taken by firing off these missiles, including five that, according to Japan, landed in its exclusive economic zone.”
The uproar points to the deeper distrust between Washington and Beijing as both sides regard the other as taking dangerous steps with respect to the status of the disputed island — making Pelosi’s trip a flashpoint for a controversy that some Biden administration officials had hoped to avoid.
“This is not just to take punitive actions against Taiwan. It really is to change the status quo,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Bonnie Glaser said this week. “I think that, perhaps, China signaled its intentions when it said that it does not view Taiwan Strait as international waters. So I think some people saw this coming.”
Chinese officials have emphasized their assertion that the waters between Taiwan and the mainland are subject to Beijing in order to challenge the propriety of U.S. military operations in the area, as Chinese state media has made plain.
“We’ll continue to conduct standard air and maritime transits through the Taiwan Strait, consistent with our long-standing approach to working with allies and partners to uphold freedom of navigation and overflight, which has enabled the region’s prosperity for many decades,” Blinken said. “Almost half the global container fleet and nearly 90% of the world’s largest ships passed through the straits this year. That’s just one reason why these actions by Beijing are so disruptive.”
His tone sharpened this week in comparison to the days prior to Pelosi’s visit, when U.S. officials sought to persuade China that the trip did not signal a revision of U.S. government relations with Taiwan. Chinese officials have scoffed at those attempted assurances, claiming that the “upgraded substantive exchanges” between Taipei and Washington present a historic challenge to Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over the island.
“The world must never allow the U.S. to see itself as a ‘world policeman’ or an ‘international judge’ and continue to treat other sovereign nations like George Floyd as if the U.S. can just bully and strangle them at will,” Hua said. “This is a fight against hegemony, against interference, and against secession.”
The U.S. has never endorsed the mainland regime’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, the island that became the last holdout of the government overthrown during the Chinese Communist Revolution. The U.S. Embassy to China was located in Taipei until 1979, when former President Jimmy Carter cut official ties with Taiwanese authorities in order to establish full diplomatic relations with China. Yet Congress, in parallel, passed legislation requiring the U.S. to maintain a close unofficial relationship with Taiwan, including through the provision of military hardware to defend the island from a Chinese invasion.
“The United States has conveyed to the PRC consistently and repeatedly that we do not seek and will not provoke a crisis,” Blinken said. “We don’t want unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We do not support Taiwan independence. We expect cross-strait differences to be resolved peacefully, not coercively or by force.”
