Tougher US stand on Taiwan worries China

On May 5, the US Department of State, in its Factsheet on Taiwan, made few subtle but important changes signalling a changed US policy towards Taiwan, which invited a sharp reaction from Beijing. The most important change was deletion of an earlier wording, which stated, “The US does not support Taiwan’s independence”; it also excised another important sentence, which read, “it acknowledged the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”.

China’s reaction was quick as it slammed the USA saying “political manipulation will not succeed in changing the status quo in the Taiwan Strait” and the People’s Republic of China was the sole legal government representing the whole country.

The Biden administration’s action represented a shift from its earlier stance that the USA did not support Taiwan’s independence. There were a number of reasons for this departure. First, there was a groundswell of opinion building in the US Congress and the government against China’s aggressive and intimidatory tactics against Taiwan and other allies and partners such as Japan, the Philippines, Australia and India. The wider consensus was that a firm message needed to be sent to China to prevent it from taking any adventurist action against Taiwan, which could force the USA’s military intervention in view of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Second, Japan had got worried by the continuous Chinese aggressive forays off the Senkaku islands in East China Sea and China’s rapid military modernisation; it felt that China’s control of Taiwan would bring its forces within 100 km of the Japanese territory and threaten its key maritime routes supplying oil and other goods. Japan was, therefore, insisting that the USA must send a strong message to Beijing that its forced occupation of Taiwan would be unacceptable and invite a strong counter response from them.

During a visit to Japan on May 23, President Biden said that the USA would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan if Beijing moved to seize the island forcibly, a sharp departure from the USA’s decades-old policy of “strategic ambiguity”. China was alarmed, though the American officials said later that the US policy on Taiwan had not changed.

The US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the key Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on June 11 that China was getting more “coercive” in its territorial claims and Washington was committed to ensure that its allies had the right capabilities to “deter its aggression”. The USA sought a region free of aggression and bullying and a world that respected territorial integrity and independence of small countries. The rule-based international order mattered as much in the Indo-Pacific as it did in Europe.

Austin told his Chinese counterpart that there had been a steady increase in China’s “provocative and destabilising military activities near Taiwan”. The Chinese military aircraft flew near Taiwan in record numbers nearly on a daily basis. The USA was committed to its One China Policy and opposed unilateral change to the status quo of the Taiwan Strait but also did not support Taiwan’s independence. Austin complained of an “alarming increase in unsafe and unprofessional encounters between the Chinese military and those of other nations”. Australia had earlier complained that a Chinese J-16 fighter jet had performed dangerous manoeuvres close to its surveillance plane over the South China Sea in late May 2022.

The USA and Japan have decided to boost military and economic ties with the South and East Asian countries. The USA’s 2023 defence budget includes $6.1 billion for its Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a series of investments to upgrade military information sharing, training and support to augment regional partnerships to counter China.

The keynote speech of the Japanese PM Fumio Kishida on June 10 at the Shangri-La Dialogue was inundated with veiled barbs against China saying that it had made unilateral attempts to change the status quo in violation of the international law and not respected the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. He vowed to strengthen his country’s military posture and cooperation with allies given Asia’s “increasingly severe” security environment.

Kishida made it clear that Japan would boost its defence budget and reinforce its defence capabilities including possible acquisition of “counter strike capabilities”. It would augment the maritime law enforcement abilities, cyber security, digital and green initiatives and economic security of partner countries.

After a 2-plus-2 meeting of the foreign and defence ministers in January, 2022, the USA and Japan agreed to work together to “deter and if necessary respond to China’s destabilising activities in the region”. This would include collaboration between the scientists of the two countries on emerging defence-related issues including countering hypersonic threats, space-based capabilities and manufacturing advanced 2 nanometre chips used in quantum computers, high-end smartphones and other equipment.

A US military planner, Colin Kohl, the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defence Policy recently warned Beijing that should it undertake some act of aggression against Taiwan, the global response would be closer to that taken against Russia.

While continuing its aggressive activities against Taiwan, China has shown readiness to continue its dialogue with the USA on political and military issues. Both countries are taking steps to find areas of confluence and overlapping interests. Shaken by the progress and uncertainties of the Ukraine war, China appears equally keen to postpone a military conflict on the Taiwan issue as long as the latter does not make any moves to declare independence from Beijing.

China wants to utilise the existing interregnum to boost its military capabilities to a point where it could prevail over the USA. Whether and when that would happen is something speculative for the future as the USA, Japan and their allies are boosting their own military and technological capabilities and it is questionable if Beijing would ever be able to overtake them in the future. So a more likely scenario is of continuation of status quo on Taiwan.