When US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flew into Taiwan on an Air Force jet, she became the highest-ranking American official in 25 years to visit the self-ruled island. China instantly announced military maneuvers in retaliation, even as Taiwanese officials welcomed her. China said over 100 warplanes and 10 warships have taken part in the live-fire […]
When US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flew into Taiwan on an Air Force jet, she became the highest-ranking American official in 25 years to visit the self-ruled island.
China instantly announced military maneuvers in retaliation, even as Taiwanese officials welcomed her. China said over 100 warplanes and 10 warships have taken part in the live-fire military drills surrounding Taiwan in the past two days, while announcing mainly symbolic sanctions against Pelosi and her family. It declared stopping all dialogue with the United States on major issues, including crucial climate cooperation between the two that led to the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord.
A joint US-China deal to fight climate change struck by Chinese President Xi Jinping and then-President Barack Obama in November, 2014, has frequently been hailed as a turning point that led to the breakthrough Paris agreement in which nearly every nation in the world pledged to try to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases. Seven years later, in Glasgow, another US-China deal helped smooth over bumps to another international climate deal. China and the US are the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 climate polluters, together producing nearly 40% of all fossil-fuel emissions.
China’s actions come ahead of a key congress of the ruling Communist Party later this year at which President Xi is expected to obtain a third five-year term as party leader. With the economy stumbling, the party has stoked nationalism and issued near-daily attacks on the government of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, which refuses to recognise Taiwan as part of China.
China has accused the Biden administration of an attack on Chinese sovereignty, although Pelosi is head of the legislative branch of government and US President Joe Biden had no authority to prevent her visit. White House spokesman John Kirby called China’s military actions a “concern to Taiwan, to us, and to our partners around the world.”
Why did Pelosi go to Taiwan?
Pelosi has made a mission over decades of showing support for embattled democracy movements. Those include a trip in 1991 to Tiananmen Square, where she and other lawmakers unrolled a small banner supporting democracy.
She led a congressional delegation to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in the spring. “We must stand by Taiwan,” she said in an opinion piece published by The Washington Post on her arrival in Taiwan. She cited the commitment that the US made to a democratic Taiwan under a 1979 law. “It is essential that America and our allies make clear that we never give in to autocrats,” she wrote.
However, the Biden administration, and Pelosi, say the United States remains committed to its ‘one-China policy.’ But Beijing sees official American contact with Taiwan as encouragement to make the island’s decades-old de facto independence permanent, a step US leaders say they don’t support.
One China Policy
Taiwan was a colony of the Netherlands for about 40 years in the early to mid-17th century and was subsequently independent again for about two decades. China gained control in the late 17th century. In 1895, Japan acquired Taiwan following the first Sino-Japanese War but after its defeat in World War II, Taiwan was returned to Nationalist Chinese control in 1945.
Taiwan, an island of 24 million people about 160 km off China’s southeast coast, separated from China in 1949, when the Communist Party won the 1946-49 civil war on the mainland against Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who fled across the strait with his supporters to install the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan.
Both sides say they are one country but disagree over which government is entitled to national leadership. They have no official relations but are linked by billions of dollars of trade and investment.
The US switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but maintains informal relations with the island. Washington is obligated by the Taiwan Relations Act, a federal law, to see that Taiwan has the means to defend itself. Washington’s “One China policy” says it takes no position on the status of the two sides but wants their dispute resolved peacefully. Beijing promotes an alternative “One China principle” that says they are one country and the Communist Party is its leader.
Taiwan residents overwhelmingly favour maintaining the status quo of de facto independence and reject China’s demands that the island unify with the mainland under Communist control.
The Chinese response to Pelosi’s visit has also sparked concerns about a new Taiwan Strait crisis, similar to that of 1995-96, when China held threatening military exercises and bracketed the island with missile strikes in waters north and south of its main ports. China has been increasing both diplomatic and military pressure in recent years. It cut off all contact with Taiwan’s government in 2016 after President Tsai Ing-wen refused to endorse its claim that the island and mainland together make up a single Chinese nation, with Communist Beijing the sole legitimate government.
“From Beijing’s perspective, US support for Taiwan has remained a – if not the — major obstacle to achieving unification. Following the outbreak of the Korean War, the US put a stop to any possible invasion plans by Beijing by deploying the 7th fleet in the Taiwan Strait. Later, in 1954, it entered into a defence treaty with Taiwan. The US did eventually terminate that treaty after establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979. But the US Congress responded by passing the Taiwan Relations Act, which mandated the US to provide Taiwan defensive weapons and “maintain the capacity of the United States” to basically defend Taiwan,” wrote Todd Hall, Professor, Director of the China Centre, University of Oxford.
Beijing has remained acutely sensitive to any actions that would suggest Washington is seeking to inject any “officiality” into the relationship, as it believes this would constitute an erosion of US commitments to China over the status of Taiwan. This was a key issue at stake in the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1995-96, when the US permitted then Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui to visit his alma mater, Cornell University.
“There has been a significant pace of arms sales approvals, a series of statements from Biden about defending Taiwan. The US government has repeatedly declared that its basic stance has not changed, but for Beijing all this suggests that – in the words of China’s foreign minister Wang Yi – Washington is surreptitiously seeking to “hollow out” its policy,” according to him.
Guarded World
As usual the world seems to be divided. Pelosi’s visit has been condemned by Beijing’s partners. Some have chosen to remain fence sitters. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called China’s military exercises a “grave problem” that threatens regional peace and security. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose country’s ties with China have nosedived in recent years, declined to comment specifically on Pelosi’s visit, but said, “Our position on Taiwan is clear. We don’t want to see any unilateral change to the status quo and we’ll continue to work with partners to promote peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
Chinese ally North Korea used the visit to accuse the US of being “the root cause of harassed peace and security in the region”. Russia — another Chinese ally and whose invasion of Ukraine has fueled concerns over China’s own threat to annex Taiwan by force — called the visit a “clear provocation, which is in line with the United States’ aggressive policy aimed at comprehensively containing China.” “It’s an aspiration to prove to everyone their impunity and show lawlessness. ‘It’s my way only,’ something like this,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
With Agencies inputs
China in seas and skies
China’s exercises, involving warplanes, navy ships and missile strikes in six zones surrounding Taiwan, are considered the largest and most threatening toward Taiwan since Beijing launched missiles into waters north and south of the island in 1995 and 1996.
China regularly sends warplanes into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone and has at times crossed the middle line of the Taiwan Strait dividing the sides, but has stopped short of direct incursions or attacks that could spark a regional conflict.
Chip Powered
An aspect of Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan that has been largely overlooked is her meeting with Mark Lui, chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Pelosi’s trip coincided with US efforts to convince TSMC — the world’s largest chip manufacturer, on which the US is heavily dependent — to establish a manufacturing base in the US and to stop making advanced chips for Chinese companies.
Taiwan’s autonomy has become a vital geopolitical interest for the US because of the island’s dominance of the semiconductor manufacturing market. Semiconductors are integral to all the networked devices. They also have advanced military applications.
Taiwan’s position in semiconductor manufacturing is a bit like Saudi Arabia’s status in OPEC. TSMC has a 53% market share of the global foundry market (factories contracted to make chips designed in other countries). Other Taiwan-based manufacturers claim a further 10% of the market.
As a result, the Biden administration’s 100-Day Supply Chain Review Report says, “The United States is heavily dependent on a single company — TSMC — for producing its leading-edge chips.” The fact that only TSMC and Samsung (South Korea) can make the most advanced semiconductors (five nanometres in size) “puts at risk the ability to supply current and future [US] national security and critical infrastructure needs.”
This means that China’s long-term goal of reunifying with Taiwan is now more threatening to US interests. In the 1971 Shanghai Communique and the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the US recognised that people in both mainland China and Taiwan believed that there was “One China” and that they both belonged to it. But for the US, it is unthinkable that TSMC could one day be in territory controlled by Beijing.
So the US has been trying to attract TSMC to the US to increase domestic chip production capacity. In 2021, the company bought a site in Arizona on which to build a US foundry. This is scheduled to be completed in 2024.
The US Congress has just passed the Chips and Science Act, which provides US$52 billion (£43 billion) in subsidies to support semiconductor manufacturing in the US. But companies will only receive Chips Act funding if they agree not to manufacture advanced semiconductors for Chinese companies. This means that TSMC and others may well have to choose between doing business in China and in the US because the cost of manufacturing in the US is deemed to be too high without government subsidies.
This is all part of a broader “tech war” between the US and China, in which the US is aiming to constrain China’s technological development and prevent it from exercising a global tech leadership role. In 2020, the Trump administration imposed crushing sanctions on the Chinese tech giant Huawei that were designed to cut the company off from TSMC, on which it was reliant for the production of high-end semiconductors needed for its 5G infrastructure business. The sanctions are still in place.
Highlights
By Maria Ryan
(Associate Professor in US History, University of Nottingham. theconversation.com)