Earlier this month, Chinese Premier Li Qiang (NPC) raised concerns in Taiwan for something he did not say.
The premier repeated that China would push for reunification with Taiwan, but conspicuously omitted the word “peaceful” — the formulation Beijing traditionally uses to demonstrate its supposedly benign intentions toward Taiwan and its purported adherence to international law. It is also intended to convey China’s long-suffering patience with an allegedly wayward “province” that refuses to submit to the beneficent rule of the Chinese Communist Party.
Beijing’s aggressive moves toward Taiwan have escalated in recent years, reaching a menacing crescendo after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August, 2022. But, as in the past, Beijing stopped just short in the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis of an actual kinetic attack on Taiwan.
The threat to use force is always there, however, and was elevated as a formal “legal” commitment by China’s Anti-Secession Law in 2005: “[S]hould possibilities for a peaceful reunification be completely exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means … to protect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” — even though the People’s Republic of China never ruled Taiwan.
Now that Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party has won an unprecedented third four-year term under the leadership of independence-leaning Lai Ching-te, Beijing may have concluded that the prospects for “peaceful” unification with Taiwan have been exhausted and the use of force is now necessary to achieve its expansionist goal.
Henry Kissinger warned Taiwan in 2007 that “China will not wait forever” and Xi picked up the theme when he took power in 2014, declaring, “The Taiwan question cannot be passed from one generation to another.”
Dropping the word “peaceful” may or may not be significant by itself. But it is accompanied by something that may be more meaningful and more ominous: a lengthy conversation between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Xi and Putin have met or talked by phone several times since their meeting in February 2022, where they declared their “no limits strategic partnership” and pledged mutual support for their respective claims on Taiwan and Ukraine — serving as a green light for the Russian invasion of Ukraine weeks later.
Xi says they have met 42 times over the years. But their latest conversation may prove to be the most significant. Could it be Xi calling in his chits from Putin as payback for all the diplomatic and material support China has provided Russia for its war against Ukraine?
Washington is supposedly considering imposing secondary sanctions on China for collaboration with Russia, precipitating a bitter complaint from Foreign Minister Wang Yi: “The means of suppressing China are constantly being reinvented. The list of universal sanctions is ever-expanding, and the fabricated accusations have reached an unimaginably absurd level.”
Xi may well have told Putin that China has paid a high price for standing by Russia’s side and he now expects reciprocity for any move China decides to make on Taiwan. “According to Chinese state media, Xi conveyed to Putin the importance of close strategic coordination between the two countries in order to defend their respective sovereignty, security, and development interests. Xi also stressed the need to firmly oppose external interference in their internal affairs.”
China is using the Xi-Putin exchanges to telegraph its serious intentions regarding Taiwan, perhaps hoping to intimidate President Biden during a fraught election year where he and Donald Trump are neck-and-neck in the polls. The strategy seems to be working.
After U.S.-China relations reached a nadir following the Chinese spy balloon incident and escalating military exercises around Taiwan, Biden and his diplomatic and national security teams launched a frantic full-court press to halt the slide and resume bilateral discussions on ways to reduce tensions. Each side had a long list of complaints. Aside from the aforesaid Chinese grievance about economic sanctions, Taiwan was at or near the top of each side’s list.
China wants the U.S. to stop encouraging the pro-independence inclinations of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party by, among other things, providing weapons to Taiwan notwithstanding the explicit provision of the Taiwan Relations Act and sending smaller warships through the Taiwan Strait.
Washington wants China to stop threatening Taiwan with its expanding naval and air exercises that increasingly encroach on Taiwan’s territorial sovereignty by crossing the once mutually respected midline of the Strait and entering Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone.
Biden may be tempted to trade a drawdown of U.S. Freedom of Navigation Operations in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea for a commensurate reduction of China’s threatening exercises around Taiwan. But that mutual restraint would be illusory, based on a false equivalence in the two sides’ behavior.
China’s aggressive actions violate international law and norms, while U.S. FONOPS are perfectly consistent with the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention. Though the U.S. has not formally signed UNCLOS, it observes its freedom of navigation provisions. China, by contrast, is a signatory but flagrantly violates its rules when it interferes with and endangers other nations’ use of the oceans.
Since the Nixon administration, Washington has already been restraining its Naval operations in the Taiwan Strait by keeping its carriers out of those international waters because of China’s objections. Only one carrier battle group has made the passage since the 1996 confrontation and that was in 2007. Since it is still relative peacetime, Washington needs to resume normal operations in the strait to deter further Chinese adventurism in the region.
Hopefully, Biden is not whispering to Xi what Obama told Putin in 2012, that he will be “more flexible” if he is reelected. That led to Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine and its collusion with Bashir Assad’s war crimes in Syria.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.