中文
The White House and a stop sign in Washington D.C., the United States, January 12, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]
By Zhou Wenxing
The Chinese mainland announced the staging of new military drills near waters of Taiwan region on August 15 as a response to an unannounced visit to the island by a five-member U.S. Congressional delegation. This provocative visit has further fueled the rising tensions brought by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking American official to set foot on the island in 25 years.
More analysts are now depicting U.S. policy on the Taiwan question as a failure. However, both President Joe Biden and the U.S. will encounter more failures in the near future should he fail to refrain more members of Congress from provoking the Chinese mainland.
Biden's ambitions to combat climate change could be thwarted. Fighting against climate change has long been one of the key agendas for Biden and his Democratic colleagues. Since his inauguration in January 2021, addressing the climate crisis has seemed to be the sole issue that Washington and Beijing could cooperate on. The two countries have already achieved substantial progress on this global issue.
But the hard-won cooperative relationship came to an end as the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to suspend talks with the U.S. side on the issue in response to Pelosi's visit. Beijing is not threatening Washington at the expense of worsening climate change, as some may argue. American leaders must respect China's core interests if they expect cooperation from their Chinese counterparts.
In addition, the growing activism of the U.S. Congress on the Taiwan question makes a potential conflict between the U.S. and China more likely. Regardless of the Chinese government's repeated articulation of its grave concerns and firm opposition, Pelosi visited Taiwan, leaving few options for Beijing and forcing the latter to conduct large-scale military exercises with live-fire drills encircling the Taiwan island. The latest visit by the five-member Congressional delegation forced Beijing, again, to take proper countermeasures.
The escalatory tensions across the Taiwan Strait might spark a potential conflict and the China-U.S. Theater Commanders Talk, Defense Policy Coordination Talks (DPCT), and Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) meetings were canceled as part of countermeasures against Pelosi's visit. The lack of dialogue and conflict management both between the two sides of the strait and that between China and the U.S. just make a conflict more likely. But a conflict between two nuclear powers serves no one's interests.
U.S. lawmakers' reckless moves have led to a sequence of consequences. But it is Biden who will take all these consequences, which would have been avoided if he had successfully dissuaded Pelosi from visiting Taiwan.
Instead of doing that, Biden provided substantive assistance for Pelosi. He expressed support indirectly by responding to Pelosi's trip to Taiwan as "her decision." National Security Council spokesman John Kirby further defended Biden's position, stating that the president "made clear that Congress is an independent branch of government." Four U.S. Navy warships were then deployed in the east of Taiwan during Pelosi's trip under authorization of Biden.
But this logic has obvious pitfalls. As one of the three branches of the U.S. federal government, Congress's efforts to break away from the one-China consensus reached by the American and Chinese governments in the 1970s and 1980s are illegal. The Biden administration was just cooperating with Congress to pressure Beijing in the name of preserving the so-called independence of executive and legislative branches.
In fact, the administration could dissuade both Democratic and Republican lawmakers from involving themselves in the Taiwan policy. For example, former U.S. President Bill Clinton succeeded in blocking the passage of the Senate-drafted Taiwan Security Enhancement Act in late 1999 via mobilizing the business community and lobbying on Capitol Hill.
Biden and other American leaders could draw at least two lessons from the recent tensions across the strait.
First, meddling with China's internal affairs is not the right way to compete. One main reason that Beijing refuses to accept the concept of "strategic competition" lies in its belief that Washington is not competing on an equal footing. But China has definitely no interest in intervening in America's domestic issues. Viewing the Taiwan question as a tool to outcompete China would only sow seeds of mutual distrust in the deteriorating China-U.S. ties, engender instability in the region, and therefore undercut America's interests. The Biden administration must exclude the Taiwan question from the ill-managed competition with China.
More crucially, the Biden administration should invest more efforts to cage the growing Congressional activism on the Taiwan question. No one should expect that China will make compromise on this domestic question. But the tendency of lawmakers' progressive involvement in it would lead to mounting tensions that may spark a conflict with a rising China.
To this end, Biden should dissuade members of Congress from visiting Taiwan, as more lawmakers are believed to be planning. He should also work hard to oppose Congress's passage of the bipartisan Taiwan Policy Act of 2022, a bill dedicated to overhauling U.S. policy on the Taiwan question and bolstering U.S. connections with Taiwan. For the sake of both his party and U.S. interests, Biden should act soon.
Zhou Wenxing is assistant professor at the School of International Studies, Nanjing University and former Asia Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School, Harvard University. He writes extensively on comparative politics and international relations, with an emphasis on the Taiwan question and China-U.S. relations.
