The immediate danger to Taiwan shouldn’t be exaggerated

Editorial: While the brinkmanship, hostile language and wider collapse in Sino-American relations is an obvious threat to stability, the encirclement exercise is part of a pattern of response

The Chinese alignment with Russia over Ukraine is another, more substantive, focus for resentment (AFP/Getty)

About the best that can be said for China’s dangerous high-profile military exercises around Taiwan – explicitly designed to demonstrate the ease with which the breakaway island can be “sealed off” – is that at least they are not the real thing.

Indeed, despite the vast show of strength over a three-day period – at least 70 Chinese aircraft, including Su-30 fighters, H-6 bombers, 11 ships and an aircraft carrier – there remains no immediate threat of an invasion.

That said, the brinkmanship, hostile language and wider collapse in Sino-American relations is an obvious threat to stability in a region that already has Kim Jong-un randomly firing missiles, seemingly to remind everyone that he’s still a player.

France’s President Macron, accompanied by Ursula von der Leyen for the European Union, took the diplomatic initiative with a state visit to China last week. He was correct in calling for a reset in relations and something of a realignment in global politics; but as soon as the presidential jet had left Chinese airspace, his hosts wasted no time in getting on with their programme of intimidation.

Territorial disputes, incursions, brinkmanship, military manoeuvres but, above all, lack of communications and understanding – and the mistakes that follow – are how wars break out. The strange affair of the Chinese balloons, and how rapidly they escalated tensions, is proof that there isn’t much trust left between Washington and Beijing.

The Chinese alignment with Russia over Ukraine is another, more substantive, focus for resentment. China’s commitment to reunification with Taiwan, the island that broke away in 1949, is real, passionate and absolute. Few things are more likely to enrage a Chinese official than any suggestion that Taiwan is or should be an independent state.

For them it is the renegade base of the old Chiang Kai-shek nationalists, who fled from Mao Zedong and spent many decades arguing that they remained the legitimate government of the whole of China – and not an independent state – until the pretence became absurd, the People’s Republic was de facto recognised by the US and took its seat at the UN, albeit as late as the 1970s.

President Xi is even more committed than any of his predecessors, perhaps even including Mao, to restoring Chinese territorial integrity, and indeed expanding its claims and its sphere of influence. Hence the dismantling of the “one nation, two systems” settlement in Hong Kong, and the paranoiac oppression of the Uyghur Muslims.

The immediate danger to Taiwan shouldn’t be exaggerated, however. The encirclement exercise is part of a pattern of response, triggered when America is deemed to have committed a diplomatic outrage. In this case, it was the speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, entertaining the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-Wen, in California last week.

He’s not a member of the government, and he’s a Republican, but he holds high rank in the US pecking order, and therefore appears to be offering some kind of recognition.

In the words of the Chinese government, the McCarthy-Tsai meeting, which was of no diplomatic standing and was more about Republican political posing, sent a “seriously erroneous signal to Taiwanese separatist independence forces”. Such a blunder required a reaction, and so it came, predictably enough.

China is also aware that, for all its military resources, an invasion of Taiwan would be logistically difficult, such is the state of the island’s defences – and some 300,000 well-equipped troops plus 3 million “civilian warriors”.

President Joe Biden has reinforced that deterrent effect by categorically stating that the US would fight for Taiwan – thus going beyond military assistance to putting US forces in danger’s way. War is not currently in the interests of China, economically or strategically.

And China also knows that such unprovoked aggression might invite the condemnation of the emerging powers, such as India, Brazil and South Africa, it is seeking to bring into a loose partnership.

In recent times, China has involved itself in trying to broker peace in Yemen and Ukraine, even engineering an unlikely rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and that is the image it prefers.

Even if Taiwan is a constant irritation, an echo of past colonial-era Western partitions, and a standing challenge to the authority of the Chinese Communist Politburo, everyone knows it’s no more a threat to mainland China than Ukraine was to Russia.

And the diplomatic, economic and military consequences of that haven’t exactly boosted Russian prestige and prosperity. China is still formally committed to reunification through peaceful means.

As President Macron has suggested, even a Europe with “strategic autonomy” can’t do much to help Taiwan, though his note of appeasement was probably not helpful in restraining Beijing from throwing its considerable weight around (and it sounds like some sour grapes over being marginalised in the Aukus pact).

However, for now, the main burden for de-escalation has to fall to President Xi and President Biden, and they must know it. It is a tragedy that secretary of state Antony Blinken’s visit to China was cancelled during the balloon crisis, but sooner or later the two sides will have to talk through their differences and recognise their huge mutual economic dependence.

Had it not been for China’s recent vandalism of it, the Hong Kong model might have served well as a template for Chinese reunification. Something like it still could, though, especially if Hong Kongers’ freedoms were restored. It would certainly help dispel the Chinese fantasy that it is being encircled by its Western enemies.

If both sides wish to avoid war, and these constantly destabilising military exercises, then the present largest source of grievance, the status of Taiwan, has to be neutralised. Until then America and China need better diplomatic back-channels, and simply a habit of dialogue to understand each other’s concerns.

Another bold attempt at detente by President Biden, one as ambitious as President Nixon’s opening of relations a half-century ago, is the first step. It should come long before the US elections and Taiwan’s 75th birthday next year heighten tensions again.