Letters from Taiwan

Xi Jinping - Chinese Vice President addressing the US-China Business Council

First, this is a not so veiled warning to the US to continue kow-towing to Beijing on all and any issues Beijing unilaterally decides constitute its ‘core interests’. It speaks volumes for how Beijing is controlling the debate by fabricating tensions with the US as a negotiating strategy.  

Second, notice that Xi’s only major public address was to a business council? That wasn’t an accident.  One of the major reasons that US foreign policy has in recent years failed Taiwan time and time again is because of pressure inside the Beltway from businesses and people directly invested in China.  China has successfully used trade to surround the US government on non-trade issues. “Shhh … don’t make trouble with China or we’ll lose our investments”.

Another strategy is pure misinformation:

… a Chinese press release said that US President Barack Obama “rejects” any call for Taiwan’s independence. The press release, issued on Wednesday in Washington by the Chinese delegation led by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平), China’s likely next leader, appeared to show that the US had changed its wording regarding its stance on Taiwan’s independence from “not support,” to “reject.”  According to a Xinhua report on Wednesday, Obama told Xi that the US “rejects any calls for Taiwan independence” and added that his country “wants to see the peaceful development of cross-strait relations move forward.”

Tosh.  They did this the last time a major Chinese General visited the US. He unilaterally claimed the US Government had changed their position only for his comments to be firmly denied later on.

That said, US Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican who chairs the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, put her finger right on the real problem - unneccessary US concessions emboldening China’s ‘peaceful’ uprising:

“From failing to bring up human rights issues in formal talks to caving to Chinese pressure not to sell new fighter aircraft to Taiwan, the administration’s China policy has consisted of one dangerous concession after another”

Maybe the US doesn’t believe that it will pay a price for this later.  Perhaps they are content with just the 23 million people of the country of Taiwan and the Tibetans, the Uighurs in East Turkestan and the Falong Gong paying this price for their trade-determined realpolitik.