US-China-Taiwan in the Age of Trump and Biden

Towards a Nationalist Strategy

Dean P. Chen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032261225
• eBook ISBN: 9781000614497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores U.S.-Taiwan-China relations during both the Trump and Biden administrations, revealing how policy changes under both presidents have impacted Washington's decades-long strategic policy framework for Cross-Strait Relations.

By tracing the continuities and changes of U.S. Strategic ambiguity and One-China Policy framework between the Trump and Biden administrations, the book assesses how the foreign policy prism, through which U.S. leaders view China and Taiwan, has experienced a distinct alteration and subsequently led to a policy adjustment. Utilising a wide range of documents and primary material, such as White House documents (ranging from the Clinton to the Biden administrations) in conjunction with interviews with Taiwan officials, this volume brings a detailed portrait of past, present, and potential future U.S.-Taiwan-China relations. Moreover, it provides a succinct examination of U.S. foreign policy traditions such as internationalism, nationalism, and multilateral nationalism (providing a study of U.S.-China relations and policies from Nixon to Biden) and the resulting influence of such traditions on recent U.S. Cross-Strait policy.

Presenting a comprehensive study of both the Trump and Biden administrations approach to Taiwan, this will be a valuable resource for any scholar or student of U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S.-Taiwan-China Relations and Cross-Strait Relations.

1 U.S. Nationalism and Interests (with Michaela Zabel)¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781003286615-1

In the tumultuous four years of Donald Trump’s tenure as America’s 45th president (2017–2021), bilateral relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had reached their lowest point since the two nations normalized their diplomatic ties in January 1979. The trade war between Washington and Beijing—which saw both sides using sharp-elbowed coercive tactics and ratcheting up tranches of retaliatory tariffs—came to a tentative ceasefire on January 15, 2020, when President Trump and China’s vice-premier Liu He signed the phase-one agreement in the East Room of the White House before hundreds of politicians and American business executives.² The deal not only committed China, over the next two years, to increase its import and purchases of American manufactured, agricultural, and energy goods and services (though as of October 2021, Washington noted that Beijing had fallen short of its purchasing promises by about 30 percent in 2020 and 40 percent in 2021, possibly due to the COVID pandemic and worsening Sino-American relations),³ it also included pledges by Beijing to tighten its protections of intellectual property and eliminate any pressure for U.S. companies to transfer technology to Chinese firms as a condition of market access, licensing or administrative approvals.⁴ In return, the United States would cut by half the tariff rate (from 15 percent to 7.5 percent) imposed on a $120 billion list of Chinese imports (while the 25 percent tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese products would remain in place). A stronger enforcement mechanism, relying on the U.S.-China bilateral consultations instead of the World Trade Organization’s arbitration panel, was set up to allow the aggrieved party to re-impose tariffs and other penalties if their complaints are not effectively addressed.

For Trump, the major complaint about the PRC was the latter’s longstanding unfair economic and business practices in dealing with America. (While the president is mostly focused on the lopsided U.S. trade deficit relative to China’s huge trade surplus, Robert Lighthizer, the then-U.S. trade representative, has emphasized the greater need to put in place a more robust enforcement infrastructure to ensure China would change the fundamental structural problems of intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers, and the unequal advantages [i.e., subsidies] enjoyed by China’s state-owned enterprises and banks in competitions with their American counterparts.)⁵ “Right now, unfortunately, it is a very one-sided and unfair one. But, I don’t blame China…. I do blame past administrations for allowing this out-of-control trade deficit to take place and to grow. We have to fix this because it just doesn’t work for our great American companies, and it doesn’t work for our great American workers,” the president remarked during his state visit to Beijing in November 2017.⁶ He viewed himself as the first and only U.S. leader willing to and capable of standing up against China.⁷ John Bolton, the former national security advisor who worked under Trump from 2018 to 2019, agreed with the president for “appreciate[ing] the key truth that politico-military power rests on a strong economy [and] that stopping China’s unfair economic growth at U.S. expense is the best way to defeat China militarily.”⁸ Tariffs were the bludgeon to rectify Chinese wrongs and push the latter into negotiations, which would rebalance Sino-American economic relations. Yet, the president’s sole preoccupation, in the first three years of his administration, on reaching a trade deal with Beijing took precedence over any other sticking points between the United States and China. More often than not, it even took on a transactional or ad hoc nature of quid pro quo interactions with Beijing. Regarding the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s crackdowns on democracy and human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, Trump rejected taking firmer stances, lest that any such behaviors would derail the trade talks with Beijing. “Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal. I don’t want anything,” recorded Bolton on Trump’s reactions toward the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 2019.⁹ The president’s mercurial attitude led some to question whether his hardline China policy was merely a “bumper sticker.”¹⁰

Notwithstanding Trump’s initial questioning of the U.S. One-China policy and taking a call from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen (see Chapter 3), he was “dyspeptic about Taiwan,” as one of the favorite comparisons was “to point to the tip of one of his Sharpies and say, ‘This is Taiwan,’ then point to the Resolute desk and say, ‘This is China’.”¹¹ A Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin described that “Trump’s attitude toward Taiwan would vacillate between indifference and disrespect, and would continue in that vein throughout his presidency.”¹² The president once told a Republican senator, “Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are eight thousand miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a f***ing thing we can do about it.”¹³ Trump was also reportedly hesitant about selling Taiwan the F-16s, prompting speculation that he would eventually abandon American support for the democratic island.¹⁴ Meanwhile, the U.S. president constantly showered praises on Xi Jinping, the PRC president and CCP general secretary, touting their close friendship. Even though the ZTE, a Chinese telecom company, was prosecuted by the U.S. government for committing various criminal activities (including the violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea), President Trump decided to relieve some of the Commerce Department’s hefty penalties on the Chinese firm after having a phone conversation with Xi.¹⁵

Nonetheless, nationalists in the Trump administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Attorney General William Barr, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger, and White House Trade Advisor Peter Navarro, took a hardline approach to push back on the PRC, calling the latter an “existential threat” to American national security interests. “In the United States, competition is not a four-letter word,” Pottinger said in October 2018. “We at the Trump administration have updated our China policy to bring the concept of competition to the forefront. It’s right there at the top of the president’s national security strategy.”¹⁶ In spite of President Trump’s capriciousness and transactional proclivities, his administration hawks consistently commenced a whole-of-government approach to confront the PRC in the geostrategic, human rights, and high-tech realms. To name just a few instances, the United States had dispatched naval warships to the South China Sea, blocked China’s tech giants like Huawei from getting advanced chips and semiconductors, bolstered relations with Taiwan (also known formally as the Republic of China or ROC) through frequent arms sales and high-ranking U.S. official visits to Taipei, sanctioned leaders of Hong Kong and Xinjiang for their anti-democratic/human rights laws and activities, closed down the PRC’s Consulate General office in Houston over its alleged espionage behaviors, raised an alert on the CCP’s misinformation and influence campaigns to sow confusion and division within American politics & civil society, restricted Chinese students and scholars having ties with China’s military from gaining access to American universities and research institutes, and sought bans on some popular Chinese apps from the U.S. market.

Moreover, the increasingly adventurous and coercive foreign policy agenda promoted by Xi Jinping as well as his shift toward a more comprehensive authoritarian control domestically accelerated the contentiousness of U.S.-Chinese strategic rivalry.¹⁷ That deterioration in bilateral ties is further compounded by the advent of a growing nationalistic/realist assessment within the United States that views America’s economic woes (i.e., the loss of manufacturing jobs, widening trade imbalances, theft of intellectual property and business secrets, to name just a few), irrational politics, and weakened global position are fostered by a longstanding predatory, yet stealthy, CCP strategy aiming to deceive and take advantage of Washington’s pursuit of a conciliatory engagement approach with China and to eventually displace American power.¹⁸ The global spread of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) allegedly from Wuhan, China, since early 2020 further deepened animosity between the United States and PRC, as both Washington and Beijing exchanged accusations over the source of the pandemic. With that, Trump, to salvage his declining popularity in a presidential election year beset by a severe pandemic and steep economic downturn, labeled the contagion the “Chinese or Wuhan virus” and reversed his friendly attitude toward Xi Jinping, admitting he “used to like the Chinese leader but didn’t feel the same way now.”¹⁹ The president ultimately closed ranks with his nationalist officials by championing their rollback on the decades-long constructive engagement policy with China, an approach enacted since the Nixon administration with the objective that a more embedded socioeconomic and cultural interchanges between the United States and PRC would eventually generate incentives for the latter to become more politically open, globally integrated into the liberal international order, hence chartering a more stable and peaceful foreign policy behavior.²⁰

To be sure, the wary and disapproving sentiments regarding China did not come from the Trump administration or the Republican hawks alone. It’s a bipartisan consensus shared and agreed to by the Democrats as well. President Joe Biden (2021–present), for instance, in a stern statement issued on August 27, 2021, called for a continued probe into the connection between China and the COVID pathogen, stressing that

critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China [PRC], yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it…. The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them.²¹

Indeed, two of the foremost national security officials in the Biden administration—Kurt Campbell (the National Security Council or NSC coordinator for the Indo-Pacific) and Ely Ratner (the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs)—wrote for the Foreign Affairs in spring 2018:

Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the U.S.-led system. And the liberal international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected. China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process…. That reality warrants a cleared eyed rethinking of the United States’ approach to China.²²

Rush Doshi, the director for China on Biden’s NSC, contended that engaging and credibly reassuring Beijing is “exceedingly difficult,” given the latter’s Leninist governance structure which is fundamentally at odds with the U.S.-led liberal order. No matter how Washington has pursued a largely benign and welcoming policy toward China, top CCP officials “continued to write in Party texts that they believed the United States was pursuing a strategy of ‘peaceful evolution’ and containment.” From Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, the United States has consistently been branded as China’s chief “existential threat.”²³

Research question

The U.S. administrations of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in spite of their numerous policy differences, both undoubtedly have taken a toughened stance on China and a much stronger commitment toward Taiwan than many ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• List of tables
• List of figures
• 1 U.S. Nationalism and Interests (with Michaela Zabel)
• 2 Deepening U.S.-PRC Competitions
• 3 Trump and One-China Adjustments
• 4 Backing Taiwan in a Free and Open Indo-Pacific
• 5 Biden’s Multilateralism and Democratic Resilience
• 6 Taiwan Strait in the Era of Fortress America
• Bibliography
• Index