Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said on Wednesday that Taiwan could be “discarded” if Donald Trump returns to the White House and implements his America First foreign policy.
“Whether the United States is trying to protect or harm Taiwan, I believe most of our Taiwan compatriots have already made a rational judgment and know very clearly that what the United States pursues is always America first,” she said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Zhu warned the Taiwanese that “Taiwan, at any time, may turn from a pawn to a discarded child.”
Zhu did not mention Trump by name, but she was responding to a question about his comments that Taiwan should contribute more for its defense.
“Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company,” Trump mused in a July interview with Bloomberg Businessweek.
“Taiwan doesn’t give us anything. Taiwan is 9,500 miles away. It’s 68 miles away from China. A slight advantage, and China’s a massive piece of land, they could just bombard it,” he observed.
Trump said China was reluctant to take such drastic action “because they don’t want to lose all those chip plants,” but he was convinced Chinese dictator Xi Jinping — who he described as “a very good friend of mine until Covid” — is still determined to capture Taiwan someday.
CIA Director William Burns said in February that Xi has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, although his enthusiasm for invasion was cooled somewhat by observing the hellish outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Our assessment at CIA is that I wouldn’t underestimate President Xi’s ambitions with regard to Taiwan,” Burns said.
Trump told Bloomberg Businessweek he was confident he could leverage his good relationship with Xi enough to prevent a Taiwan invasion from happening, but he advised the Taiwanese not to take their security for granted. He also wondered why the United States should carry so much of the burden of defending Taiwan when the Taiwanese “took our chip business from us.”
“They took almost 100% of our chip industry, I give them credit. That’s because stupid people were running the country. We should have never let that happen. Now we’re giving them billions of dollars to build new chips in our country, and then they’re going to take that too, in other words, they’ll build it but then they’ll bring it back to their country,” he said.
Trump reiterated these points during his three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan last week, suggesting Taiwan should pay more for its “protection” and threatening to impose tariffs on Taiwanese computer chips.
Taiwanese Premier Cho Jung-tai disagreed with Trump’s assessment during remarks to the Taiwanese legislature a few days after the Joe Rogan interview.
“Taiwan developed its semiconductor industry on its own and made itself into a world leader,” she said.
Cho said she was concerned about potential damage to the reputation of Taiwan’s chipmaking industry but was not greatly worried about the strength of the U.S.-Taiwan relationship if Trump is reelected president.
Outside the circumspect remarks of the Taiwanese government, some analysts believe Trump is serious about driving a hard bargain to obtain more defense spending from Taiwan, possibly by arranging more favorable terms for U.S. semiconductor imports.
Taiwan would actually have a bit of trouble paying more for defense at the moment because some $20 billion in arms purchases from the United States have been backlogged since the Chinese coronavirus pandemic and the backlog grew worse because so much American military hardware has been sent to Ukraine.
Wen-ti Sung, a Taipei-based nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, told AFP on Tuesday that the Taiwanese government is concerned with Trump’s “transactionalist and mercantilist sentiments,” but it was also concerned about Vice President Kamala Harris’s incoherent policies.
As for outgoing President Joe Biden, he had a habit of making blustery pronouncements in favor of defending Taiwan against China, only for his White House to walk them back when China complained. The longstanding U.S. diplomatic posture toward Taiwan has been described as “strategic ambiguity,” which means everyone knows the U.S. is legally committed to defend Taiwan, but top-level U.S. officials do not talk about fighting China in blunt terms.
Trump set a daring precedent in 2016 by speaking directly with then-Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen a month after his election. This enraged China because accepting Tsai’s congratulatory phone call was seen by Beijing as elevating her to the status of a national chief executive. China goes to great lengths to thwart any diplomatic interaction that makes Taiwan look like an independent nation.
Tsai’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said in April 2019 that President Trump’s support for Taiwan was unusually strong and much appreciated.
“Overall speaking, the warmth and the support coming from the Trump administration these days is unprecedented and we enjoy these kinds of relationships,” said Wu.
Biden, on the other hand, annoyed the Taiwanese by shipping them military equipment that was “poorly packaged,” sometimes “soaking wet and covered in mold,” and often “unusable.” Some of the packages contained mismatched and non-functional ammunition. U.S. taxpayers shelled out over $700,000 to replace the inept shipments.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) wrote a letter to the Pentagon last week asking Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to investigate the “embarrassing debacle” created by these shipments – which, curiously enough, began shortly after Biden met with Xi Jinping in San Francisco.
“Delivering damaged military aid to a key partner is sadly part of a dangerous pattern of incompetence by the White House that has pushed the world to the brink and jeopardized America’s national security,” Ernst said in her letter to Austin.
