A new cut of the cloth: Exploring Beijing’s tailored response to the Tsai-McCarthy meeting
A new cut of the cloth: Exploring Beijing’s tailored response to the Tsai-McCarthy meeting
WRITTEN BY RORRY DANIELS
24 April 2023
On 5 April, Taiwan’s leader Tsai Ing-Wen met with US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy at the Reagan Presidential Library in California. She stopped in the United States on the way home from visiting Taiwan’s allies in Central America. This meeting, while long in the works, was a compromise. McCarthy’s original plan to visit Taipei was quashed amid concerns in both Washington and Taipei that the trip could untenably escalate cross-Strait military tensions.
The response from Beijing was more restrained than expected. While the Chinese military ran drills practising the encirclement of the island alongside simulated precision strikes, threats to board ships transiting the Taiwan Strait were not carried out, nor did China proceed with a separate three-day no-fly order near Taiwan in mid-April. This relatively light response could lead to a false sense that the compromise to meet during a stop-over created a sustainable blueprint for future high-level meetings between officials from Taipei and Washington. However, other factors may have been just as decisive in deterring Beijing from a more forceful response. Shifting Chinese priorities amid global instability warrants a careful examination of how this meeting played out differently from then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taipei last August.
Timing is everything
Between August 2022 and April 2023, China has undergone a sea change in its national priorities. The Taipei visit of the former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was disastrously timed in the run-up to China’s most important political event in decades — the 20th Party Congress, where President Xi Jinping secured an unprecedented third five-year term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Pelosi trip dropped right in the middle of preparations for this event when all of the personnel appointments that Xi deemed critical to his long-term success were being negotiated and finalised.
Beijing long signalled that it would respond to a Tsai-McCarthy meeting, but its actions did not break precedent and in many ways showed restraint.
The CCP believes it has an obligation to fulfil its founding members’ objective of unification with Taiwan. In the run-up to this important period of party transition, nationalism and internal pressure were amplified towards the most forceful possible response. These domestic imperatives drove a simulated blockade of the island, missile launches, and a renewed flurry of PLA Air Force sorties into Taiwan’s airspace.
By contrast, the PLA response to the Tsai-McCarthy meeting took place at a time of very different priorities in the Chinese political system. Xi Jinping’s preferred candidates for CCP leadership have now been appointed and the pressure to align internally around them has subsided. Following the so-called blank paper protests in November and December 2022, China abruptly shifted course on its zero-COVID strategy, placing efforts to rebuild the domestic economy after the pandemic disruptions above all other priorities.
After suffering at the beginning of the pandemic, cross-Taiwan Strait trade has been growing. US-China trade reached record highs in 2022 at nearly USD 700 billion per year. Even as China continuously moves to protect itself from long-term decoupling — especially in technology — there is no short-term substitute for the value chain that connects Taiwan, Mainland China, and the US. The economic penalties China levied after the Tsai-McCarthy meeting were on non-commercial entities and officials; they will have little, if any, effect on the Chinese economy. By contrast, a response risking a cross-Strait military skirmish could devastate the global economy, disrupting a major lane of commercial shipping and prompting US moves to isolate China’s economy from the international trading and financial system.
Beijing is also aware that both the US and Taiwan are headed into their respective national election seasons. With a ‘tough on China’ approach being a rare instance of bipartisan agreement in the US and Tsai’s term limitations increasing the chances of success for more China-friendly opposition parties, the CCP is putting more emphasis on its soft power projection.
Beijing’s approach to the Tsai-McCarthy meeting was further tempered by former president and opposition Kuomintang (KMT) leader Ma Ying-jeou’s simultaneous 12-day visit to the Mainland. This timing was too convenient to be coincidental — Beijing is hoping to take advantage of its stronger relationship with the KMT to sharpen the electoral choice between Taiwan’s two major parties on Taiwan’s future. With carrots still on the menu of Beijing’s policy choices to affect Taiwan’s election, the CCP leadership may have determined that using a ‘bigger stick’ simultaneously would have been counterproductive.
US-China relations are also in a different, if still fragile, state. The Xi-Biden summit in November 2022 set a course for the resumption of high-level bilateral diplomatic dialogue, if temporarily scuttled by the surveillance balloon incident in February 2023. Still, China remains forward-leaning on diplomatic outreach and activities and has not changed its overall commitment to a responsible approach to managing US-China relations.
Location, location, location
While US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing remains on ice, there are incentives for Beijing to demonstrate restraint, and other senior-level US officials are rumoured to be in the queue for bilateral negotiations when high-level travel resumes. In what might be construed as a positive gesture towards this outcome, the Tsai-McCarthy meeting was notably not held in Washington, DC. Holding the meeting far away from the centre of US political power allowed some breathing room from accusations that a Taiwan president meeting with the third-in-line to the US presidency is an upgrade of the unofficial relationship.
The timing of the Tsai-McCarthy visit coincided with another high-level political event: the China visit of French President Emmanuel Macron alongside EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. With President Xi wrapped up in meetings, press conferences, and all the wining, dining, and military displays common to these types of events, there was little reason to raise the spectre of a US-China military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait.
China decided to wait until Macron was gone and Tsai was back in Taipei to conduct military drills in response to the meeting. Doing so immediately after the meeting would have blocked Tsai’s transit home to Taipei, a clear escalation of cross-Strait tensions. That China waited to mount its military drills suggests political considerations are still heavily weighted over actual preparations for war. In other words, the PLA is not pursuing goals independent of political oversight, particularly on such a difficult and sensitive issue for CCP leadership.
Fundamental trends remain worrisome
Ultimately, there is no certainty on which of the above factors was most decisive in tamping Beijing’s response to the Tsai-McCarthy visit. The most likely scenario is that it was a combination of all of the above. The danger ahead is whether the US and Taiwan can acknowledge that the relatively mild Chinese response to the Tsai-McCarthy visit was mostly circumstantial.
Meanwhile, China uses these events as opportunities to sharpen its military strategy on a Taiwan contingency. Beijing believes that doing so is a deterrent to both Taiwan independence activists and a warning to the US military of the challenges it might face in defending Taiwan from an attack. However, whether these deterrent signals are properly received and digested per Beijing’s intentions is another matter. Beijing’s military drills have been cited in the US military’s pleas to Congress to upgrade equipment and resource strategy based on a timeline of when the PLA would be capable of negating US force projection in and around Taiwan. This is driving a military approach to resolving Taiwan’s political status that raises the likelihood of a full-scale arms race in Asia.
China also continues its push to poach Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, particularly in Latin America. Honduras is the latest example of a country enticed to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, following El Salvador and the Dominican Republic in 2018, and Panama in 2017. Taiwan still has seven allies in Latin America and the Caribbean, but the numbers are dwindling as Beijing mounts a charm and investment offensive to lure developing countries into enforcing its position on Taiwan.
Eventually, Washington and Taipei could face a scenario in which Taiwan has no diplomatic allies to visit near US territory, making transit visits impossible. This would grant the US and Taiwan less flexibility in framing presidential visits, giving Beijing greater grounds for a more forceful response.
Now is the time for the US and its allies to carefully calibrate their reaction to Beijing’s latest moves, without panic or relaxation. Beijing long signalled that it would respond to a Tsai-McCarthy meeting, but its actions did not break precedent and in many ways showed restraint. While Beijing should in no way be rewarded for its lack of worse behaviour, the US and Taiwan should not assume that two incidents reveal a pattern of how Beijing would respond to future meetings. Similar restraint from the US, its allies, and Taiwan’s political leadership could allow the breathing room needed to effectively prepare for and manage the much more worrisome long-term trends.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Rorry Daniels is the Managing Director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, where she leads strategy and operations for the Institute’s projects on security, climate change, and trade throughout Asia. She is concurrently a Senior Fellow at ASPI’s Center for China Analysis. She was previously with the National Committee on American Foreign Policy where she managed the organisation's Track II and research portfolio on Asia security issues, with a particular focus on cross-Taiwan Strait relations, US-China relations, and the North Korean nuclear programme. She is a 2022 Mansfield-Luce scholar focusing on cross-Taiwan Strait relations and US-China strategic competition in Southeast Asia. She thanks Johanna Costigan, Taylah Bland, and Lery Hiciano for their assistance with this piece. Image credit: Flickr/Office of the President Republic of China (Taiwan).