Communist China’s Claim to Taiwan Looms as Central Issue in Next Week’s Trump-Xi Summit at Beijing

Communist China’s party boss, President Xi Jinping, is sure to play the Taiwan card when he hosts President Trump next week at Beijing. A spokesman for the regime left no doubt of the priority given to China’s perpetual demand to rule Free China, stating Taiwan is at the center of China’s “core interests” and part of the “political foundation of China.”The question, however, is how the communists will attempt to negotiate American support of Taiwan against other concerns ranging from the search for an end to the war in Iran to North Korea’s threatening stance against South Korea to Japan’s growing military establishment under its new right-leaning prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.“China’s determination to safeguard national reunification and territorial integrity is unwavering,” a spokesman, Lin Jian, told reporters at Beijing. “Taiwan independence,” China’s Global Times quoted him as saying, “is incompatible with peace across the Taiwan Strait.”China menaces the island province with ships and planes. This week, Taiwan’s defense ministry reported six Chinese ships crossing the line that divides the Taiwan Strait between the province and the mainland while 22 planes entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone — outside Taiwan territorial air space but close enough to show Beijing’s potential military might.Mr. Xi, projecting himself as a peacemaker interested in resolving the Iran war, is not yet ready to go beyond rhetoric and gestures vis-à-vis Taiwan, but he can still make clear to Mr. Trump that he would be more open to deals on trade and tariffs if Washington would reduce its support for Taiwan. That’s on top of the influence that he can wield on a deal with Iran, the source of 90 percent of the communists’ oil imports.Although America broke off diplomatic relations with the “nationalist” Chinese regime on Taiwan after 1978, when President Carter recognized the government at Beijing, Washington remains committed to Taiwan’s defense as part of an island chain extending from Japan to the Philippines. America has no military bases on Taiwan, but Washington dispenses about $1.5 billion in aid annually, including equipment and training, and has about 500 military advisers on Taiwan.Analysts have frequently described Taiwan militarily as a “porcupine” that could inflict damage on Chinese forces if they tried to take over the island. A retired navy admiral, Mark Montgomery, has said Taiwan needs a “true counter intervention force” supported by a thousand American advisers, according to the GIs’ daily newspaper, Stars and Stripes.The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has laid down the gantlet in the face of Chinese claims to Taiwan, declaring “We don’t need any destabilizing events to occur with regards to Taiwan or anywhere in the Indo-Pacific.” America and China, he told reporters, “understand that it is in neither one of our interests to see anything destabilizing happen in that part of the world.”Like an opening bid in a card game, those words are likely to lead to hard bargaining. The fear in China is that Mr. Xi may play upon Mr. Trump’s desire to cut back on America’s investment in defending its friends and allies and on the desire of Taiwan’s powerful Kuomintang or nationalist party to cool down tensions between the island and the mainland.“Does ‘America First’ mean abandoning Taiwan and South Korea,” an article published by Pacific Forum, a think tank based in Hawaii, asked last year. Mr. Trump, demanding both Japan and South Korea pay more for the defense provided by American troops, has given an impression he’s “no longer interested in defending these countries and Taiwan.”The president of Republic of China, as Free China is properly known, Lai Chingi-te, besides worrying about American support, also has to fend off opposition from the Kuomintang. That’s the nationalist party that once ruled the mainland under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who led his army to Taiwan before Mao Zedong’s Red Army finished its conquest of the mainland in 1949.Now, by historical irony, the leader of the KMT, Cheng Li-wun, recently met President Xi in Beijing, urging strengthening ties. The visit came “at a precarious moment,” said the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. “Cross-strait relations have gradually deteriorated since 2016, and even more so after 2022, when the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taipei.”

Communist China’s Claim to Taiwan Looms as Central Issue in Next Week’s Trump-Xi Summit at Beijing

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