With the hotly contested U.S. election unveiling just around the corner, whether Trump is re-elected or Biden is the new occupant of the White House, the next U.S. president will face new challenges in the direction of U.S.-China relations over the next four years.
Voice of America interviewed six experts to offer advice to the next president on five major issues, including U.S. positioning toward China, economic and trade, cybersecurity, human rights, and Taiwan.
How the next U.S. president should clearly define China is critical. Whether China is America’s Competitor, Adversary, or Enemy will define the nature of U.S. relations with China and signal its future direction.
Defining China: A Mix of Adversary and Cooperative Rivalry
Winton Lord was a participant in the U.S. diplomacy that opened the door to China nearly 50 years ago; he served as Ambassador to China and Assistant Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific Affairs in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Ambassador Lord told VOA that the next U.S. president should continue the current administration’s definition of China as a major strategic competitor of the United States. He argued that “all U.S.-China relations will continue to be a competitive mix, with some hostile heat factors and some limited cooperative factors.
Ambassador Lord argued that China is not an adversary of the United States because it is “not a total enemy, not an enemy that leads inevitably to conflict”; however, he noted that “despite the competition and cooperation between the United States and China, whether it be (China’s) threats to human rights, to Taiwan, or to the penetration of our society, the U.S. and China will continue to be a competitive force”. and we will all oppose them in those areas.”
Ambassador Lord emphasized that the current state of U.S.-China relations is largely the result of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, “In that sense, there is an element of confrontation in the U.S.-China relationship, but that doesn’t mean that we have to get into conflict or make China an outright enemy. It just means that there is tension in the relationship, especially because of recent actions by China at home and abroad that we need to manage.”
Jerome Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law, was an international legal inspiration to the Chinese government in the early days of reform and opening up and is one of the most prolific American legal experts in providing legal assistance to Chinese dissidents and human rights defenders.
The next U.S. president should not oversimplify “the complex challenges of the relationship with China,” according to the 90-year-old Professor Kong. “I don’t think a single word or phrase can summarize an adequate strategy to consider. To be both simple and adequate, I have a formula I call the 4 C’s.” That is, Cooperation, Competition, Criticism, and Containment.
Although Kong also defines China as a competitor of the United States and an object to be contained, he emphasizes more on U.S.-China cooperation. He said, “We have to work harder with China. In the areas of climate change, the environment and the economy; and also in those areas of security where we don’t have much experience: space and cyber, the Arctic and Antarctic, all of these areas are in desperate need of better rules, order and security. And that’s not going to happen without cooperation between the United States and China, and other major powers.”
Kong also believes that the next U.S. president’s policy toward China will need to include “the Cold War policy that was adopted in dealing with the Soviet Union.” Because “the U.S. does need strong defenses that other countries, especially Asian countries, feel they must take.” He argued that “China also needs to contain itself. It’s already containing the United States. China needs to restrain its overly aggressive military assertions and policies. Therefore, both sides need, so to speak, mutual containment.”
According to Kong Jirong, “We need cooperation; we need competition, which is inevitable; we need criticism, free expression on both sides, and more information about China’s opaque society; we need each side to contain its own military power, and I hope the United States develops its own military power, but in a limited way, because we need to put more resources not into arms Rather, it is about improving our own society and helping the social, economic and political development of other groups. So it’s very complicated. We can’t sum up U.S.-China relations as a foreign policy in one word.”
Aaron Friedberg is a professor of political science and international relations at Princeton University. During the 2012 presidential election, he served as national security adviser to the Romney presidential campaign.
According to Aaron, China is a competitor, but not an enemy, of the United States. He believes it will be important for the next U.S. president to identify China’s common challenges to the free world, “all challenges not only to the United States but to liberal democracies, challenges that exist across the board in a range of areas, including economic, technological, military, and ideological areas.
Van Aalen noted that the next U.S. president must confront these challenges head on and not just be defensive, but proactive in his China policy.
“We have to resist the temptation to restart (bilateral relations) and take for granted that the problems that have rapidly emerged over the past four years are simply the result of the policies of the current US administration. I don’t think so. I believe that only defensive policies will not be sufficient to deal with them. We need to act to make the Chinese regime pay for the series of increasingly provocative policies it has adopted.”
According to Van Aalen, based on his understanding of the nature of the CCP’s Leninist party, the short-term goal of the next U.S. president remains to push back against China’s provocative policies; in the long term, the two sides’ ability to work together will depend on a change in the CCP leadership.
“This is a Leninist regime committed to maintaining a monopoly of political power at home. Its leaders hold a black-and-white and zero-sum view of politics and political competition. Their aim is to maximize their own power and to maximize China’s power relative to other countries in the international system.”
“Because of the nature of this regime and what its current leaders are trying to achieve, we are going to experience a period of increased competition. We must be realistic about this.”
Hu Ping is a local deputy to the Haidian District People’s Congress, where Beijing University was located in the early days of China’s reform and opening up in 1980, author of “On Freedom of Speech,” who devoted himself to the overseas Chinese democracy movement after studying in the U.S. He is the editor emeritus of Beijing Spring magazine and a pro-democracy theorist.
According to Hu Ping, the next U.S. president should certainly define China under the Communist dictatorship as an enemy of the U.S. “not only because today’s China is a more dangerous challenger than Russia, which ideologically denies universal values, but also because Xi’s interpretation of building a community of human destiny has revealed the Chinese regime’s expansionist ambitions.
“Xi made it very clear, saying that this is ‘in line with the Chinese people’s traditionally upheld concept of universal harmony, and the Chinese view of the world that is tender and distant and harmonious with all nations’. And the so-called ‘view of the world’ is the familiar phrase, “Under the universal sky, there is no king’s land; under the land, there is no king’s minister.”
Hu Ping pointed out that according to the Chinese view of the world, the world must be unified, that is, the so-called “lying on the side of the couch will not allow others to sleep soundly”, “is that your existence hinders the unification of the world, so you have to be eliminated, and this is still in ancient China among the emperors known for enlightenment Zhao Kuangyin spoke. “
In the past, Hu Ping said, China either thought of itself as civilization itself or as the center of the world, “so to unify the world was to have its central power spread over the whole world,” “to use its government and to use its power to cause a new world order, which is clearly the same as the current of the world order is incompatible.”
According to Hu Ping, Xi’s use of this worldview to explain his community of human destiny “certainly means rationalizing both aggression and expansion, and will inevitably follow the path of aggression and expansion”; and “because China has greater economic power than the Soviet Union did back then, and because of China’s enormous size . So it does pose an extremely serious challenge to the United States and to the world.”
Columbia University political science professor Andrew Nathan, who entered Harvard University in 1960 at the age of 17 and studied under Fei Zhengqing, first in East Asian history and then in political science, has studied Chinese politics for more than half a century and has authored or co-authored no less than 15 books on China.
He has written more than half a century of research on Chinese politics, and has authored and co-authored no less than 15 books on China. He agrees with the official U.S. definition of China as a “Peer Competitor. It was a concept put forward in an official White House document two or three years ago after consulting with other agencies, and “it’s a good concept,” Li said.
But Li Anyou doesn’t think the current U.S. administration has a unified policy toward China: “It’s very divided, with Trump’s policy of a trade war, Pompeo’s policy of overthrowing China’s Communist Party, and some other officials’ strategy of sticking to reciprocity.”
According to An You Lai, it’s a mistake to view China as a 100 percent enemy, “because it seems to me that China doesn’t want to overthrow the global system or replace the United States as the sole superpower, but it does want to compete with the United States for its influence, including its military influence in Asia and its diplomatic and other influence. So it’s competition. So if we see it as competition, I think the focus should shift to the United States, which is to better strengthen itself, to develop its economy, to improve its political system so that we can compete with China.”
An You Lai also has a different view of the CCP, “The Chinese Communist Party is different from the Soviet Communist Party during the Cold War. The Soviet Communist Party wanted to spread socialism around the world, they wanted to overthrow other governments and establish communist governments. In my opinion, the Chinese Communist Party has no such ambition. They did not try to get other countries in Europe and Africa to adopt the Chinese ideology or the Chinese political system. I think what the CCP wants is to keep its power in China, to make China a great power, to make China accepted by the world for its own sake. But it does not want to overthrow other governments.”
Gordon Chang, a current affairs commentator and columnist who has taken a hardline stance on China, is best known for his 2001 book, China is Coming to a Collapse.
According to Chang, China is America’s enemy “because they have been attacking America with malice. Right now, we have 226,000 Americans killed by a virus deliberately released by Beijing. We don’t know how this virus started, whether it was naturally occurring or created in a laboratory. But we do know that Xi Jinping took steps in December and January that he knew the inevitable result would be that this disease would spread outside of China. Therefore, this is a malicious attempt to spread this disease.”
Trade Policy with China – Decoupling of Key Sectors a Foregone Decision
The Trump administration is waging a trade war against China through mandatory tariffs. The U.S. and China signed the first phase of a trade agreement today in January, but the new crown pandemic has hit the U.S., China and the global economy hard, and the prospects for the agreement’s eventual full implementation are uncertain. But the trade war has accelerated the decoupling of the U.S.-China supply chain. What kind of trade policy should the next U.S. president adopt toward China?
Former U.S. Ambassador to China Lord affirmed the problems in the bilateral relationship targeted by the Trump administration’s trade policy toward China, “China has for many years resorted to mercantilism and protectionism, taking advantage of violating WTO norms, gaining unfair advantage, stealing intellectual property, forcing U.S. companies to transfer technology, so I think there are real problems, and the current administration has rightly Recognizing the problem, but I don’t think its response has been effective.”
Ambassador Lord believes that the next U.S. president should not focus on tariffs. “I will not cancel current (trade) agreements, but I will try to make more progress on issues such as intellectual property rights, subsidies to Chinese companies, and cyber theft of economic secrets.”
On the issue of U.S.-China economic and trade decoupling, Lord argued that it should be selective rather than full decoupling, “not the one-size-fits-all approach that the Trump administration is implementing. There are certain other areas where the Trump administration is being tough on China that I agree with in principle, but that’s using a machete, not a scalpel.”
He said the U.S. should be very careful that some of its dependence on China for supplying items must be broken, “such as critical security items that will be needed in future pandemics, drugs, minerals like rare earths, selective areas like these; and also working with our allies to strengthen our own domestic production, or at least relying on our own programs rather than China’s. “
Lord argues that waging an all-out trade war and full decoupling will ultimately result in adverse effects on many American workers, U.S. exports and some industries. He argues that selective decoupling is happening, concentrating on precise areas, rather than a full-scale rollout.
According to Columbia University political science professor An-You Lai, Trump’s trade war with China has been a failure. “It hasn’t caused any fundamental change to the Chinese economy, nor has it changed the US trade deficit with China. Trump said that China paid for the tariffs, but that’s not the case, and American consumers paid for the tariffs. I don’t think the trade war is going to hurt the Chinese economy too much and is therefore a complete failure. I also don’t think the trade war should continue, or that it should be intensified. I don’t think it will work.”
According to Li Anyou, the decoupling of the U.S.-China economy and trade is a complex issue, and security-related areas will inevitably be decoupled, “the high-tech sector will be decoupled whether there is a trade war or not.” But in many other areas, such as manufacturing and raw materials, there won’t be a complete decoupling. Take the iPhone maker, for example: “There is no other place in the world where Apple can make so many high-quality iPhones. But this is just one example of many things where the U.S. has no choice but to establish economic relations with China.”
The next U.S. president should separate security considerations from economic considerations when it comes to trade, according to Li Anyou. “If there are security concerns, including espionage and technology theft, then the government should intervene to prevent the U.S. from being taken advantage of. For example, when some Chinese company wants to invest in the U.S. to buy a company in order to acquire technology from that company, if that technology is critical to security, then the U.S. government should prevent that from happening.”
Secondly, Le An You argues that there should be a return to “multilateral arrangements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that the Obama administration entered into and Trump withdrew from, to build strong trade relations with other countries around China, and to set rules that incentivize China to comply with those regulations, and we should also use the rules that are already in place in a similar way, using the rule of law, diplomacy, and urging China to be in changes where its economy is unfair.”
Third, Leon You argued that the U.S. should stick to free trade and not use tariff weapons. “We must trade with China on the basis of free trade as we normally do with the rest of the world and not use tariffs to try to put pressure on China because it doesn’t work.
For his part, Princeton University professor of political science and international relations Alan Fan argued that the next U.S. president should not treat China as a normal trading nation. “We have to recalibrate many aspects of our economic and trade relationship with China, partly because of the policies that China has been pursuing and partly because of the nature of the Communist regime. In my view, we can’t continue to see China as just another normal trading partner, because it’s not.”
But he largely agrees with Le An You’s analysis on security considerations and tariffs. Van Alen believes that some existing policies should be continued, such as increased scrutiny of Chinese companies’ investments in the U.S. high-tech sector, the need to apply for export licenses for exports to China of certain sensitive technologies, and the realignment of certain supply chains. But he does not believe that high tariffs should continue to be imposed on some consumer goods from China, and there is no reason to change some of the non-strategically sensitive trade between the two countries.
Hu Ping, editor emeritus of the Beijing Spring, argues that globalization has created a situation where good capitalism is rather worse than bad capitalism. “In favor of authoritarian governments like China, which take full advantage of its low human rights, it has instead created a higher level of competitiveness.”
Hu Ping said that while the past 20 years of U.S.-China economic and trade engagement has resulted in gains for both sides, the extent and aspects of the gains are very different. “In the U.S., it is multinational capital that gains, while the interests of ordinary laborers are harmed; in China, the lives of ordinary people also benefit, but the biggest gainer is the authoritarian government, reinforcing its power. That is the crux of the matter.”
Thus Hu Ping points out that it is inevitable that the US will adopt the necessary protectionism. But he argues that a trade war will not fully solve the problem. He believes that even if the decoupling of high-tech industries involving national security from China is to be achieved, the prerequisite for doing so is to join forces with other liberal democracies, “because decoupling can only be achieved after a global democratic alliance has been established. Otherwise, instead of decoupling from the other side, you isolate yourself, and the result is worse.”
Zhang Jiatun, a current affairs commentator who has been a sharp critic of the Chinese Communist Party, argues that the U.S.-China trade deal will probably not continue no matter who wins the 2020 election. He believes that if Biden is elected, he will end the trade war, “Biden has made it clear that he does not like President Trump’s failed policy of imposing tariffs on China under Special 301 …… President Biden will renew his attempts to negotiate with China.”
Zhang Jiadun believes the U.S.-China trade deal will not continue “because China has not complied with the first phase of its trade obligations …… It’s actually easiest for China to just buy stuff ……. I think Trump will realize that it is impossible to negotiate with China, they are not sincere. Therefore, I think he will end the agreement.”
The trade policy with China that the next U.S. president wants to implement, according to Zhang Jiadun, is a complete disengagement between the two sides, “cutting off trade relations with China, cutting off investment in the Chinese market, cutting off investment in the U.S. in research partnerships with China, cutting off relations with China to the greatest extent possible.”
Technology and Security – Sanctions Against Huawei Are Necessary
The Trump administration’s sanctions against Huawei, China’s top tech company, have excluded it from building 5G networks in almost all Western countries. But the bans against both TikTok and WeChat have been blocked in US courts. What policy should the next US president adopt on the high-tech and cybersecurity front?
Nearly all respondents – liberal and conservative in stance – agreed that it was essential for the Trump administration to sanction Chinese high-tech giant Huawei.
Ambassador Lord said Huawei and other Chinese applications pose a general security challenge to the U.S.: “With respect to cybersecurity, we should not be ambiguous and should do everything we can to fight back and protect our interests. Especially when it comes to stealing economic information or security technology information,”
Kong Jirong said: “I don’t believe for one minute that we should enter and adopt technology like Huawei or ZTE. It’s dangerous. No matter what Huawei says, it is a tool of the Chinese government, which is obvious to many of us who know what’s going on.”
An You Lai said, “We shouldn’t use Huawei equipment because I believe Huawei takes orders from the Chinese government, even if they say they don’t, and its equipment can be used to spy on or harm the U.S. in the event of a cyber conflict.”
Most interviewees agreed that how to handle apps like TikTok and WeChat could be a challenge for the next U.S. administration. Ambassador Lord said it is important to distinguish between cyber espionage and the intelligence gathering that every country does, and that this should also be done “with a scalpel, not a machete.”
He also argued for working closely with U.S. allies to “present a united front and develop a coherent policy, one that can distinguish between practical security concerns and maintaining the often positive ways of linking the two U.S.-China societies.”
It could be a “realistic question of how far we can invoke national security concerns to stop cooperation with China, and a very difficult task that can only go so far with general principles, and we have to look at each individual case, and that will be a challenge for the new administration,” according to Kongjerong.
Van Aalen said the principle of reciprocity should be applied in the high-tech sector. “If China prohibits Western companies from operating their applications in the Chinese market, why should Western countries allow Chinese companies to operate their applications in Western markets. It’s a matter of fairness.”
Zhang Jiadun expressed this more categorically, “I think the next president should immediately ban WeChat and TikTok and all other Chinese apps. If the federal courts don’t like it, then we’ll find China under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, because it will make it harder for the federal courts to overturn the ban.”
Zhang Jiadun said, “We should make China pay the maximum price for stealing American intellectual property. They steal hundreds of billions of dollars a year, so our sanctions against China should be in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.”
Human Rights Policy Towards China – How to Make Beijing Pay the Price?
The Trump administration has imposed extremely harsh sanctions against the Chinese Communist Party for human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and confronting the CCP’s human rights abuses is one of the few areas of consensus between the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States. However, Beijing’s human rights abuses at home and abroad have not been curtailed or changed as a result. In this regard, what kind of more effective human rights policy towards China should the next U.S. President adopt?
Ambassador Lord believes that the next President of the United States must continue to speak out publicly and privately on human rights issues in China, and garner as much international solidarity as possible in terms of sanctions or rhetorical criticism.
According to Ambassador Lord: “Human rights efforts have always been in great difficulty, not only for the current administration but also for past administrations, because the Chinese Communist Party has put political control and the political system above all else, and they are willing to pay the price to maintain it. This is especially true under Xi Jinping, who has become even more repressive domestically with brutal policies against Xinjiang, the destruction of Hong Kong’s autonomy to make it another Chinese city, and other human rights abuses such as the repression of the Chinese people.”
Lord argued that the next U.S. president’s human rights policy toward China must be realistic, and that human rights issues cannot fully navigate U.S.-China relations and dominate the agenda. “We have security, diplomatic and economic interests and many other issues that must be advanced, and we cannot cede all of them to human rights issues. If human rights in China need to be improved, whether at home or abroad, it must first come from the Chinese people and from Chinese society itself. We should maintain our position on human rights because it reflects our values, it helps maintain public and congressional support for China’s policies within the United States, and it gives some encouragement to Chinese reformers.”
According to Lord, U.S. human rights policy toward China must also be based on the example of American society itself, and he criticized President Trump, who “is setting a very bad model of democracy that makes it hypocritical for us to pressure China on some of the same issues.”
Ambassador Lord hopes that the new U.S. administration will restore democracy, the rule of law, norms, and human rights at home and speak out on human rights globally, which he believes is the only way to “enable us to send a more effective message in our dealings with China.”
Prof. Kong Jirong said President Trump’s congressionally-backed measures to sanction China for human rights abuses were effective. “I wouldn’t say it’s not working because China has not tried to create more anxiety since the new national security law came into effect on July 1 this year.” “Even the prosecution of the 12 Hong Kongers in China is not under the new Hong Kong version of the national security law. So I think China is trying very hard not to make people feel too uneasy.”
Kong Jie-rong believes that the next U.S. president’s attitude toward Beijing’s human rights abuses will somehow affect the strength of the Hong Kong version of the national security law’s enforcement in Hong Kong. “Despite their claim that they can exercise their judicial power over anyone in the world who they believe has acted or spoken in a way that is harmful to Hong Kong and China, they have yet to act. ……. I think they are waiting and watching the attitude and behavior of the next U.S. administration.”
Van Alen stressed that the next U.S. president’s human rights policy must be able to make Beijing pay the price for human rights abuses. “One of the immediate questions the next president will face will be whether the United States should participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics. There will be tremendous pressure in the U.S. because of the revelations about the Chinese Communist Party’s actions in Xinjiang, and Congress and human rights groups will call for a boycott. And then the question would be whether other democratic countries would participate.”
He noted that the concern is that the CCP now responds to human rights issues with an arrogance not present in the past or in other authoritarian governments, because they believe the West is heavily dependent on China economically.
Van Aalen said it was important for the United States to demonstrate its willingness to apply pressure, “both in the hope of getting Beijing to change, but also to educate its own people about the CCP and the nature of what it is doing.”
An-You Lai offered three levers for the next U.S. president to promote human rights in China: “First, we should rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, and we should do a lot of things that we haven’t done yet in the U.N. human rights system to keep the pressure on, to keep the focus on China, and to unite our allies and friends, which is multilateral diplomacy.”
“Second, a very important lever is our own example, the U.S. presence in the world. The concept of human rights and the rule of law, so that people around the world, including China, can see that ideal.”
“Third, it’s the Chinese people themselves, who are the main force in promoting human rights in China, not us. Therefore, we should help them in any way we can, whether it’s through rhetoric or through political asylum …… I believe that if the Chinese people want human rights, that will eventually happen. Our main job is to help them.”
Zhang Jiadun believes that the crimes against humanity committed by China are enough for the next U.S. president to cut ties with China. “These crimes are as serious as the crimes of the Third Reich before the Holocaust. This is horrible. the world hasn’t seen this in 70 years. We should have an obligation to cut ties with China.”
He argues that it is not enough to impose sanctions on China, “This is a major unified regime. We can’t think about it in a petty way. We have to know that we are dealing with a malignant regime.”
Policy Towards Taiwan – Strategic Ambiguity or Clarity?
The Trump administration has done much to enhance informal relations between the United States and Taiwan, including visits by Cabinet officials to Taiwan, increased military sales to Taiwan, and calls for Taiwan’s participation in international organizations. There have been calls from within Taiwan and the U.S. Congress for the United States to establish formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. At the same time, Beijing’s rhetoric and actions to unify Taiwan by force have been rare and intense. What kind of policy towards Taiwan should the next President of the United States uphold?
Ambassador Lord affirmed the Trump administration’s policy toward Taiwan. He said, “One of the good things is to elevate unofficial relations with Taiwan by sending high-level officials to visit, not provocatively the Secretary of Defense, but high-level economic and other cabinet officials; continue to sell defensive weapons to Taiwan, but urge Taiwan to buy and develop its own weapons budget to deal with Chinese threats, such as missiles; increase behind-the-scenes coordination with Taiwan’s military and avoid provocations against China.”
But he argued that the United States should continue to maintain its vague “One China” policy. “This policy, pursued by the last seven or eight U.S. administrations, has preserved the basic relationship with China and has served to protect Taiwan and make it a model of democracy that is not only a prosperous economic force, but also of Chinese origin. A change towards formal relations, or the announcement of a formal security treaty to remove strategic ambiguity, would be extremely provocative and could lead to conflict with China, and would certainly undermine any chance of a more stable relationship. So we should not make fundamental changes.”
According to Leon Lai, the next president should reaffirm traditional U.S. policy toward China based on the three communiqués and the Taiwan Relations Act, “i.e., no U.S. venue on how to resolve the Taiwan issue other than a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue. In my view, the next president should maintain what is known as a policy of strategic ambiguity. In other words, I don’t think we should change our policy toward Taiwan now.”
Van Aalen agrees that the one-China policy has worked for a long time, and he’s not sure whether it would be advantageous to try to change it, but disadvantageous “might give China an excuse to put more pressure.” He believes the reality is clear: “Taiwan is an independent sovereign entity, a self-governing democracy, and Taiwan has the right to remain so.”
Ambassador Lord said the next U.S. president should restore U.S. credibility with allies, especially those in Asia, rather than trying to get China to test U.S. deterrence capabilities. Ambassador Lord said there is also a pressing matter to continue to pressure Taiwan to gain representation in international organizations.
Kong Jie-rong said next year will mark the centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. “Well Xi Jinping who emerges as a strong leader is under tremendous pressure to be able to justify a high-profile commemoration of this great event. Nothing is more important to him than for him to achieve the reunification of Taiwan and the motherland. So I think the next few years are going to be a very dangerous period.”
He argued that steps taken by the next U.S. president to further strengthen Taiwan should be moderate. “Care must be taken not to go too far. We must stay within the limits of the existing agreement with China, and without a peace agreement made by the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, there should be no change in the status quo.”
According to Lai Anyou, Chinese President Xi Jinping has no plans to launch a military attack on Taiwan in the near future. “Therefore, we should not take any action that would trigger an attack by China on Taiwan. Changing the name of the policy will only increase pressure on Xi Jinping to use military force. We do not want to trigger a war.”
According to Van Aalen, the United States should not abandon strategic ambiguity, but it should help Taiwan develop a defense policy and make it clear that it will assist Taiwan if China uses force. “We must help Taiwan defend itself against China. We must also take steps to send a clear signal that if China uses force or attempts to coerce Taiwan, we will fulfill our obligations under the Taiwan Relations Act to give aid to Taiwan.”
He said, “The last thing we want is for the CCP to underestimate our resolve and the resolve of our partners and allies to give aid to Taiwan in the event of an attack on Taiwan.”
To avoid a war in the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. should make a clear statement defending Taiwan, according to Zhang Jiadun. “Remember, in 1950, we made it clear to Kim Il Sung that we would not defend Korea, and what happened? And he attacked Korea. We told Saddam Hussein in no uncertain terms that we would not defend Kuwait, and what happened? And he attacked Kuwait. The same posture, we could have avoided the Korean War, we could have avoided the Gulf War by making a very simple statement that we would defend South Korea, we could have said we would defend Kuwait, and then there would have been no Korean War, there would have been no Gulf War. So we should not make the same mistake again. Yes, if we want to go to war with China, then don’t say we will defend Taiwan. That’s the easiest way to go to war with China. But the easiest way to avoid war with China is to make clear our intention that we will defend solid democracy.”
The next U.S. president should commit to recognizing Taiwan as the legitimate government, according to Zhang Jiadun. “If Taiwan wants a mutual defense treaty with the United States, we should be open to that. Taiwan should be made a treaty partner like NATO.”
Hu Ping also believes that the next U.S. president should achieve the early establishment of formal diplomatic relations with the Republic of China. “Once formal diplomatic relations are established, then it will be of great significance to enhance Taiwan’s international status, not to mention that it also powerfully solves the dilemma of whether the U.S. strategy for Taiwan is clear or ambiguous, and it provides a stronger guarantee for Taiwan’s security.”
According to Hu Ping, the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Republic of China on Taiwan and the United States is not as difficult as commonly thought. If the U.S. establishes formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, mainland China can’t really find a reason to oppose it.
Hu Ping points out that the CCP has quietly revised its One China Principle since 2000, “Originally its One China Principle was to oppose Taiwan independence, two Chinas or one China and one Taiwan, as well as it was also to oppose one China and two governments, but since 2000, it has only opposed Taiwan independence, two Chinas or one China and one Taiwan, and no longer opposes one China and two governments. “
Hu Ping said that if the U.S. establishes formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan without changing the ROC’s constitutional system, “that would effectively be implementing one China, two governments, and since its premise is still one China, there would be no reason for the Chinese Communist Party to protest.”
Hu Ping asked, “If China can recognize both the North and South Korean governments, why can’t the U.S. recognize both the Beijing and Taipei governments? The reasoning is the same.”
Hu Ping said, “If the United States establishes diplomatic relations with Taiwan, firstly, it makes Taiwan’s international status improved, and in addition it also makes cross-strait relations and Taiwan’s security to be further guaranteed, which is very beneficial for cross-strait relations to be in a more stable state for a longer period of time, so this is not only in the interests of the people of Taiwan, but also completely in the interests of the United States. ”
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