Trump-Biden confusion spells trouble for Taiwan as China’s Xi Jinping circles

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping escorts then Vice President Joe Biden past Chinese honour guards.

Beijing will provoke a crisis with Taiwan sooner or later. There is a good chance it might come sooner, perhaps almost straight after the US presidential election on November 3.

Two critical variables collide here — Beijing’s intent, Washington’s disposition to respond.

The US polls are moving strongly in favour of Joe Biden. However, you would expect Donald Trump to bounce back somewhat. If the election is close on November 3 it will end up in the courts. US elections are often a shambolic disgrace. Trump is right to argue the prospect of millions of postal votes floating around is a recipe for irregularity if not downright fraud.

If Trump leads in any important state on November 3 but faces the prospect of losing the state on postal votes, expect a swarm of legal challenges to strike out or limit those postal votes.

All this could create a period of confusion, even chaos, in US politics and effective strategic paralysis. Beijing might conclude that Trump is almost certainly on the way out, to be succeeded by a weak Biden, and that no one in Washington at that moment has the authority or the will to tackle a military crisis.

I don’t think Beijing will embark on a full-scale invasion of Taiwan. But what the past 10 years in the South China Sea have shown us is that Beijing will test American red lines. It does this in several ways. First, it offers Washington something it wants — a climate change agreement, help on North Korea, whatever. This never amounts to anything but it rein­forces the party in Washington arguing to pursue engagement at all costs and avoid confrontation on any other issue.

Second, Beijing often conducts its local military action in some feeble measure of disguise. Thus a naval war ship will be repainted and labelled a coast guard vessel. It will then accompany fishing boats or some such and harass and even if necessary sink some other nations’ ships. This allows Beijing to achieve a minor military outcome while claiming it has not taken military action. Thus was the South China Sea lost.

Third, when it deploys actual military units it often plays a dangerous game of chicken, constantly intruding into another nation’s air space, or sailing within a few hundred metres of another nation’s ships, or challenging their military aircraft, but not actually firing a shot. This is designed to intimidate, to frighten away and to normalise Chinese aggression, while always stopping short of actions that would certainly provoke a military response. If it finds the US red line receding, it keeps pushing.

China’s Xi Jinping has made it clear he wants to recover Hong Kong and Taiwan during his presidency. He plans to be president for life but exhibits strategic impatience, and he has already been in power almost a decade.

Hong Kong was handed to Beijing by the British in 1997 but there was a formal agreement to allow it a large measure of autonomy. When the world was sufficiently distracted by COVID-19, Beijing moved to crush that autonomy.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 early this year, Beijing’s rhetoric has become increasingly nationalistic on Taiwan. A nation of 24 million people, Taiwan has been completely independent of Beijing since 1949. In truth it was seldom ruled by Beijing before that. There is no principle in human rights or self-determination that allows Beijing to forcibly conquer and subjugate Taiwan. The US, under the Taiwan Relations Act, is pledged to defend Taiwan.

But for the past six months Beijing has been using air and naval assets increasingly to harass Taiwan. It frequently flies military aircraft into Taiwanese air space, across the midpoint between mainland China and Taiwan.

US Vice President Joe Biden reacts as he is directed to a position for photos with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping before talks in Beijing in 2011.

All through the Trump presidency Xi and his senior colleagues have raised Taiwan repeatedly with the Americans, telling them the whole bilateral relationship is at stake if the Americans continue to support Taiwan and demanding the US not sell Taiwan weapons.

Trump at times has been very offhand about Taiwan, even reluctant to sell it arms, because China is a much bigger economy.

But as his hostility to Beijing has ramped up this year, he has assisted Taiwan by sending senior US officials there and he has approved a big arms deal. Trump’s very unpredictability is a factor deterring Beijing.

So what might Beijing do after November 3, and why? The why is easy to answer. Xi speaks of the Chinese motherland in sacred terms and action towards reasserting Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan would be popular domestically.

But Beijing would also want to establish new facts on the ground, some new paradigm, which it could rely on a distracted Washington ignoring, and then a weak Biden administration accepting. Thus, in a reprise of the 1950s, it could seek to retake some Taiwanese islands near the mainland coast. Some of these islands are unpopulated and Beijing might take them with notionally civilian invaders. A much more serious military operation would be to take one or two of the islands with small resident Taiwanese populations.

Less provocative would be massively increased cyber attacks on the Taiwanese government, intimidatory and dangerous missile firings near Taiwan, or substantially enhanced Chinese air incursions into Taiwanese air space.

The limitation of those sorts of activities is that they wouldn’t create new facts on the ground that would permanently alter Taiwan’s circumstances. A more aggressive option would be for Beijing to declare an air defence identification zone around the whole of Taiwan. This would require aircraft from any nation to seek Beijing’s permission to enter. This would be extremely provocative and US military aircraft would of course defy it. But other nations’ civilian airliners would be forced to go along.

The good news is that the US Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii, the most Asia literate and the most important part of the whole US system regarding Asia, has been signalling to Beijing, with deep seriousness, not to exploit this period. Beijing deprecates US politicians, but it takes the US Navy, based in Hawaii, deadly seriously. Indo-Pacom has also positioned major US warships, and I’m led to believe submarines, in the region. Taiwan was also discussed by the Quad foreign ministers — Australia, US, Japan, India — at the just concluded Tokyo meeting.

With so much military concentration there is also the danger of misjudgment and accidental conflict. We should, for reasons of principle and of national self interest, support Taiwan’s exemplary democracy. This would help Beijing avoid strategic miscalculation, especially in this acutely dangerous period coming up.