News reports have already moved on from the historic meeting earlier this month in Singapore between China’s President Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou. The summit may have been notable as the first encounter between the leaders of the two countries since Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in 1949, but it also raised questions in scope far beyond the China-Taiwan relationship. Above all, Asia watchers should be intrigued whether Xi’s presence at the meeting indicates that Chinese foreign policy finally is evolving toward adoption of more liberal norms of international behavior on questions of core national interest.
After all, it was only 19 years ago that Beijing tried to influence the first direct Taiwanese presidential election by launching ballistic missiles near the island. That came after prior missile launches in 1995 over then-leader Lee Teng-hui’s visit to Cornell University, his alma mater. The blatant attempt the following year to intimidate Taiwan’s voters not to elect Lee, a pro-independence candidate, in the first open election in the island’s history prompted Bill Clinton to send two U.S. aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Strait.
The effects of this crisis set the stage for the subsequent era of Chinese foreign and security policy. To the United States and many Asian regional states, a China that in the mid-1990s had just begun its economic and military ascent suddenly appeared both threatening and diplomatically immature, and therefore a potentially uncontrolled danger. Beijing’s response to the U.S. Navy’s intervention, on the other hand, was to embark on a major military buildup, fueled by annual double-digit increases in its defense budget, designed in no small part to field weapons that could target U.S. forces operating in Asia, and thus prevent a similar humiliation from ever taking place again.
Two decades and four Taiwanese presidential elections later, China’s methods have evolved dramatically. Once again, a candidate not supported by Beijing is favored to win an upcoming election, but instead of showing brute force a dramatically stronger China is using the carrot. The subtlety fits the new conditions of China-Taiwan relations since Ma came to power in Taiwan in 2008. Ma has presided over a dramatic rapprochement with the mainland, one that many observers say has reduced the threat of cross-strait conflict; others have argued that the policy foreshadows a de facto “Finlandization” of Taiwan and its eventual absorption into China. Among the milestones of Ma’s tenure has been the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) to reduce trade barriers between the two and the inauguration of direct cross-strait mail service and air flights. The ECFA, in particular, has been a controversial policy, hindered in its full implementation by Taiwan’s parliament over lingering fears that it will result in the island’s economy being overwhelmed by its giant neighbor.
Ma is now preparing to relinquish power, and Taiwan’s voters will go to the polls in January to elect his successor. By all estimations, Ma’s ruling KMT party will lose the election, and the traditionally more independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, will win. Tsai has pledged not to disturb the tranquility across the Strait, toning down any comments that indicate she might reverse recent trends in relations or move to reopen the independence issue. Nonetheless, Xi and the Chinese government clearly do not want to risk the progress they have made with Taiwan and thus decided to make a startling public show of support for Ma and his party.
From one perspective, then, Xi’s decision to smile and shake hands for the cameras is exactly the type of modern China that Washington hoped would emerge eventually from the Mao era. The guiding assumption of U.S. policymakers since Richard Nixon opened ties with Beijing was that, as it integrated into the global political and economic system, China would adopt the norms of liberal international behavior that underpinned the postwar system. Jimmy Carter pursued this path by derecognizing Taiwan and opening formal diplomatic relations with China, while the George H. W. Bush Administration essentially ignored the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and Bill Clinton engineered China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. This mantra was repeated as recently as September by President Obama in his Rose Garden remarks with Xi, when he stated that “the United States welcomes the rise of a China that is peaceful, stable, prosperous, and a responsible player in global affairs.”
From the perspective of liberal internationalism, then, the process has been a slow one, punctuated by unfortunate moments like the 1995–96 missile firings (not to mention 1989 itself), but nonetheless proceeding in a direction that brought Xi to Singapore earlier this month to meet Ma as all but equals. This view would suggest that what is needed is greater engagement, continued summits like that between Obama and Xi, and annual high-level meetings like the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, all of which will help the ongoing evolution of China’s external behavior, and possibly its internal behavior as well.
Yet there is another view of Saturday’s summit, one that calls into question China’s adoption of liberal norms and instead suggests that Beijing is simply becoming more subtle in using its strength to shape regional and international relations in its favor.
Xi’s willingness to meet Ma in person, and during the run-up to the presidential election, was shocking in its boldness. It sent as strong a message as possible of China’s expectation that its voice will carry weight in Taiwan’s most important decisions. The adoption of this tactic is itself a result of the past twenty years of Chinese growth. Beijing is today far more confident of its military strength and global standing than it was in 1995. Yet at the same time, it has just as little confidence that the Taiwanese people are moving closer to the mainland—and indeed, there is abundant evidence that pro-mainland sentiment is waning in Taiwan.
China has not completely given up the threat of the stick. During the administration of the last DPP President it passed the 2005 anti-secession law that pre-justifies Chinese intervention if Taiwan even calls for a referendum on independence. The law remains on the books as a warning. Backing up its implied threats with muscle, it continues to place ballistic missiles, now more than a thousand of them, across the Strait from Taiwan, and its growing amphibious and air capabilities have now rendered uncertain Taiwan’s ability successfully to defend itself. Yet Xi understands that overt threats of action against Taiwan’s independence (if not survival) would likely unify Taiwanese public opinion against the mainland. But Ma’s unpopularity and growing Taiwanese concern over the growth of Chinese influence on the island mean that a new and more direct approach is required to swing the January election in a direction favorable to Beijing.
This is not a form of behavior that liberal internationalism would recognize. This is realpolitik nationalism. Xi was mainly reminding Taiwanese voters that China still has a vested interest in the outcome of the election, the more so in that Beijing does not consider Taiwan a foreign country. The meeting was no less a veiled threat for being couched in smiles and handshakes. Its directness is breathtaking, but that, too, is part of Xi Jinping’s style.
And that is the main takeaway from the historic summit: Asia lives in the era of Xi Jinping. None of his predecessors would have had the audacity or confidence to pull this sort of thing off. This is his style, and it is evident in everything from his direct involvement in the territorial dispute with Japan to his dealings with Barack Obama. He is like the ego to Vladimir Putin’s id. Subtle in his use of propaganda and the media, and sensitive to the levers of global power, Xi reflects a China that is at once confident and paranoid, deeply integrated externally into the global political and economic system, but internally resistant to liberal norms and suspicious of the designs of liberal states on it. The possibility of losing Taiwan to eventual independence remains unthinkable in Beijing, and until China’s naval power can stand off U.S. power and make Taiwan’s defense highly questionable, other modalities must serve.
That is not the path that liberal internationalists have predicted from their engagement with China. No Chinese language equivalent of kumbaya has yet emerged. Xi’s domestic civil society crackdown, aggressive island building campaign in the South China Sea, and now the Taiwan election intervention rather reveal a regime committed to rewriting regional norms of behavior in ways that bolster its parochial interests. China still thinks zero-sum, not win-win. The battle for China’s soul is therefore far from over, and a few diplomatic photo shoots should not avert the world’s gaze from Beijing’s evolving strategy.