Taiwan’s Diplomatic Dance

FP Insiders get to read exclusive excerpts from our regular FP Live interviews. This week, host Ravi Agrawal sat down for one of the program’s regular China discussions with three experts: Ryan Hass, a former China director at the National Security Council; Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow and Foreign Policy columnist; and James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and writer of China Brief.

The discussion encompassed highlights from the recent meeting between the presidents of China and Russia, the recently concluded “two sessions” meetings in Beijing—an annual rubber-stamp convening—and the ongoing dramas over TikTok and a recent public sighting of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. The bit our editors want to highlight in particular, however, involves rival diplomatic missions from Taiwan. Former President Ma Ying-jeou became the first sitting or former leader to visit mainland China since 1949, a trip Taipei’s ruling party has called “regrettable.” It comes right as President Tsai Ing-wen prepares to visit the United States and Central America this week.

Subscribers can watch the full video in the box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript, exclusive to FP Insiders.

Ravi Agrawal: Ryan, you used to be responsible for America’s China policy. How do you think the Biden administration views last week’s meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Moscow?

Ryan Hass: My expectation is that they’re watching very carefully. As I look at the meetings in Moscow last week, what really struck me was that, for Putin, Ukraine is an existential issue, but that wasn’t the train upon which the conversation was had.

The conversation took place on Xi’s preferred train, which was talking about locking in China and Russia as long-term partners for dealing with the challenge and the confrontation that they feel they face from the West. This is instrumental to Xi’s ability to achieve his visions. He wants to rejuvenate China to its past glory. In order to achieve this, he needs to be able to concentrate on the principal challenge that he feels he faces, which is coming from the United States, to be able to free up resources and attention. To do so, Xi needs to have a benign land border with Russia.

Having Russia as a focus of American policy also provides a bit of distraction, takes a bit of the bull’s-eye off Beijing’s back, which is probably welcome. But Russia also plays an important role for China in terms of providing affordable and secure supplies of food and fuel, both of which China is vulnerable on.

RA: James, what’s your sense of the biggest things that emerged from the “two sessions” meetings in Beijing? It seemed like China was beginning to take a more rhetorically hard-line stance against the United States, at least than it previously has.

James Palmer: We’ve seen this shift take place over the last three or four years. In past years there was more passive-aggressive rhetoric about the United States. For example, many references to “a certain country” interfering; now you’re just getting the Unites States, straight-up named. The two sessions, particularly the advisory body, there are these pushes or experiments with new angles, and one of those that was quite visible this time was the extremely hostile ultranationalism.

The other thing we’ve seen, of course, is this big reassertion of Xi’s power. Even in new instructions to the State Council, Leninist ideology was removed and replaced with Xi Jinping Thought as the only guiding factor. That’s been important for him, especially in the wake of zero-COVID, too, because zero-COVID and its ultimate failure was a failure of his policy. The need to assert himself essentially is even stronger.

RA: Taiwan’s former president, Ma Ying-jeou, landed in China yesterday. It was a historic visit, the first by any sitting or former Taiwanese leader since 1949. Ryan, what’s your sense of the impact this visit might have? How should we read it as news emerges from there?

RH: The way I think about it requires stepping back slightly to 2015, which was when Ma Ying-jeou made headlines by being the first sitting president to meet with China’s leader in Singapore. Ma Ying-jeou was term-limited, so he left office the next year. He was succeeded by Tsai Ing-wen, who is a more anti-unification leader by orientation.

The fact that Ma Ying-jeou is traveling to China, coincidental with Tsai Ing-wen transiting the United States, is a neat encapsulation of the different visions the two leaders have. Ma Ying-jeou’s argument essentially is that he and his political party, the KMT [Kuomintang], are able to protect Taiwan by managing relations across the Taiwan Strait. Tsai Ing-wen’s argument is that China is implacable in its ambitions to absorb Taiwan and that the best way for Taiwan to protect itself is to move closer to the United States and strengthen its ability to deter aggression from China. These two competing philosophies are on display right now, where the former and current leader of Taiwan are physically going to be located this week. And ultimately, this is a choice that the Taiwan voters will have a say in: Taiwan has presidential elections next January.

RA: James, just from the U.S. perspective, how do you think Washington is looking at Ma Ying-jeou’s visit, and what takeaways will you be keeping an eye on?

JP: I’ll be looking for the language used on the Chinese side because Taiwan is always a fraught issue. Everybody has to walk this line whereby there’s no acknowledgment that in any way it’s a country. If they take him seriously, they will look for other ways to give him respect, whether it’s the positioning of the meeting, who he gets to see, how he’s filmed for the TV cameras. I think they’ll be taking it pretty seriously because they have so few options in China-Taiwanese public relations at the moment.

RA: Anyone have a hot take on where the TikTok saga is going to head in the next week or so?

JP: However much you imagine everybody hates TikTok on the hill, it’s even worse. It’s the one issue that will bring everybody together—Democrats, Republicans, cats, dogs. The congressional hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew did nothing to help with that.

RH: I’m a parent of a 15-year-old high school freshman daughter, so I’m certainly following this with interest. As a China watcher, I’m a bit bemused that TikTok has somehow become a symbol of the challenge that China poses to the United States. As an American citizen, I wish we had leaders that were capable of taking a more holistic view of data security as an issue, rather than this whack-a-mole approach of going after a single company.

My best guess is that ultimately this issue will be decided in the courts, and it will come down to a question of whether or not the government is capable of making a compelling case that TikTok poses a national security risk. If they can, then I expect that the courts would side with the government. If they don’t, then TikTok may continue to be used by hundreds of millions of Americans.

RA: Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma has made a public appearance in China after a year away. What’s your take on that?

Zongyuan Zoe Liu: Jack Ma has been cherished as the token or symbol of China’s entrepreneurship. However, without knowing exactly why or to what extent the government played a role in convincing him to come back, we cannot say this is a significant government policy change in the private sector.

Stepping back, the rise of Jack Ma and the rise of Alibaba has a lot to do with government or monetary support. In particular, right before Alibaba’s IPO listing in the United States in 2014, Jack Ma received a capital injection from China Investment Corporation, which is the government investment vehicle in China.

RH: I draw a bit of a line from Liu He’s speech at Davos this year telling the Davos crowd that they’re welcome to come back to China, to Premier Li Keqiang’s presentation at the two sessions where he said, “China is open for business,” to Jack Ma suddenly appearing in Hangzhou. It appears to be enough data points to draw a pattern.

The Chinese are trying to counter some bad headlines. One of the very prominent Chinese businessmen, Bao Fan, has been silenced and missing for a while. An American due diligence company had its offices raided last week, and so I imagine that all of these pieces fit together.