Blake Hounshell is worried about Sino-US relations in the light of arms sales to Taiwan:
Now, China is expressing furious anger over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan -- threatening unprecedented actions in response, including sanctions on U.S. companies, and hinting darkly of a broader unwillingness to cooperate with American diplomatic priorities (read: North Korea and Iran). Military-to-military cooperation between the U.S. and China now seems to be off the table, and deputies-level talks will be suspended.
Truth be told, China hadn't been and probably wouldn't be super helpful on Iran and North Korea's nuclear programs, but the direction the relationship is taking is worrying.
There’s an interesting backstory to this. Throughout its time in power the pro-independence DPP refused to buy arms from the US. There were complaints from the Taiwanese that the Americans were palming junk on them (plausible in that the US wouldn’t want the PLA inheriting any really top line stuff anyway should the worst happen). But what that was really about was an attempt to get a commitment from the US to protect Taiwan with its own assets, so drawing it away from China and into the American orbit.
That option was rejected by the US, which was part of the reason why the working relationship between China and the US during the Bush years was generally a pretty good one, after that little misunderstanding about the spy plane over Hainan - it was when, for instance, the military contacts now being suspended by the Chinese were first initiated.
The apparent paradox here is that the reason the latest tranche of arms sales went through is because the Taiwanese elected the comparatively pro-China Kuomintang, which has since been busy resurrecting economic and cultural ties with the mainland. The Taiwanese public overwhelmingly favours the current status quo in Taiwan-China relations. From the KMT’s point of view, buying a load of American weapons helps it resists domestic suspicions that it is drawing too close to China. That in turn enables it to go on establishing closer commercial and diplomatic links with the mainland. Additionally, a stronger defence posture allows Taipei to have more say over the speed and depth of the links between the two.
And that, after all, is the plan as far as Taiwan is concerned: absorbtion, rather than invasion, with an eventual bit of political tidying up to seal the deal. It wouldn’t be too cynical to regard the occasional subvention from the Taiwanese taxpayer to the US defence industries as America’s price for acquiescence in the process. I don’t think the Chinese countermeasures are especially harsh, given that their formal position is that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and that selling it weapons is the equivalent of selling them to Guangdong or Sichuan. Beijing’s response to that would involve more than mumbling about sanctions on defence companies that don’t sell into the Chinese market anyway. I do think Airbus will have a good year, for what it’s worth.
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