David A. Andelman, visiting scholar at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, wrote an op-ed for KXLF about the current US-China trade relations under the Trump administration.
Donald Trump is poised to stick a second thumb in the eye of China and its newly ordained President for life, Xi Jinping. On Thursday, it was $50 billion worth of ill-advised tariffs against a country fully able to retaliate with a devastating tariff war of its own. Last week, the first thumb was in the form of a simple two-line note from the White House. Sandwiched between three congressional bills renaming post offices, Trump signed into law the Taiwan Travel Act, which encourages “visits between officials of the United States and Taiwan at all levels.”
Basically, the bill allows the President of Taiwan and other top government officials, who for four decades have been barred from visiting the United States, to come for official visits and allows senior Americans to go there as well.
If the tariff regime is very much top of mind from Wall Street to Shanghai, the Taiwan Travel Act went little noticed in Washington, while looming large in Beijing, where leaders were bordering on the apoplectic. From the podium of the National People’s Congress that had just given him the right to serve as President for life, Xi proclaimed angrily: “Any actions or tricks to separate the country are bound to fail. They will receive the condemnation of the people and the punishment of history.” And he continued to affirm his country’s unflinching intent of maintaining a one-China policy.
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But when the island’s new President, Tsai Ing-wen, took office last year, she effectively repudiated the two-China concept, suddenly ratcheting up the temperature between Taiwan and the mainland. So now, in the wake of the new travel act, the waiting game begins on both sides of the Taiwan Strait: When might Tsai pay a visit to Washington with all that would entail?
Together with the $50 billion in tariffs Trump is prepared to levy on Chinese products and intellectual property, the President is reaching dangerously close to two of the existential third rails of dealing with China.