Here’s the People’s Republic of China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, still on about the Republic of China’s President, Tsai Ing-wen’s congratulatory telecon with President-Elect Donald Trump:
We urge the new US leader and government to fully understand the seriousness of the Taiwan issue, and to continue to stick to the one-China policy[.]
He went on to say that US-PRC relations would be “badly affected” were such behaviors to continue.
Indeed we do fully understand the seriousness of the Taiwan issue and the seriousness of the status of the RoC, which sits on that island. It’s about time our administration gained that understanding, too, and began moving away from the…foolishness…of the last 45 years.
And Geng had this:
The Taiwan question has a bearing on China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and is one of China’s core interests.
Indeed. The “Taiwan” question has a very large bearing on the island nation’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity and is at the center of the RoC’s core interests.
If our relationship with the mainland Chinese government is “badly affected,” that would be to the PRC’s detriment, not ours. Furthermore, our relationship with the mainland already is—or would be with a less timid administration—badly affected by the PRC’s naked aggression in the East and South China Seas and by its use of northern Korea’s behaviors as levers against the Republic of Korea, Japan, and us.
The PRC isn’t helping matters either, when it trots out its token, and crony, capitalist Wang Jianlin to make naked threats against American citizens:
I’ve invested $10 billion in the U.S. I have 20,000 employees there. If things aren’t handled well, those 20,000 people won’t have food to eat[.]
(The PRC and Wang are projecting their own failings, too: Americans don’t starve from our government’s retaliation against those who disobey it.)
The beginning of Trump’s recognition:
Trump said on “Fox News Sunday” that he doesn’t feel “bound by a one-China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.”
It’s remotely possible for reasonable men to debate the degree of linkage involved in the fate of a sovereign nation, but it’s entirely appropriate for Trump—or anyone—to not feel bound by a “one-China” policy. Throughout these last 45 years, the US has never recognized a one-China policy; we’ve only acknowledged that the PRC and an early, weak RoC had such a policy, even though too many American administrations have meekly behaved as though we accepted it.
On the other hand, one China: The Republic of China. One China: The People’s Republic of China.
One China, and one China.