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By PHELIM KINE
with STUART LAU
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Hi, China Watchers. Today we dig into Taiwan Vice President-elect Bi-khim Hsiao's plea for an end to delays in U.S. weaponry deliveries, parse a setback in Beijing's diplomacy in the Pacific Islands and profile a book that describes how Taiwanese students in the island's authoritarian era brought their fight for "freedom and justice" to U.S. college campuses.
Let's get to it. — Phelim.
Taiwan's VP-elect: We're ready to produce U.S. weapons systems on the island
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The Taiwanese navy launches a missile from a frigate in July 2022. | Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images |
Taiwan's Vice President-elect, Bi-khim Hsiao, has delivered a sharp rebuke of delays in U.S. weapons' deliveries to the island.
"Deficiencies in the traditional U.S. defense industry production base" meant that "the current U.S. defense industry base is producing neither enough nor on time the hardware to meet global demand," Hsiao said via video link to the Hill & Valley Forum on AI Security in Washington on Wednesday.
Hsiao also urged the Biden administration to allow the self-governing island to enter into co-production deals with U.S. arms manufacturers to accelerate the flow of weapons to the island's defense forces.
She pitched Taiwan's industrial "ecosystem of materials, machine tools, integrated chips" and skilled workforce as a perfect fit for "integrated collaborations, or a possible co-production scheme" for weapons systems the island requires to deter a possible Chinese invasion attempt. Hsiao got down to specifics — she wants the Biden administration to include Taiwan in the Pentagon's National Defense Industrial Strategy's "international collaboration mechanisms such as SOSA, the Security of Supply Arrangements." By joining SOSA Taiwan could request expedited delivery of U.S.-produced weapons systems.
Those comments reflect Taiwan's frustration with a yearslong, $19 billion backlog of U.S. weapons deliveries at a time of growing concern that China may be prepared to take the island by force by as early as 2027. And they suggest that the government of Taiwan's President-elect Lai Ching-te, who takes office on May 20, will push the Biden administration for innovative approaches to ensure that the island gets the arms necessary to bolster its defensive capacity.
But that's not likely to happen anytime soon. The Pentagon is reluctant to approve weapons co-production deals in Taiwan due to concerns about the island's vulnerability to Chinese espionage operations. And any such co-production ventures would rely on the same suppliers for critical weapons parts that are already struggling to service existing producers.
Still, Hsiao's suggested solution — licensing and manufacturing agreements that would allow firms including Lockheed Martin and RTX to produce advanced weapons systems including the Javelin, Harpoon and Stinger missiles on the island — has support on Capitol Hill. As Phelim and POLITICO's Paul McLeary reported last month, lawmakers plan to introduce a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that would allow for the transfer of sophisticated weapons technology to Taiwan to enable domestic production.
Hsiao also argued that Taiwan's push to develop asymmetric weapons systems — including armed air and sea drones modeled on those that Ukraine deploys against Russia — isn't sufficient to deter a Chinese invasion. The Biden administration has strongly backed that approach as an alternative to bigger ticket weapons systems with limited effectiveness against a sea-borne invasion force.
"While we are learning meaningful lessons from Ukraine’s defense, so are Russia and China," Hsiao said. "If our adversaries are quickly adapting and investing in new technologies, we have no choice but to find a way to get ahead."
So long, Solomon Islands' China chum
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Manasseh Sogavare speaks at a press conference in Honiara on July 2023. | Charley Piringi/AFP via Getty Images |
The Biden administration may have scored a backhanded victory in its diplomatic rivalry with Beijing in the South Pacific this week. The political party of Solomon Islands' China-friendly Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare took a beating in the country's election results this week and announced he won't stand as a candidate when lawmakers convene this week to choose a new leader.
Pacific island headache. That's good news for the Biden administration, which has fretted over Sogavare ever since he signed a security pact with China in 2022 that the U.S. feared could provide Beijing a new beachhead for military operations across the Pacific. Sogavare added insult to injury when he skipped Biden's U.S.-Pacific Islands Forum summit in September in Washington because he said he wanted to avoid a "lecture" from U.S. officials.
Hold the champagne. But Sogavare's exit doesn't end his influence or those of other lawmakers who favor closer ties with Beijing. Sogavare may "play the role of the spoiler" once a new government is chosen and "work behind the scenes as well as publicly to undermine any new coalition if the opposition prevails," said John T. Hennessey-Niland, a former U.S. ambassador to Palau and now professor of practice at the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University.
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Power Play's host Anne McElvoy interviews Elbridge Colby, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development about how America is heading towards an "iceberg" that is war with China. Listen to it here.
TRANSLATING WASHINGTON
— LABOR DEPT RIPS XINJIANG LABOR AUDITS: U.S. firms seeking to comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act can't rely on traditional "social auditing" analyses of supply chain, supplier and worker data, a senior Labor Department official warned Tuesday. Such audits can't occur "without government oversight, making objective worker interviews free from reprisal an impossibility. … Auditors have reportedly been detained, harassed, threatened or stopped at the airport," in China, Deputy Undersecretary of Labor for International Affairs Thea Lee told a hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China on Tuesday. Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said in response: "The allegation of 'forced labor' is nothing but a lie concocted by the U.S. side … to wantonly suppress Chinese enterprises."
— CHINESE AMBASSADOR ISSUES U.S. TRAVEL WARNING: There's no sign yet that the Chinese government is persuading the State Department to downgrade its Level 3 "Reconsider Travel" advisory for China. So China's Ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, highlighted the perils of the U.S. for Chinese visitors in a "Safe in America" event in Washington. Xie's shortlist: "racial discrimination, … 'hysterical McCarthyism' and the resurgence of a 'politically correct chilling effect'" that is "poisoning the public opinion environment," said a Chinese state media report of the event published Tuesday. Xie hammered those points home by posting a Chinese-language pamphlet of key safety tips on his X account.
TRANSLATING EUROPE
EU TRADE CHIEF EXPECTS ELECTRIC VEHICLE PROBE TO WRAP UP BY SUMMER: The EU's anti-subsidy probe into Chinese electric vehicles is expected to be wrapped up and move on to the next stage by summer, EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said Tuesday. "On the electrical vehicles probe, the work is indeed advancing," Dombrovskis said in an interview with POLITICO's Jakob Hanke Vela. "Certainly, one can expect next steps before the summer break." Dombrovskis' remarks suggest that the probe will not be carried forward to the next European Commission mandate, which begins in December.
Dombrovskis also warns Beijing about the EU closing its market: Dombrovskis also warned Beijing about the need to open up its market for EU medical equipment, a thorny issue at the heart of the EU's first ever case under the International Procurement Instrument. "Launching this … probe allows us to enter into a dialogue with China … and if it does not bring results, it allows us also to restrict the EU's medical devices markets to China's producers," Dombrovskis told Jakob. "Either both markets are open or both markets are not open."
CHINA LASHES OUT AT UK OVER SURVEILLANCE GEAR REMOVAL: The Chinese Embassy to the U.K. hit out at the British government's pledge to remove Chinese surveillance tools from sensitive sites by April 2025. "We firmly oppose the U.K. side's discriminatory practices against Chinese companies under the pretext of national security," an embassy spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday. "We urge the U.K. side to stop political manipulation." The embassy's comment came a day after the British government reiterated the removal timeline, saying that half of all Chinese equipment in these sensitive sites had already been removed.
HOT FROM THE CHINA WATCHERSPHERE
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A U.S. and a Chinese flag pictured outside a building in Beijing. | Teh Eng Koon/AFP via Getty Images |
— PEW: U.S. STILL SOUR ON CHINA: The latest Pew Research Center survey of U.S. attitudes toward China shows public perceptions of China remain solidly negative. Some 42 percent of Americans consider China "an enemy" while 81 percent "see the country unfavorably," according to survey results published Wednesday. And 79 percent of Americans "have little or no confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping to do the right thing regarding world affairs." Liu at the Chinese embassy blamed those survey results on "some U.S. politicians and anti-China forces driven by ideological bias and selfish political interests … [that] have poisoned the public opinion atmosphere in both countries."
— LATEST CHINA-PHILIPPINES DUST-UP AT SEA: Another week, another incursion by Chinese naval units in Philippine waters of the South China Sea. Chinese Coast Guard and Maritime Militia vessels "harassed, blocked, water cannoned, rammed vessels of the Philippine Coast Guard and the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources" who were on a support mission for Filipino fishing boats, the Philippine Foreign Affairs Department said in a statement Tuesday. The U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, MaryKay Carlson, condemned the incident as "dangerous maneuvers," in a post on X. Beijing remains defiant. The Philippine vessels "infringed on China's sovereignty; China Coast Guard took necessary measures to expel them," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Tuesday.
— TAIWAN TELLS ITS CITIZENS: AVOID CHINA: Taiwan's government has advice for its citizens considering a trip to China: Don't. Beijing's more expansive Law on Guarding State Secrets, which took effect Wednesday, means "the risk of a possible violation of the law has greatly increased," Taiwan's official Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement Tuesday. The law can classify "news reporting, academic research, business and investment information, or conversations with local people" as "state secrets," so the council urged Taiwanese "not to travel to China unless it is necessary."
TRANSLATING CHINA
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— DOOLITTLE RAID RENDERS CHINESE PROPAGANDA PUSH: The Chinese government is all about U.S.-Chinese military cooperation — in World War II, that is. Beijing is lauding the bonds between the survivors of the April 1942 U.S. Air Force Doolittle Raid on Tokyo — airmen who bailed out or crash-landed in China after the attack —and the Chinese citizens who rescued them. Chinese state media has been awash for weeks —including People's Daily Online coverage on Tuesday — with stories that recall those efforts as "a test of fire and blood." An online video documentary hailed that cooperation as "countless drops of goodwill [that] converge to create a bridge of friendship." State media last week reported on an event at the Chinese embassy in which Charge D'Affaires Jing Quan linked the bonds between the U.S. airmen and their Chinese rescuers with current efforts to revive bilateral "people-to-people exchange."
We've been here before. State media in October lionized U.S.-China cooperation in World War II through the American Volunteer Group, popularly known as the Flying Tigers. That followed the flood of effusive state media rhetoric in August marking the 140th anniversary of the birth of General Joseph Stilwell, who led U.S. forces in China in World War II. It's all "a painless way to signal that despite all [the bilateral tensions] China still wants engagement," argued Jonathan Hassid, associate professor of political science at Iowa State University and an expert on Chinese propaganda. One of Beijing's goals is to present itself to developing countries as a responsible global power that "doesn't want to be enemies with the U.S.," Hassid said. The campaign also highlights Japan's role as an aggressor in WWII at a time when Washington and Tokyo are in lockstep against Beijing's increasingly assertive posture in the Indo-Pacific.
"Anything that China can do to separate the U.S.-Japanese alliance is helpful" to Beijing, Hassid said.
HEADLINES
Financial Times: A disappearance in Xinjiang
ChinaFile: Lessons from Tiananmen for today's university presidents
Wall Street Journal: Why Beijing won't acknowledge 'competition' with the U.S.
ONE BOOK, THREE QUESTIONS
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Erin Kirk and Carton W. Chen. |
The Book: Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies and Cold War Activism
The Author: Wendy Cheng is chair of the Intercollegiate American Studies Program at Scripps College
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is the most important takeaway from your book?
We all come from political histories, many of which are not well known or understood. Even under challenging circumstances, people can organize creatively and effectively toward shared goals.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing this book?
Although Taiwanese independence today is often understood to be an anti-PRC position, during the 1960s to the 1980s many Taiwan independence activists were interested in and sympathetic to what was happening in the PRC. After all, for those who opposed the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan, they had a shared enemy. This changed later on, but it shows that their politics were not as straightforward as we might think today.
What lessons might pro-democracy Chinese students in the U.S. learn from the pro-democracy Taiwanese students during the island's authoritarian era?
They are part of a long tradition of student migrants who have fought for freedom and justice far from home. They don't have to concede to the terms set by the U.S. or by the CCP. Build relationships and solidarity with other communities who are fighting against authoritarian regimes.
Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at pkine@politico.com.
Thanks to: Heidi Vogt, Jakob Hanke Vela and digital producers Tara Gnewikow and Fiona Lally. Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week's items? Email us at pkine@politico.com and slau@politico.eu.
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