U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken said Wednesday that China is ditching the decades-long status quo and ratcheting up pressure on Taiwan toward what it calls “reunification.”
When the United States normalized relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1979, it agreed to a principle that came to be known as the “One China” policy, taking a position of “strategic ambiguity” on the contested question of Taiwanese sovereignty. Since then, America has never officially recognized Taiwan as a sovereign nation in its own right.
The arrangement has kept the peace for the intervening years but China appears to be willing to challenge the status quo. “What’s changed is this — a decision by the government in Beijing that that status quo was no longer acceptable, that they wanted to speed up the process by which they would pursue reunification,” Blinken said during an interview with Bloomberg.
“They also, I think, made decisions about how they would do that, including exerting more pressure on Taiwan, coercion — making life difficult in a variety of ways on Taiwan in the hopes that that would speed reunification,” Blinken told the outlet.
Blinken’s discussion comes on the heels of comments he made last week at Stanford University that China is seeking to take over Taiwan, contravening over 40 years of regional stability, “on a much faster timeline.” Chinese President Xi Jinping declared during a Communist Party Congress that “the wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification.”
Despite China’s aggressive claims to Taiwan and what it describes as reunification, its Communist Party never has controlled the island.
China’s new muscular approach to Taiwan has been marked by an increase in military drills, with a party spokesman threatening to “take resolute and strong measures” in response to the recent visits to Taiwan of American political representatives, including House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip in August.
Despite Chinese saber-rattling, Blinken has sought to assuage China: “We don’t look for conflict. We don’t want a Cold War. We’re not trying to contain or restrain China.”