Editor’s note for Monday, August 1, 2022

My thoughts today:

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will on Wednesday visit Taiwan and meet president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文 Cài Yīngwén), according to “three people familiar with the situation” cited by the Financial Times and per “a senior Taiwanese government official and a U.S. official” quoted by CNN.

Here are a few things to read and watch to understand the situation:

There was the usual fiery bluster from Chinese government spokesperson Zhào Lìjiān 赵立坚 at the Foreign Ministry press briefing he held today (in English, Chinese), warning that the “People’s Liberation Army of China will never sit idly by” if Pelosi visit Taiwan.

However, some of the wolf warriors have softened their tone somewhat. Hú Xījìn 胡锡进, former editor-in-chief of nationalist newspaper the Global Times, ended last week writing that “Chinese mainland will fight to the end to thwart Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan,” and that the “Taiwan Straits will be the place where the U.S. will finally show its true ‘paper tiger’ face.” By today he was tweeting with a much less threatening tone:

Let her go to Taiwan. But pray before departure: wish herself a safe journey and wish herself not be defined by history as a sinner who starts a spiral of escalation process expanding military frictions to a large-scale war in the Taiwan Strait.

Meanwhile, the main effort of state broadcaster CCTV seems to have been a very unflattering video portrait of Nancy Pelosi (in Chinese), but CCTV has a long way to go to come even close to the toxicity of Pelosi’s critics and haters in American media.

Mark Liu (劉德音 Liú Déyīn), chair of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which makes the world’s most advanced chips, gave a brief interview to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria (part 1, part 2).

• Liu says that China could not take over TSMC in an invasion: The global, interconnected nature of the work the company does means war would simply spell an end to operations, and an invader would not be able to continue making high end chips without ongoing, smooth international partnerships.

Ryan Hass, former director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the U.S. National Security Council, yesterday published a short history and policy analysis “An American perspective on the role of Taiwan in U.S.-China relations” on the website of the Brookings Institution.

• The piece argues that U.S. policymakers “will need to restore coherence to policy decisions and public messaging” on Taiwan, which is important for the U.S. because “Taiwan is one of a small number of issues that has the potential to spark conflict between the United States and China.”

Chairman Rabbit (兔主席 tù zhǔxí), a popular WeChat account and pseudonym of Rén Yì 任意, the grandson of Party elder Rén Zhòngyí 任仲夷, published a post translated into English by the Ginger River Review titled “The Taiwan question may be turning into a ‘gray rhino’ event.”

A gray rhino event is a highly probable, high impact threat that people just ignore and watch as it runs right up to them.

Our word of the day is gray rhino event (灰犀牛事件 huī xīniú shìjiàn).

Admin note: TheChinaProject.com now redirects to TheChinaProject.com, but we’ll be moving all our content over to the new address this month for the formal launch of The China Project on September 1.