Tsai meets McCarthy: Will China double down on threatening Taiwan or play it cool?

Nine months after then U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei,  Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文 Cài Yīngwén) is set to touch down in Los Angeles airport to meet Pelosi’s successor Kevin McCarthy.

Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy today in California may cause Beijing to double down on its belligerent approach to “engaging” with Taipei, as Taiwan’s high-stakes presidential campaign gets underway. If the nine months since Pelosi’s visit are any indicator, an aggressive Chinese reaction is likely to boost rather than deter support for Taiwan among democracies in the region and further afield.

Many observers dismissed Pelosi’s trip as prioritizing symbolism over substance, while also putting Taiwan at unnecessary risk. Although there may not have been obvious deliverables for Taiwan resulting from the Pelosi visit, geopolitical winds have generally been blowing Taipei’s way since August.

The Pelosi visit was followed by the biggest military exercises China has ever conducted near Taiwanese waters, with a simulated partial blockade and the firing of 11 missiles over and around the island. China’s timing, six months after its “all-weather” friend Russia invaded Ukraine, raised concerns both regionally and among the democracies who see Taiwan as a bulwark against an expansionist Beijing, as well as a vital economic partner.

China’s threatening exercises helped push Japanese society towards greater support for a more assertive defense posture, and it made it easier for Philippines president Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos Jr. to open bases to U.S. troops that would likely be involved in the event of a Taiwan contingency. It also catalyzed the rapidly warming unofficial ties between Ukraine and Taiwan.

Pelosi’s visit was also welcomed in a diplomatically-isolated Taiwan, which is effectively blocked from the United Nations by Beijing. Polls showed widespread support from Taiwanese people themselves.

Pelosi sets a precedent for the U.S. and its allies

The Pelosi visit also offered a convenient pretext for Beijing to continue a longstanding trend of increasing PLA aggression towards Taiwan, said Ivan Kanapathy, a former member of the National Security Council under both the Trump and Biden administrations and former military attache at the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei.

“China’s response provided an impetus for the United States’ October 2022 export controls and Japan’s new national security strategy two months later,” Kanapathy told The China Project. The Pelosi visit also sent a reassuring message to other American partners and treaty allies in the neighborhood.

“Had Speaker Pelosi canceled her visit in response to Beijing’s pressure, U.S. credibility and alliances in the region would have suffered and Beijing would have been emboldened,” he added.

Pelosi’s trip actually sparked a chain of events that boosted Taiwan’s unofficial diplomatic relations with other countries, particularly at the parliamentary level.

“If senior U.S. officials stop meeting with Taiwan’s president, allied officials will do the same,” Kanapathy said. “This would increase Taiwan’s political isolation, reduce Taiwan’s economic and societal connections over time, and ultimately harm deterrence because Beijing would then perceive little cost for military aggression.”

Japan’s seat at the table

China’s growing threat towards Taiwan is largely framed by English-language media around the Beijing-Taipei-Washington triangle, but as China’s exercises last August highlighted, Japan is very much a part of the equation.

Chinese encroachments into Japanese waters are nothing new. But when five missiles landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone in the aftermath of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, “military conflict in the Taiwan Strait became less unimaginable to Japan,” Eleanor Shiori Hughes, a defense analyst at the Asia Group, told The China Project.

After all, Hughes noted, some Japanese islands, like Yonaguni Island, are situated closer to Taiwan than one of Japan’s main islands. As such, “concerns about a Taiwan emergency have penetrated the Japanese public consciousness.”

Madoka Fukuda, a political scientist at Hosei University in Japan, wrote in February for the Washington-based Stimson Center that China’s reaction to the Pelosi visit changed how Japanese saw China.

“The Japanese public is now widely aware of the need to enhance defense capabilities and Japan’s role in the alliance with the U.S., perceiving China as a threat, especially in the Senkaku Islands or the Taiwan Strait,” Fukuda wrote. In a notable first, a Japanese poll late last year found more respondents supporting taking on a stronger role in its security alliance with the U.S than opposing it.

“The more aggressive China becomes, the more other countries want to cooperate with Taiwan and with each other,” Kolas Yotaka, spokesperson for Taiwan’s presidential office, told The China Project. “China overestimates its ability to force others to behave the way they want, and underestimates how much people value their own freedom.”

The sense of increasing cooperation in the region is palpable, especially among U.S. treaty allies, with South Korea and Japan ties improving after years of bad blood. The Philippines also announced that it would grant the United States military access to three naval bases on the island of Luzon, near Taiwan.

Czech mate?

Beyond the region, other countries have also been upgrading their unofficial ties with Taiwan, with the Czech Republic leading the way. In March, the Central European country sent the largest foreign delegation ever to visit Taiwan since its democratization after the end of the Cold War. The high-level delegation of 160 politicians, businesspeople and members of civil society flew to Taiwan to meet with Tsai and Taiwanese lawmakers. They arrived from Prague in a Czech government plane piloted by active Czech air force pilots.

Members of the 160-plus strong Czech delegation to Taiwan from March 25, 2023. Photo via European Values Center for Security Policy.

In 2020, the last time a large delegation from the Czech Republic visited Taiwan, China retaliated by freezing business contracts with Czech companies, Jakub Janda, director of the Prague-based think tank European Values Center for Security Policy told The China Project. Janda, who was a member of the most recent delegation, said that to his knowledge, China has yet to retaliate this time around, despite the group including top national security officials.

No one knows how China will respond to the Tsai-McCarthy meeting, but the Czech delegation’s visit and China’s lack of a response suggests two possibilities. One may be that China — with French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen meeting Chinese leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 this week — will keep its response muted as it tries to boost its economy and present itself as a responsible power, despite its close ties to Russia. Another is that China may simply wait for its VIP visitors to leave before reacting. Janda said he is leaning toward the former possibility.

“We are waiting to see if China responds after the Tsai-McCarthy meeting,” he said. “We think the main reason for the lack of retaliation is that China is now pretending to be nice to Europeans as Macron visits Beijing to kneel before Xi.”