Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: The Trump administration blocks Taiwan’s president from transiting through the United States, sex scandals abound on the Chinese internet, and Beijing makes a big push on nuclear fusion.
Trump Snubs Lai
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has reportedly blocked Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te from transiting through the United States on his way to and from Latin America—the first such known refusal of a Taiwanese president in more than three decades.
The move comes as Trump, who is said to have personally opposed Lai’s visit, is attempting to curry favor with Beijing before a potential visit to China.
Because Washington does not officially recognize Taiwan’s government, Taiwanese presidents cannot officially visit the United States. In 1994, Washington modified its previous ban on all visits by Taiwanese leaders to allow “transit visits,” in which Taiwanese leaders nominally stop in the United States on the way to Latin American countries—a handful of which recognize Taiwan.
In practice, though, these are visits to the United States in all but name, with Taiwanese leaders often using them as lobbying opportunities.
Trump’s move could face opposition from Congress. In 2018, Congress passed the Taiwan Travel Act, which supports high-level Taiwanese officials visiting the United States under “respectful” conditions. However, though Congress can still muster some bipartisanship when it comes to pressuring Beijing, Republicans are unlikely to be courageous enough to publicly speak out against Trump’s decision.
This latest move is a slap in the face to the many China hawks who backed Trump, continuing their trend of humiliating themselves in order to please a president whose view on China swings between xenophobia and praise for autocracy.
A good example is U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was a strong supporter of human rights in China as a senator. But since taking his current post, he’s backed the defunding of democracy promotion efforts in China and fired many of the State Department’s China’s experts.
The most prominent China hawk on the strategy side is Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy. Once considered a member of the foreign-policy establishment, the loyal Trumpist said he wants to realign U.S. strategic assets toward Asia to help counter China.
However, as Taiwanese writer Brian Hioe pointed out, Colby has repeatedly made hostile statements about Taiwan and seems to perceive the island as simply a U.S. chess piece.
It takes a certain amount of doublethink to reconcile Colby and other hawks’ desire for a workable Asia-Pacific strategy, in which the United States is deeply dependent on long-term alliances, with Trump’s aggressive attitude toward those same allies.
The U.S. submarine deal with Australia and the United Kingdom is threatened, for instance, principally because it was agreed to under former U.S. President Joe Biden. (I’ve heard defense experts suggest that the plan is to tear up the deal and then sign what’s essentially the same deal with Trump’s name on it, in order to keep the petulant president happy.)
Meanwhile, U.S. trade relations with China remain fraught, with tariffs at their highest levels in history, despite the two sides backing off from a full blown decoupling. As the Lai decision shows, Beijing has the advantage.
Trump now seems desperate to reach big trade deals—not least because he’s hoping to distract attention from the ongoing scandal about his involvement with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
With China, however, reaching such a deal won’t be quick or easy.
What We’re Following
Sex, lies, and kung fu. There’s been an unusually rich crop of sex scandals on the Chinese internet lately. Just breaking is the news that the head of the famous Shaolin Temple, a Buddhist monastery in Henan province, has been defrocked for corruption and maintaining “improper relationships” with several women. Buddhist monasteries have been a locus for sex scandals for centuries, with the anti-Buddhist Emperor Wuzong offering it as one reason for his mass closure of monasteries in 845 CE.
Meanwhile, the MaskPark scandal has exposed a massive online network of Chinese men who have been swapping photographs taken or shared without women’s consent, often through the use of pinhole cameras. Voyeurism is a common problem in China, especially in poorer areas where women are still dependent on public bathroom facilities. Chinese feminists have drawn comparisons to the similar Nth Room case in South Korea.
These follow the long-running Sister Hong scandal, involving a 38-year-old individual with the surname Jiao. While presenting as a woman online, they lured hundreds of men into having sex and illegally sold images of the encounters on the internet. It’s unclear how many of the involved parties were actually deceived by Jiao, but the men have largely been the recipients of public sympathy nonetheless.
Thai-Cambodian conflict. China has taken a back seat in the mediation of the fierce border clash between Cambodia and Thailand, two countries that China has strong relationships with. The United States and Malaysia ended up playing a more significant role in ending the fighting, with a temporary cease-fire seemingly holding for now.
In regards to Cambodia, China’s main concern in recent years has been the scam centers that target Chinese citizens for both kidnapping and fraud. At least one Thai airstrike appears to have targeted a scam center—possibly with tacit support from Beijing, which has previously supported aggressive action against the criminal gangs that control the industry.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- The Great Dismantling by Suzanne Nossel
- The Air Battle That Could Decide the Russia-Ukraine War by Franz-Stefan Gady
- Why Isn’t China Wooing Europe? by Julian Gerwitz
Tech and Business
Fusion push. China is making a big push on fusion power—the elusive holy grail of nuclear energy—with a new $1.6 billion investment from state-owned enterprises. This comes after smaller, privately funded projects (including some odd sources of capital, such as gaming giant MiHoYo) have achieved tentative successes in recent years.
China’s substantial investments in fusion have fueled a hectic tech race with the United States. Actually achieving sustainable fusion power would be a gigantic breakthrough in clean and cheap energy, and though the winner of this race would be immediately catapulted ahead, it’s unlikely that success would stay confined to one country for very long.
It’s worth noting that fusion power has been just around the corner for over half a century now—the breakthrough could come tomorrow, or it could still be decades away.
Video game lawsuit. The Chinese video game industry has grown massively in the last decade, and China is now the world’s largest market for video games. But despite successes such as Black Myth: Wukong and Genshin Impact, Chinese firms have often been accused of a lack of creativity and of plagiarizing Western or Japanese games.
A new lawsuit by Japanese gaming giant Sony against Chinese industry leader Tencent Games is only likely to add to that. Sony said that Tencent, after being refused a license for Sony’s hit series Horizon Zero Dawn, produced a rip-off of the game, Light of Motiram, with a similarly red-headed heroine fighting and taming robotic beasts in a post-apocalyptic world.
You can judge the legitimacy of the claim for yourself: Here’s an image of Horizon, and here’s one of Motiram. Chinese fans have already dubbed the game “Horizon Zero Originality.”
