Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime has scuttled a dialogue with the United States on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, citing U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
“Over the past weeks and months, despite China’s firm opposition and repeated protest, the U.S. has continued to sell arms to Taiwan and done things that severely undermine China’s core interests and the mutual trust between China and the U.S.,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said Wednesday. “Consequently, the Chinese side has decided to hold off discussion with the US on a new round of consultations on arms control and non-proliferation.”
That announcement makes a breakdown of a diplomatic initiative long desired by U.S. officials, just months after the two powers held their first meeting in years. That exchange left U.S. officials with a “desire now for more substantive engagement,” but that short-lived effort has foundered amid the flood of other disputes between Washington and Beijing, stoking “the risk of arms race dynamics,” according to the State Department.
“China has chosen to follow Russia’s lead in asserting that engagement on arms control can’t proceed when there are other challenges in the bilateral relationship,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. “We think this approach undermines strategic stability. It increases the risk of arms race dynamics.”
China preempted that rebuke by maintaining that such talks are conditional on U.S. behavior.
“The responsibility fully lies with the U.S.,” Lin said. “China stands ready to maintain communication with the U.S. on international arms control in line with the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation, but the U.S. must respect China’s core interests and create necessary conditions for dialogue and exchange.”
The U.S. regarded the government in Taiwan as the legitimate government of China for decades after World War II. And while the U.S. moved its embassy from Taipei to Beijing as part of a 1979 rapprochement with the communist regime, federal law has required presidents of both parties to maintain friendly unofficial relations with Taiwan and provide its government with weapons to deter or fend off a prospective Chinese invasion.
“We have made efforts to bolster the defense of our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, and we will continue to make those efforts in the face of Chinese threats to their security,” Miller said. “Unfortunately, by suspending these consultations, China has chosen not to pursue efforts that would manage strategic risks and prevent costly arms races, but we, the United States, will remain open to developing and implementing concrete risk-reduction measures with China.”
Taiwan has procured weapons from the U.S. for decades, but a recent law authorized President Joe Biden to transfer arms to Taiwan through a process similar to the one that has enabled the rapid delivery of weapons to Ukraine in recent years.
“There is money that was contained in the recently surpassed supplemental bill that gives us, for, I believe, the first time, the ability to provide Taiwan with drawdown authority and other weapons from U.S. stocks,” Miller told reporters Wednesday. “But that is a new authority. If you look at the support that we provided or the security cooperation that we have provided them over the decades, it has been Taiwan actually purchasing military [equipment] from the United States. It has not been, in any way, charity from the United States.”
Miller offered that observation in response to former President Donald Trump’s recent statement that “Taiwan should pay us for defense.” Lin reiterated Beijing’s position that the U.S. has no legitimate interest in the status of Taiwan.
“Let me reiterate once again that the Taiwan question is purely China’s internal affair and brooks no external interference,” Lin said Wednesday. “We are opposed to making China an issue in U.S. elections.”
Chinese Communist Party officials regard Taiwan as a renegade province, although the communist regime has never ruled the island, which, since 1949, has functioned as the last refuge of the nationalist government overthrown during the Chinese Communist Revolution. The democracy has emerged in recent decades as the world’s leading producer of high-end semiconductor microchips, adding a technological layer to the strategic significance of an island that forms a key geographical link in a chain of U.S. allies across the region.
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Xi aspires to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s control as part of a wider effort to assert sovereignty over crucial waterways near the mainland coastline and also across the South China Sea — a territorial ambition that “could spark a broader conflict,” a senior U.S. diplomat warned last month.
“We have consistently urged [China] to avoid coercive or provocative actions both in the Taiwan Straits and in other areas like the South China Sea and off Japan because provocative actions are almost by definition dangerous,” said Sandra Oudkirk, the outgoing director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. ambassador to the island, in a June 14 press conference. “They run the risk of a miscalculation or an accident that could spark a broader conflict.”