In the lead-up to President Trump’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) this week, Taiwan’s fate appeared to hang in the balance.
China, apparently brimming with confidence, seemed prepared to press Trump on America’s commitments to Taiwan. The carefully worded ambiguity of those commitments seemed incompatible with Trump’s freewheeling diplomatic style. Senior Taiwanese officials publicly expressed their fear that Trump would “put Taiwan on the menu” during talks with Xi.
But as Trump departed from Beijing on Friday afternoon, Taiwan emerged from the summit in the same position as it had started.
Reports from the summit began on a sour note Thursday, with China taking a menacing tone in its summary of Xi’s initial meeting with Trump. “The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” Xi told Trump, according to Chinese state media. “If handled well, bilateral relations can remain stable. If handled poorly, the two countries will have clashes or even conflicts, pushing the entire relationship into a very dangerous situation.”
The White House summary of the same meeting made no mention of the island nation. When asked by reporters afterward whether Taiwan had come up during the meetings on Thursday, Trump declined to comment.
“What may be happening is that China’s figured out that it’s not going to get Trump to publicly make significant concessions on Taiwan. And therefore, the next best thing is for Xi to at least get it on record that he tried to drive home the point with his own tough rhetoric in public,” said Wen-Ti Sung (宋文笛), a China expert at the Atlantic Council.
Some analysts interpreted Xi’s language as an escalation from previous warnings that China has made to the U.S. on the Taiwan issue. “He is telling Trump not only that the U.S. is an active participant in mishandling the situation, but also that military sparring may be a very real possibility as a result,” Anushka Saxena, an expert on Chinese politics at the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Yet the true worst-case scenario from Taiwan’s perspective, in which Xi’s rhetoric prompted Trump to change his, failed to materialize.
“The fact that Xi devoted an entire paragraph to warning Trump about Taiwan, yet received no meaningful response in return, suggests that Xi did not get what he wanted on Taiwan,” Henry Gao (高樹超), a China analyst at Singapore Management University, wrote in a post on X. “Either Trump ignored the warning, or worse from Beijing’s perspective, he refused to make any commitment at all.”
“All we can say is that there has been no surprising information so far, and we will continue to maintain close communication with the American side,” Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑), a spokesperson for Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, said on Thursday afternoon.
In an interview with NBC News on Thursday evening, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the U.S. position was unchanged. “We always make clear our position, and we move on to the other topics,” Rubio said. When asked whether Xi had pushed Trump to stop selling weaponry to Taiwan, Rubio said that it “did not feature prominently in Thursday’s discussion.”
The Taiwanese government was quick to tout the Rubio interview as evidence that the summit had gone well. “Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) thanks the United States for its repeated statements of support and its emphasis on peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, and for reiterating that its policy toward Taiwan remains unchanged,” Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Friday morning.
On Friday afternoon, the Chinese side released a summary of Trump and Xi’s engagements that morning. It made no further mention of Taiwan.
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