the state of US-China-Taiwan relations: a Discussion With dr. David Bachman

by Nick Tselikov

Interview

Dr. David Bachman discusses the current state of US-China-Taiwan relations, highlighting Beijing’s growing pressure on Taiwan through economic incentives, military posturing, and information influence. Bachman identifies security, technology, and economics as the core areas of US-China rivalry, noting the Trump administration's unclear Taiwan policy. He also reflects on strategic ambiguity, semiconductor tensions, and the limited US role in shaping cross-strait peace.

---

Tselikov: Dr. Bachman, thank you for volunteering to participate in this interview.  

Bachman: My pleasure. 

Tselikov: Xi Jinping has announced on various occasions that it is China’s “historic mission” for the PRC to take Taiwan and unify it with the mainland. He has also said that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) needs to be militarily ready to invade it by 2027 and has implied he wants to unify with it by 2049. What actions has Xi’s regime taken in recent years to bring him closer to this goal? 

Bachman: Xi has taken—well, China has taken many actions to advance this goal. On the carrot side, it continues to make offers to people from Taiwan to find good jobs in the PRC, to have opportunities to talk about One Country, Two Systems. Particularly, the province of Fujian (which is the province opposite Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait) is continuing to make special offers to people on Taiwan, where they share language, and many of the people from Taiwan originated—or their families originated—in Fujian. So that’s one the sort of soft side, or the carrot side. On the more coercive side, deep involvement of Chinese social media in trying to shape the intellectual and public sphere in Taiwan, which, whether that’s coercive or not, it certainly is trying to create opinion in Taiwan that war would be a disaster for Taiwan; that the PRC is inevitably going to take control of Taiwan. “Better to make a good deal now rather than to wait till later,” when it’s even more advantageous for the PRC, or when the PRC gets even more leverage. 

On the stick side of things, there have been repeated military exercises that have gotten closer and closer to the actual main island of Taiwan. There has been a steady drumbeat of military drills and activities that seem aimed at a Taiwan invasion scenario, and the development of other kinds of coercive capabilities—whether it’s embargoes, mine laying, other kinds of ways to put pressure on Taiwan. So all of those are part of what’s going on, and of course, there’s the general upgrade of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) capabilities, which arguably now make it the second most effective or powerful military in the world, short of nuclear weapons. 

Tselikov: Since 2016, Taiwan has been under the rule of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has been more assertive and pro-independence in its policies against the PRC than its predecessor, the Kuomintang (KMT). How have their policies regarding the PRC changed in this time period, under both President Tsai and President Lai? 

Bachman: I will distinguish between President Tsai and President Lai. I think President Tsai clearly understood the limits of how far she should go, and she didn’t really press things. She denied that the 1992 Consensus: an agreement reached between government-sponsored but formally unofficial parties in 1992 that agreed that there was one China, and that Taiwan was part of it, but they differed about who was the rightful government of all of that China. She refused to acknowledge that that was binding on her, because the DPP was not the government at that time—and that led to some sanctions by the PRC. But for the most part, President Tsai was quite careful. She learned from the earlier DPP president, Chen Shui-bian (who had been the president of Taiwan 2000-2008), who had tried to push the envelope. This only provoked the PRC and led—in some ways—to a rough, tacit alliance between the US and the PRC to limit Taiwan’s ability to change the status quo. So she lived within those sets of constraints: the PRC punished Taiwan by cutting back on tourism, and there were some occasional disruptions in trade, and so on. But for the most part, her first term wasn’t much of a problem. Lai Chingte, or William Lai Chingte, was, in the campaign, more outspoken about trying to advance Taiwan Independence, to get—partly to mobilize domestic supporters for the election—but he seemed in some ways as much more challenging to the PRC. Just like a week or so, he’s been called a “parasite” by the Chinese government. They really stepped up military engagements in the last day or two. New York Times today has a new story about landing barges that would facilitate an invasion that seemed to have just come online, and so on. All of these things speak to the PRC really seeing President Lai as a bigger problem and as one that has to be reined in quite quickly. 

Tselikov: Many areas of competition and contention currently exist between China and the US, as well as China and Taiwan: economic issues, security, soft and hard power, international competition, human rights, and so on. However, it seems that some of these issues now have more weight than others. In your view, which of these, or any other areas, are of heaviest concern at present within the China-Taiwan-US triangular relationship? 

Bachman: Certainly for President Trump, economic issues in US-China relations are seemingly the one that he mentions the most. We did have—both in the last week or so—the National Threat Assessment for 2024 [that] said China was the largest military threat to the United States, although… it made drug cartels the biggest overall security threat to the United States. Secretary of Defense Hegseth has just been in East Asia reaffirming US security ties with Japan and Korea, and seeming to also incorporate Taiwan as a security concern. But President Trump hasn’t spoken yet about that. Presumably, he has approved what Secretary Hegseth has said. So I would certainly say security would rank up with economic issues at the height.  

It’s hard to separate out technology from economic issues, but certainly, there remain people in the administration quite concerned about China’s technology, halfway trying to prevent the PRC from closing the technology gap, and rapidly denying access to the most advanced semiconductors in the same way that the Biden administration did. There has been some talk about strengthening some of those technology limitations, although I haven’t seen definitive action on them. So, those have been the high priority ones.  

The State Department continues to sanction people: just most recently, people involved in putting bounties out for Hong Kong dissidents abroad [were sanctioned]. So in some ways, there’s some emphasis on human rights, but I haven’t heard much about it. The Annual Human Rights Report—as far as I know—has not come out. Certainly, with the closure, or the imminent closure, of Voice of America and... Radio Free Asia, we’re not going to be contesting with the PRC for hearts and minds, in some ways, and that weakens American soft power. And it’s not seemingly an area where President Trump seems to want or… feels the need to compete, so some of those issues are descending on the agenda of priorities. So, security, economics, and technology are at the top, and others, I would argue, quite considerably further down. 

Tselikov: Biden’s return to an international protection and assertion of US interests led to tougher stances on issues like Taiwan, human rights, demographic reform, and so on regarding US-China relations. The stance on strategic ambiguity was nevertheless not significantly changed. The mindset of the new Trump administration seems to be different on the issues, excluding it [i.e., besides strategic ambiguity]: in your view, how is this affecting current realities of the relationship, and how might it affect them in the future? 

Bachman: The Trump administration, as far as I know, has not put out a clear statement about Taiwan and strategic ambiguity. There have been some interesting changes of views of people in the Trump administration… Eldridge Colby has been nominated to be the lead secretary, or under secretary of defense… I forget the exact title, but number two or three within the defense department. In 2022-2023 he wrote a book, Strategy of Denial, that talked about doing many things the Biden administration did in terms of working with allies and cutting Taiwan off. But he seems anxious or seemed anxious to gain a position in the second Trump administration. He’s backed off that, that sort of strategy of denial, or at least explicit commitment to Taiwan. He’s also seemed to say we don’t need to spend as much as we anticipated spending on defense to be able to do it: all of these things seem to be designed to win approval from Trump for his appointment. 

I don’t know that Secretary Hegseth has any particular view, one way or another, about Taiwan policy. One would suspect that Secretary Rubio would, with his own background and strong, conservative, and anti-communist feelings, be someone who would be more likely to argue for defending Taiwan or keeping Taiwan out of Chinese hands. Similarly, with Michael Waltz, the National Security Adviser, he’s articulated a strong, anti-PRC kind of position. I assume that that may be a false assumption that extends to keeping Taiwan out of PRC hands, but that’s, again, there hasn’t been an awful lot of official commentary on Taiwan that I’ve seen. So, I’m hard pressed to say what the administration’s Taiwan policy is. De facto, it continues to be strategic ambiguity.  

But with the Biden administration, I would say that while it formally remained dual deterrence or strategic ambiguity, that in practice Biden made enough comments saying that Taiwan had US “rock hard support” or “rock solid support;” that in the event of a PRC attack, the US would have intervened. And I’m sure the PRC, in its contingency planning, has always assumed that the US would intervene. So, whether that would require the PRC to preempt or launch pre-emptive strikes on US bases in Asia and the Pacific as part of military scenarios involving Taiwan... I don’t have any insight into that. I suspect that’s certainly a choice that could be made by Chinese leaders; that’s something that’s in the operating procedures that if the PRC decided to attack Taiwan, that’s one of the choices that the leader of the PRC would have to make. But it’s there, and it’s ready to go if they make that kind of choice. So, I’m not sure that strategic ambiguity necessarily has the effect that some would say it does.  

Tselikov: In light of the potential areas of escalation in the US-China competition, what steps could the US government under the new Trump administration take to potentially ease the tensions between the two countries? 

Bachman: Well, certainly there’s this discussion of whether there’d be a deal between the US and the PRC, and whether Xi Jinping would come to the US (although I think it’s the turn of the US president to go to the PRC). The scope of such a deal remains to be seen, and certainly, the Chinese position is that until that’s worked out, we're not going to commit to a deal. The last thing they want is a sort of Zelensky-like meeting at the White House, with yelling and screaming, and so on, in ways that would force Xi Jinping to walk out of the meeting. So it’s unclear what the real situation is.  We know that President Trump has elicited promises from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to invest an additional $100 billion in the US, for enhancing the ability of advanced semiconductors to be built in the US. Whether that really would get the United States to be largely self sufficient in all the most advanced semiconductors is not clear to me; it’s not clear to me how rapidly TSMC will build those factories, because to the extent that the US does become self sufficient, it makes Taiwan less important in technology affairs, and if it becomes less important in technology, then it may become less important in strategic terms. So TSMC and Taiwan both have an interest in going slow on that commitment.  

On the other hand, if the PRC is convinced that the US will be self-sufficient and that the US will be pressuring its allies to further cut back on technology sales to Taiwan, and the PRC sees itself making progress closing the gap (which is dubious, but nonetheless, something they might be thinking about), that might encourage the PRC to think “Well, maybe it’s in our interest to destroy TSMC on Taiwan now, before the US is sufficient.” So we’re both in a position of lacking a large number of the most advanced chips. And since China produces more chips, than the United States, that might be part of their thinking, too. So, certainly, one would hope that in some context, Trump and Xi begin to have greater contact with each other to at least understand where the other is going, and where they might find points of agreement. But I don’t see anything imminent yet, and there aren’t reports of the kind of contact by lower-level officials that really create the spade work for head of state types of meetings that go along with presidents, unlike Trump. It may be that Trump wants to talk about everything with Xi in a spontaneous and open-ended kind of way, but that’s certainly not how Xi Jinping wants to engage with President Trump. 

Tselikov: What would you recommend to the general public to stay informed about the issue and to potentially contribute to the continuation of peace between the competing parties? 

Bachman: That’s a very good question. Well, first I’d recommend that people stay informed about what’s going on in US-China relations, US-Taiwan relations: and that’s reading major newspapers, or magazines like the Economist, and get a sense of what the state of play is. I understand that there’s an awful lot in the news these days, and there’s a lot to try to digest; but basically understanding what’s going on and knowing what’s going on is the first step.  
Obviously, foreign affairs is a realm of US activity that is concentrated in the executive branch of the government. And so, the ability of ordinary people to influence the affairs of the executive branch is somewhat limited compared to legislation. But certainly, writing letters, emails, other kinds of communications with the White House, phoning the White House—doing the same for the State Department—is one way by which public opinion can be conveyed. In terms of broader kinds of ways to maintaining peace, on the one hand, assuming the US is committed to defending Taiwan, then you want to strengthen deterrence there, saying that “yes, that you might want to move away from strategic ambiguity” and say “We will defend Taiwan in the event of an attack; we will not support Taiwan independence; we won’t contribute to Taiwan joining international organizations where statehood is a prerequisite for membership; but we will maintain robust relations with the people of Taiwan, the economy of Taiwan,” and so on, and that we don’t want the status quo disturbed particularly by non peaceful means, but we’re willing to go along with what the people of Taiwan and the people of China agree to through non-coercive kinds of discussions, negotiations, and so on.  

Arguably, the US in some ways has a lesser ability to influence the course of peace or war in the Taiwan Strait than either Taiwan or the PRC does. That the US can try to deter Chinese attacks and Chinese pressure, it’s clear the the United States is not able to deter Chinese pressure on Taiwan, but ultimately it depends, as the first question said: that If Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders are determined that Taiwan be a part of the PRC by 2049, that’s their choice to make to take actions that advance that goal, or to achieve that goal. And so, deterrence may fail, and it gets harder and harder for the US to deter the PRC based on China narrowing technology gaps, seemingly being able to deploy many more ships and kinds of weapons systems in Taiwan scenarios than the US can, and China’s ability to build things more quickly seems to suggest that a balance of power in the Taiwan Strait is shifting towards the PRC. So, PRC has the greatest ability to affect war and peace there. Taiwan, one could argue, does have the ability to declare independence; it is highly unlikely that anyone would recognize Taiwan, and that would provoke the PRC to use force. So in that sense, Taiwan has more ability to provoke conflict. And so the US, as long as it continues its current policy, is more or less relegated to a fairly passive position here, well, passive to the extent that we want the status quo to be maintained, that we would have to continue to enhance deterrence and continue to sell weapons to Taiwan. 

There would probably be upgraded US-Taiwan military cooperation, but that’s within—at least, from an American perspective— the parameters of current US policy. If the US were to say, however, that it was disengaging, or it was not going to come to Taiwan’s defense, as president Trump seemed to imply in his first when he—according to his former National Security Advisor, John Bolton —picked up a sharpie and said, “China is the body of the sharpie, and Taiwan is the tip,” and made pretty clear that the US wasn’t going to war with China over this small, little island which he recognized as being very far away from the US. If the US were to follow through on Bolton's purported remarks, then that would open up all sorts of opportunities for the PRC. And maybe it would force Taiwan to negotiate, but it might also force Taiwan to see if it could develop nuclear weapons to ensure its independence. So in that sense, if you are going to be more isolationist, then that would be a way to eliminate a kind of possibility for the United States to get involved in foreign wars. I don’t think that’s likely to happen. I think there are many in the government who would argue strongly for the need to hold onto Taiwan or to prevent it from falling into PRC's hands. But nonetheless, that would be one way by which the United States could avoid conflict. 
​​
Tselikov: I thank you again for choosing to participate in this interview, and have no doubt that there are observers who will be interested to hear your insights.