Straight News: What do you think about the $95 billion foreign aid bill passed by the US Congress, which includes $1.9 billion in aid to "Taiwan and regional partners"?
Special Commentator Liu Heping: First of all, I would like to state that the Taiwan issue is fundamentally different from the Russia-Ukraine issue and the Palestinian-Israeli issue, in that Ukraine and Israel are both sovereign and independent countries, while Taiwan is part of China. The passage of the Taiwan aid bill once again reflects the Biden administration's duplicity on the Taiwan issue, that is, it says that it does not support "Taiwan independence", but in fact it is doing something else, and this approach obviously sends a wrong political signal to Lai Qingde, a "pragmatic Taiwan independence worker" who is about to take power, and makes it more difficult to control the "Taiwan independence" forces and the situation in the Taiwan Strait in the future.
But then again, although the U.S. Congress finally passed the foreign aid package that includes aid to Taiwan, if we reflect on the process of introducing this bill and the details of the relevant aid, I think the Tsai Ing-wen administration should not be too happy.
First of all, when the war between Russia and Ukraine is intractable, and the Ukrainian army is gradually losing its dominance in the ground war and urgently needs foreign aid, this foreign aid bill has been waiting for half a year before it was finally introduced. The reason behind this involves not only the power struggle between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, Trump and Biden, but also the two different values and worldviews in the United States, as well as the resulting dispute between two different diplomatic lines, that is, the dispute between the two different diplomatic lines of interventionism and isolationism, and isolationism is gradually making a comeback. Against this backdrop, if pursuing an isolationist far-right line represents Trump's return to the White House, there is a big question mark over whether the United States will really clash head-on with a powerful China over the Taiwan issue in the future.
Second, in this aid package, aid to Ukraine is as high as $60.8 billion, and aid to Israel is also $26.3 billion, while aid to Taiwan is only $1.9 billion, and it also includes aid to "other partners" in the region. This also means that aid to Taiwan is actually embellished and symbolic. As you know, real money will not deceive people, which shows that in the eyes of the Biden administration, the Russia-Ukraine issue, the Palestinian-Israeli issue and the Taiwan issue are still different from each other.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken talks with U.S. Ambassador to China Burns in Shanghai on April 24.
Straight News: The $95 billion foreign aid bill passed by the US Congress includes $1.9 billion in aid to Taiwan, and what impact will this incident have on the next Sino-US relations?
Special Commentator Liu Heping: Speaking of China-US relations, I believe you have noticed that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting China in the past two days, and in addition to the Russia-Ukraine issue, the Taiwan issue is also one of the focus topics of the game between China and the United States. Moreover, according to foreign news reports, Blinken's visit to China this time has a strong implication of "not being a good comer." A typical manifestation of this is that before Blinken's departure, the Wall Street Journal quoted so-called informed sources as saying that the White House is working on so-called "sanctions" to exclude some Chinese banks from the global financial system, that is, the SWIFT settlement system, in order to prevent Beijing's so-called commercial support for Russian military production. As you know, this matter is not trivial, cutting off the connection between a country's banks and the SWIFT global settlement system is known as the "financial nuclear bomb" of the United States.
Over the years, the United States has only used it against the hostile country Iran and Russia, which has launched a special military operation against Ukraine, but this time it has been used to threaten China. Moreover, because Iran and Russia have been suffering from Western economic and financial sanctions for a long time, their economic and financial dependence on foreign countries is not very strong, which is not the same as China, which has long been deeply integrated into the process of globalization. Therefore, not to mention the real use of this "financial nuclear bomb" against Chinese banks, even if it is threatened, the negative consequences are incalculable.
There is a saying in China that a leaf knows autumn. From the US move of wielding a "financial nuclear bomb" against China, we can find that there have been three not-so-good signs and trends in China-US relations in recent times.
First, in the face of very unsatisfactory Sino-US relations over the past few years, the United States has been thinking about preventing Sino-US relations from becoming worse, especially to prevent Sino-US relations from moving from competition to confrontation and conflict. However, if the United States really throws this "financial nuclear bomb" against China, China will definitely take countermeasures in the financial field, which means that not only the financial war between China and the United States has officially started, but may even spread further to other fields. As a result, Sino-US relations will inevitably sink.
Second, over the past few years, China has been firmly opposed to the full "decoupling" of the Chinese and US economies, and the United States has claimed, at least on the surface, that it will not seek a full "decoupling" of the Chinese economy. However, the fact is that due to Trump's high tariffs on all Chinese goods exported to the United States, the ties between China and the United States in the economic and trade fields are gradually weakening, and the so-called industrial chain restructuring launched by the Biden administration, especially the ban on the sale of chips to China, has made China and the United States in the high-tech field in fact "decoupling". The Biden administration's threat to throw a "financial nuclear bomb" at China this time is bound to arouse China's vigilance, so that China will definitely take measures to reduce its financial dependence on the United States, especially the US dollar, and lead to the gradual "decoupling" of China and the United States in finance.
Third, over the years, China has been calling on the United States not to engage in bloc confrontation, and President Biden himself promised at the recent China-US summit that he would not form an alliance against China. However, Western countries led by the United States are not only forming alliances to aid Ukraine and sanction Russia, but also building a multi-level alliance system to contain China in the "Indo-Pacific" region, and are ready to throw a "financial nuclear bomb" against China under the pretext that "China is helping Russia rebuild its military industrial system", which clearly wants to classify China and Russia into the same camp. In fact, this is to create and intensify the confrontation between the two camps of the East and the West.
All this means that the current Sino-US relations have once again reached a critical crossroads, and if they go in the right direction, they will allow the Sino-US relations to bottom out, and if they go in the wrong direction, they will sink down. Moreover, this strategic choice between China and the United States is not only related to the trend of the Russia-Ukraine issue and the Taiwan issue, the trend of China-US relations, but also the destiny of the entire mankind.
Straight News: In your opinion, what is the reason why China-US relations cannot stop falling and stabilize, but there are signs that they may deteriorate?
Special Commentator Liu Heping: I think the root cause lies in the difference in the way the Chinese and American governments do things and think differently.
China upholds a relational and holistic mindset. In other words, China pays attention to the overall environment and situation, and looks at and handles local issues in a game of chess. The Chinese side has repeatedly stressed that the precondition for China-US cooperation on regional and international hotspot issues is that the United States must respect China's concerns on issues related to China's core national interests, including Taiwan.
However, the US side seems to be unable to understand China's concerns and appeals, and on the one hand, it still demands that China must unconditionally cooperate with the United States on the Russia-Ukraine issue, and on the other hand, it continues to test China's "bottom line" on the Taiwan issue and the South China Sea issue, and constantly intensifies the so-called "sanctions" against China in the high-tech field. Obviously, the US side does not understand the intrinsic correlation between the two. The reason behind this is that the US side adheres not only to a strong hegemonic thinking logic, but also a partial and fragmented way of thinking, that is, it believes that the two can be handled separately, and there is no contradiction between the United States' demand that China cooperate with the United States on the Russia-Ukraine issue and the United States touching China's red line on the Taiwan issue.
Behind this, what is reflected is actually the one-line and deep-rooted ideological and value thinking of the Americans. In other words, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are looking at the world through colored glasses of ideology and values, and for this reason, the whole world is simply divided into two camps: black and white, left and right, right and wrong. Once they believe that a country has challenged their ideology and values, it will inspire a high level of confrontation and confrontation, and they will not stop at all. This is the reason why although the Biden administration pays lip service to prevent China-US relations from moving toward confrontation and conflict, in fact it cannot stop moving toward confrontation and conflict one after another, including on all issues such as the high-tech field between China and the United States, the Taiwan issue, the South China Sea issue, and so on.
Author丨Liu Heping, special commentator of Shenzhen Satellite TV's "Live Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan".
Editor丨Guo Jinchi, Editor-in-Chief of Shenzhen Satellite TV Direct News
Typesetting丨Zheng Zhijia, direct news editor