Open questions | The next 10 years: Tsinghua’s Yan Xuetong talks Trump, Taiwan and what it means for China

International relations analyst Yan says US presidential candidate Trump would not be willing to go to war with China in the Taiwan Strait

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Published: 6:00am, 22 Jul 2024Updated: 8:15am, 23 Jul 2024

In 2013, Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University, made nearly 300 predictions on international relations in his book Inertia of History: China and the World by 2023. Ten years later, his predictions had an accuracy of 82.3 per cent, including the forecast of an emerging bipolar world between the US and China. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.

Where do you think former US president Donald Trump stands on Taiwan? Will he challenge the “one China” policy as he did in his last term?

I don’t think Trump will go further than US President Joe Biden on the Taiwan issue. If you compare the policies of the Biden and Trump eras, Biden’s [administration] is more inclined towards Taiwan’s independence than Trump. One thing you may have noticed is that Trump always claimed that he was the only US president since the Cold War who had not been involved in a new war. What does this mean? Trump really does not want to go to war with China in the Taiwan Strait. He will be more cautious than Biden in terms of preventing a war across the strait.

Has anything changed between China and the United States since the presidents of the two countries met in San Francisco in November? Did the summit achieve anything?

The San Francisco summit actually prevented China and the US from going to war over Taiwan. It resolved the main core issue between China and the US.

On the last day of the drills in the Taiwan Strait this time following Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te’s inauguration, Chinese and American military officials held a video call. That shows that China and the US had already established a crisis management mechanism to prevent the Taiwan conflict from escalating into a war.

The conflict and confrontation between China and the US didn’t stop after the summit but it changed in two important ways. First, for the worse – the United States has expanded its containment of China from technology decoupling to commercial protectionism … I think the trade dispute between China and the US will continue to worsen.

So what is the other relatively positive change? The two sides have reached an agreement to strengthen social exchanges, including between students, in second-track dialogues, and with academic exchanges. The social exchanges between China and the US have become more relaxed than in the previous year.

Is Beijing concerned that these exchanges could be disrupted by Trump’s potential return to the White House?

Regardless of the election’s outcome, whether Trump or Biden wins, the general trend of China-US relations from now until the first half of next year will be continuous deterioration. As the election is becoming more intense, both sides and their parties are having to be tougher on China, so the Biden administration will definitely introduce some new policies that are not constructive to bilateral relations.

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