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The Diplomat (11 August 2022)

Zhenze Huang

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial stop in Taiwan during her Indo-Pacific trip in early August has sparked the worst crisis in the Taiwan Strait since 1995-96. While the issues regarding China’s ongoing harsh responses and trilateral tensions have been brought to the center of public attention, Pelosi’s Taiwan visit itself hit Beijing’s bottom line of the “one China principle.” Her trip to Taiwan, despite repeated warnings from the Chinese government, manifests the increasing difficulty the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is having in seizing the initiative on cross-strait relations.

"Beijing’s Dilemma in Stabilizing Cross-Strait Relations Under Xi Jinping and Tsai Ing-wen"

Since 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party was inaugurated as the Republic of China (ROC) president, the long-standing tacit agreement between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Kuomintang (KMT) during the Ma Ying-jeou administration (2008-2016) vanished, given the DPP’s ideological tendency toward Taiwan independence. Beijing attempted to address this through an unyielding demand that Tsai make a commitment to the “1992 consensus” as the sole prerequisite to engaging in cross-strait dialogues. However, Tsai did not respond positively in her inaugural address, sowing the seeds for the tensions between the two sides.

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