Amy Hawkins

And in a phone call between China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, recently Wang Yi said it was the biggest risk in US-China relations was going to be the Taiwan issue.

So China views Taiwan as part of its territory.

Taiwan's a self-governing island, which largely rejects the idea of being ruled by China.

It has its own democratically elected president.

And the US, while it doesn't formally recognise Taiwan, it does supply Taiwan with the means to defend itself and supports Taiwan diplomatically in certain ways to kind of avoid a situation where China decides to take Taiwan by military force.

Yeah, definitely.

And certainly people in Taiwan feel less and less confident of support from Washington.

And Trump has talked about Taiwan as being kind of an economic competitor who stole America's semiconductor industry because, you know, that's kind of Taiwan's biggest asset economically is that it has a very advanced and globally dominant semiconductor industry.

And it also kind of accused Taiwan of not being grateful enough for US support and saying it should pay for more US support and this kind of thing.

And he definitely doesn't seem to view Taiwan as a democratic ally in Asia in the same way that previous presidents, especially President Biden, have done.

At the moment, the US stance on Taiwanese independence is that it does not support Taiwanese independence, whereas Beijing would like Trump to say that the US opposes Taiwanese independence.

And it seems like a quite...

small and maybe irrelevant semantic difference, but actually kind of gradually reshaping the global conversation and understanding about Taiwan as part of Beijing's goal into pushing the world order to a place whereby if and when it does take over Taiwan, there's the least possible resistance.

A more practical aim for China is to get the US to stop sending arms to Taiwan

But on that side, that's actually a matter for Congress.

Beijing doesn't, I think, have the highest hopes that it will achieve any big wins.

But I think at the very least, it will seek to be showing that the US is not supportive of Taiwanese independence.

Yeah, I mean, definitely.

And I think the war in Ukraine in particular has given China a lot of pause for thought in that regard of, you know, you can't just launch an attempt to annex another country and expect it to be over within a few months.

But I think something that Beijing does see happening is that