In a significant shift from his earlier comments, President Trump belatedly reaffirmed the longstanding “one China” policy to China’s president Thursday in a lengthy phone conversation that helped ease tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Trump’s conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping was their first since Trump took office Jan. 20, a delay that was widely seen as a sign of Beijing’s irritation at Trump’s hints that he would fundamentally change U.S. policy toward the world’s second largest economy.
According to a White House statement, Trump told Xi he would honor the diplomatic understanding, first established after President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, that the United States will not challenge Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty over Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing views as a breakaway province.
“The two leaders discussed numerous topics and President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our ‘One China’ policy,” the statement said. It described the call as “extremely cordial.”
The call marked an apparent climb-down for Trump, and if he gained anything in return — other than an invitation to visit China — the White House was silent about it.
The shift is the latest sign that Trump has had to moderate some of his more provocative foreign policy prescriptions and demands to adjust to the realities of the modern world.
Earlier this week, he vowed “strong support” for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, weeks after calling the 38-nation military alliance “obsolete.”
Last week, his ambassador to the United Nations said the administration would not lift sanctions on Russia until it withdraws from Ukraine, weeks after Trump had suggested he might ease sanctions.
Trump repeatedly criticized China’s trade policies during and since the campaign. His promise to get tough on China has been a central element of Trump’s claim that his experience as a businessman would allow him to get better deals for the United States than his predecessors achieved.
In December, he said in an interview with Fox News, “I don’t know why we have to be bound by a one-China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.”
Shortly before his inauguration, he told the Wall Street Journal that “everything is under negotiation, including one-China.”
Most importantly, Trump spoke with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, on Dec. 2, breaking with decades of diplomatic precedent and drawing a harsh rebuke from China’s Foreign Ministry.
No U.S. president or president-elect is believed to have spoken directly with a Taiwanese leader since the U.S. recognized the mainland government and cut ties with Taiwan in 1979.
Many Taiwanese were delighted by the Trump-Tsai call — a rare moment of international recognition for their small but vibrant democracy — yet they have expressed concerns about becoming a geopolitical bargaining chip for Trump.
Following the news of Trump’s call with Xi, Taiwan’s presidential office issued a cordial, yet muted statement on Friday, expressing understanding toward the U.S. goal of “peace and stability in East Asia.”
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According to a summary of Thursday’s call by China’s official New China News Agency, Xi spoke in florid diplomatic rhetoric; he told Trump that “China will work with the United States to enhance communication and cooperation so that bilateral ties can advance in a sound and stable manner and yield more fruits to benefit the two peoples and people of all countries in the world.”
Trump told Xi he was “very happy” to speak with him, the agency reported, adding that he praised the “historic achievements” of China’s development. Trump said that developing the China-U.S. relationship has the “broad support of the American people,” the agency added.
Though Trump has spoken by phone with more than a dozen other world leaders since his inauguration, his only conversation with Xi took place in November, a week after the election.
Trump has accused China of manipulating its currency, supporting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, economically “raping” the U.S. and creating “the concept of global warming” as a hoax to undercut U.S. manufacturing. During his campaign, he advocated a 45% tariff on Chinese exports to the U.S.
Trump’s top advisor on trade is Peter Navarro, a hawkish business professor at UC Irvine who directed a documentary called “Death by China.” And his secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, told the Senate during his confirmation hearing that China should be denied access to artificial islands that it built in contested waters of the South China Sea.
Yet the Trump administration has markedly softened its tone since the campaign and the transition period.
In a phone call last week with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, national security advisor Michael Flynn “noted that the U.S. government is committed to developing strong U.S.-China relations,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported.
Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, attended a Lunar New Year event at China’s embassy in Washington, D.C., last week and shook hands with Ambassador Cui Tiankai. Her husband, Jared Kushner — one of Trump’s top advisors — met with Cui before the event.
And this week in Tokyo, Trump’s secretary of Defense, James Mattis, said that issues in the South China Sea would be “best solved by the diplomats.”
On Wednesday, Trump sent Xi a letter wishing “the Chinese people a happy Lantern Festival and prosperous Year of the Rooster.”
“The letter is the kind of standard language and protocol prepared for any new president,” said Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing, who was a National Security Council China director under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama. “The timing might be linked to Tillerson’s confirmation last week,” he said.
“My guess is that Tillerson is now making his own round of phone calls and meetings with ambassadors and foreign leaders,” he said.
Wang Huiyao, president of the Beijing-based think tank Center for China and Globalization, said Trump’s administration likely faced a rude awakening about the complexities of the U.S.-China relationship after his inauguration.
“I think Trump is more informed as a president now than when he was a candidate,” he said, “so he realized that this agreement the U.S. and China made before cannot be easily broken.”
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Special correspondents Yingzhi Yang in The Times’ Beijing bureau and Ralph Jennings in Taipei contributed to this report.
jonathan.kaiman@latimes.com
For more news from Asia, follow @JRKaiman on Twitter
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