Taiwan Issue Quotes

To get Xi Jinping to help with our Pyongyang problem, Trump has dropped all talk of befriending Taiwan, backed off Tillerson's warning to Beijing to vacate its fortified reefs in the South China Sea, and held out promises of major concessions to Beijing in future trade deals.

There is only one China. Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation.

What China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago.

I think that there is a relatively small number of people who are pushing for independence in Taiwan.

Safeguarding the interests of our Taiwan compatriots and expanding their well-being is the mainland's oft-repeated pledge and solemn promise of the new leaders of China's Communist Party central committee.

The Donald Trump call in the president of Taiwan and of itself, as Henry Kissinger said, hasn't created some tremendous trouble in China. But what we don't know is whether this is just posturing or whether this is a policy change.

Our policy for the last many years has been to deter the Chinese government in Beijing from ever coming into the position where they thought they had enough leverage over the U.S. to cross the Straits of Taiwan.

As I've said many times and publicly, a war between China and Taiwan that involves the United States is a lose-lose-lose.

But now all of a sudden some idiots in Taiwan start to say that they are not Chinese. Their grand parents were Chinese. But for some reason, they feel they are not Chinese.

Taiwan is the one issue that goes to the heart of the domestic and international legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to rule China. The CCP claims to be the only group that was capable of unifying China and making it strong enough to stand up to the bullying of Western powers and imperial Japan. The existence of Taiwan as an autonomous political entity which is de facto independent of the PRC calls into question these claims.

[We should] set our eyes on the future. The political differences between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan should eventually be solved step by step, and [we] can not let these problems hand on from generation to generation.

The PRC is the big brother in this relationship, and it has the capacity to be generous to Taiwan on this issue in a manner that might do much to defuse that issue internally in Taiwan.

The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.

America has made it very clear in several administrations that if there is an attack by China on Taiwan, the United States is very likely to resist.

It can be argued - and rightly - that Taiwan is not just another regional issue: after all, the Chinese regard it as part of China. But Taiwan is also a regional issue for three reasons. First, the overthrow or even the neutering of democracy in Taiwan, which is what Beijing effectively demands, would be a major setback for democracy in the region as a whole. Second, if the Chinese were able to get their way by force in Taiwan, they would undoubtedly be tempted to do the same in other disputes. And third, there is no lack of such disputes to provoke a quarrel.

Beijing's imperial reach extends far and wide, from Taiwan and Xinjiang to the South China Sea and beyond.