Xi to Biden - We will unify Taiwan with China
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Xi warned Biden during summit that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with China
Xi told Biden in a group meeting attended by a dozen American and Chinese officials that China’s preference is to take Taiwan peacefully, not by force, the officials said.
The Chinese leader also referenced public predictions by U.S. military leaders who say that Xi plans to take Taiwan in 2025 or 2027, telling Biden that they were wrong because he has not set a time frame, according to the two current and one former official briefed on the meeting.
Chinese officials also asked in advance of the summit that Biden make a public statement after the meeting saying that the United States supports China’s goal of peaceful unification with Taiwan and does not support Taiwanese independence, they said. The White House rejected the Chinese request.
A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined to comment.
The revelations provide previously unreported details about a critical meeting between the two leaders that was intended to reduce tensions between their countries.
Xi’s private warning to Biden, while not markedly different from his past public comments on reunifying Taiwan, got the attention of U.S. officials because it was delivered at a time when China’s behavior toward Taiwan is seen as increasingly aggressive and ahead of a potentially pivotal presidential election in the self-governing democratic island next month.
After the initial publication of this story, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) issued a statement calling for Republicans and Democrats to work together to deter China.
“This story as reported is beyond unnerving,” Graham said. “I will be working with Democratic and Republican Senators to do two things quickly. First, create a robust defense supplemental for Taiwan and second, draft pre-invasion sanctions from hell to impose on China if they take action to seize Taiwan.”
Officials familiar with the conversation between Biden and Xi described the Chinese leader as blunt and candid, but not confrontational.
“His language was no different than what he has always said. He is always tough on Taiwan. He’s always had a tough line,” said a U.S. official with knowledge of the conversation.
During the summit in San Francisco, Xi expressed concerns about the candidates running for president of Taiwan in next month’s election, according to U.S. officials. Xi also noted the influence that the U.S. has on Taiwan, they said.
When Biden asked that China respect Taiwan’s electoral process, Xi responded by saying that peace is “all well and good” but that China needs to eventually move toward a resolution, one U.S. official said.
CIA Director William Burns said earlier this year that U.S. intelligence shows that Xi has directed his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. “Now, that does not mean that he’s decided to conduct an invasion in 2027, or any other year, but it’s a reminder of the seriousness of his focus and his ambition,” Burns said.
Biden has said in the past that the U.S. military would defend Taiwan if China invaded, but the White House has walked back his comments.
Under its longtime “One China” policy, the U.S. recognizes Beijing as China’s sole legal government but maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory. Most of the island’s 24 million people favor maintaining the status quo, neither unifying with China nor formally declaring independence.
After the summit, Biden reiterated long-standing U.S. policy.
One Chinese official who attended the meeting, Hua Chunying, posted afterward on X that Xi had told Biden and other U.S. officials that the “Taiwan question remains the most important and most sensitive issue in China-U.S. relations.” Hua added that the U.S. should “support China’s peaceful reunification” and that “China will realize reunification, and this is unstoppable.”
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You'd think that would be up to Taiwan and the Taiwanese people; not Xi's China nor Biden.
China stating that re-unification of Taiwan is "unstoppable," doesn't exactly sound like they're committed to a peaceful reunion.. more like they intend to exert force and expect Taiwan and the rest of the world to accept it.
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funeralxempire
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You would think it would be up to both the citizens of the ROC and PRC. While I assume Mainlanders would support it, they should still have the right to refuse. Likewise, obviously the citizens of ROC should have the right to either agree or refuse.
Issues like differences between the borders each China claims would need resolved too. ROC claims some land the PRC has already ceded, ROC would need to agree to recognize those changes.
Of course, that's all assuming there's a desire to respect the rights of the various people who would be impacted, which I don't believe is a fair assumption.
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I guess this will accelerate America’s decoupling from China.
The greatest beneficiary of all of this stuff is going to be Mexico as ever more manufacturing & production moves there to satisfy American demand for all kinds of goods from dollar store plastic crap to mid to high end electric cars.
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I guess this will accelerate America’s decoupling from China.
The greatest beneficiary of all of this stuff is going to be Mexico as ever more manufacturing & production moves there to satisfy American demand for all kinds of goods from dollar store plastic crap to mid to high end electric cars.
Don't Canadians import the same cheap crap we US citizens do?
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goldfish21
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I guess this will accelerate America’s decoupling from China.
The greatest beneficiary of all of this stuff is going to be Mexico as ever more manufacturing & production moves there to satisfy American demand for all kinds of goods from dollar store plastic crap to mid to high end electric cars.
Don't Canadians import the same cheap crap we US citizens do?
Probably a subset of it, or different product lines of cheap crap.
We have a Quebec based company called Dollarama that operates dollar stores across the country and has their own line of cheap crap manufactured. Some of their items are actually Okay for what they are. Afaik, it's slightly different cheap crap than is available at American dollar store chains.
There's a whole 'nother level of cheap crap and convenience items South of the border. What a strange land.. where you can get cheese and pancake batter in aerosol cans..
In general, Canadians do indeed import a bunch of foreign made cheap crap. HOPEFULLY it's only to minimize the cost of smuggling quality drugs into the country.. but probably not. It's probably because Canadians consume about as much junk as our Southern neighbours. I wouldn't Personally know, though, as I minimize the amount of that sort of stuff I buy Ever and I don't have any statistics on how much Canadians buy vs. Americans.
We can do without a bunch of cheap crap, though. And if we Need luxury electronics we can source them from another country OR *gasp* make stuff here!! If China wants to flex it's authoritaaaay, okay go ahead - let them - and then other countries that buy a bunch of their goods can choose to award contracts to other people. Time will tell if others are willing and able to take on the contracts. Of course the Almighty Dollar is going to decide if and where those contracts go.. if anyone can come close to matching China's slave labour prices, then maybe things will change as China pisses off the world with their geopolitical shenanigans. I know this would make ME personally want to shift production to Vietnam or Cambodia or Mexico etc, but the bottom line is that only the bottom line is going to make corporate Canada/USA move production anywhere else. (Unless sanctions dictate it..)
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funeralxempire
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Realistically, China doesn't have the transport assets to make a successful invasion likely. Even if they leverage all the additional civilian ferry boats they can muster, they still can't move enough men and materiel to make achieving victory possible.
With that in mind, I don't think it would be on the sort of scale you might be worried about. Especially if you consider that the PLA has no legit experience whereas the US military has basically done nothing but fight since 1941. Most aspects of the PLA can be viewed as untested, relative to the constant learning from experience of the US military.
While the US hasn't experienced a near-peer conflict, part of the reason why they sometimes seem to use overkill amounts to treating those operations as live-fire training and testing, to confirm the viability of <whatever the details might be>.
Say for example, when they have a B-2 fly a mission with some standoff munition that could have just as easily been performed by a pair of F-15Es with JDAMs. Yes, it's wasteful by some measures, but it also allows them to be able to plan around being able to pull off that complex of mission. It would be even most wasteful to come up with a training exercise simulating such a mission, so in the long run it's not really a waste, so long as one accepts the premise that such practice is required.
You're right that everything should be done to avoid it, but at the same time, if Taiwan makes the choice to assert independence, other nations should have it's back. PRC attacking would be a pretty solid cause for declaring independence. PRC attacking would almost certainly be a disaster for the PLA, even if the US bleeds more than they're used to.
The F-22 is hornier than a jackrabbit in heat to get it's first air-to-air kill that isn't a balloon.
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Last edited by funeralxempire on 21 Dec 2023, 10:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I think we already opened that pandora's box when we invented and used the atom bomb in WW2 and allowed unstable governments to get their hands on the technology for creating bigger and more powerful bombs.
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funeralxempire
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I think we already opened that pandora's box when we invented and used the atom bomb in WW2 and allowed unstable governments to get their hands on the technology for creating bigger and more powerful bombs.
They're not that difficult to figure out how to make, the hardest part being putting together enough fissile material.
The gun method is basically what it says on the cover, shoot one subcritical mass into another, resulting in a critical mass, resulting in a runaway reaction and boom.
![Image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Fission_bomb_assembly_methods.svg/440px-Fission_bomb_assembly_methods.svg.png)
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“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas, this is part of our strategy” —Netanyahu
戦争ではなく戦争と戦う
Faschismus ist die Gewalt der Schwachen.
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Realistically, China doesn't have the transport assets to make a successful invasion likely. Even if they leverage all the additional civilian ferry boats they can muster, they still can't move enough men and materiel to make achieving victory possible.
Hmm, do you really think China couldn't move enough troops to Taiwan to win a war?
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They have crazy manufacturing capacity. Boats, planes, bridges etc they'd just build whatever they need overnight and move cannon fodder over until they took Taiwan - If that's the direction they opted to go in vs. some other sort of force/coercion.
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They're used to using words like this
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USA is revitalizing an airforce base in the pacific that was once the busiest airport in the world just in case TSHTF with China: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/22/asia/us- ... index.html
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