Beijing would not attack Taiwan if it believed trade would suffer, senators hear

Beijing would not invade Taiwan if it believed that US allies and partners would respond by severing trade ties, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard on Wednesday, as expert witnesses urged lawmakers to acknowledge that allies’ strategic contributions go beyond defence spending.

Noting that China is “an export-driven economy”, Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said that “if they believed trade with US allies and partners would stop if they attacked Taiwan, they would never do it”.

Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province, to be eventually united with the mainland, by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island militarily.

Mastro and other witnesses at the committee hearing stressed that US allies and partners could provide Washington much more than just financial aid to help deter China militarily.

“Too often burden-sharing is scoped down to a single figure, which is, ‘how much is a country spending [as a] percentage of GDP on defence?’” said Randall Shriver, board chairman of the Project 2049 Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“That doesn’t always tell the whole story,” he said, noting that the Philippines has been making more military sites available to the US despite only spending 1.5 per cent of its GDP on defence.

Since his return to the White House in January, US President Donald Trump and his advisers have emphasised requiring allies and partners to spend specific percentages of their GDPs on defence, at times threatening to withdraw US military support if they fail to do so.