President Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Beijing said on Thursday that the US leader’s strategy for China would involve “some pain” and claimed that allies must do more to counter the Asian country.
Speaking in a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, David Perdue, a former Republican senator representing Georgia, also affirmed Washington’s commitment to a one-China policy.
“We’re going to continue to honour the one-China policy, as stated in the Taiwan Relations Act, also backed up by the three communiques and the six assurances,” Perdue said.
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The Taiwan Relations Act was signed by then-president Jimmy Carter shortly after Washington switched official diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, and obligates the US government to support Taiwan’s defence capabilities.
However, it does not specifically articulate a one-China policy, which is spelled out in the first of the communiques – agreements between the US and China that formalised the diplomatic switch.
Perdue’s reference to the “six assurances” relates to commitments that Washington made to Taipei in 1982 that it would disregard Beijing’s opposition to US arms sales to the island.
Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington opposes any attempt to take the island by force and remains committed to supplying it with weapons.
Asked several times about what Trump’s administration will do to reverse the migration of supply chains for critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, shipbuilding and other industries to China, Perdue said: “President Trump is all over that. The starting conversation [is] with trade. There are going to be many others.”
Trump said last month that Chinese President Xi Jinping would visit the US in the “not too distant future”, although that has not been confirmed in Beijing.
Later in the hearing, when queried again about supply chains, Perdue lauded Trump for “stepping up and trying to communicate a very difficult strategy that may not be as easy as everybody thinks it will be on the American people”.
“There will be some pain in executing what we have to do to stand up and defend our own freedom,” he added.
Although he did not explicitly link the “pain” to disruptions expected as a result of the tariffs announced by Trump a day earlier, Perdue was speaking as global markets swooned on expectations that the punitive levies would stoke inflation and curb growth.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 1,600 points on Thursday.
China was America’s second largest import source last year in terms of value, which was pegged at US$439 billion, according to US government data. That was just behind Mexico, which shipped goods worth a total of US$506 billion.
Trump hit China with a 34 per cent import tariff, on top of the 20 per cent punitive levies laid on since he returned to office in January. Along with Canada – America’s third largest import source – Mexico was spared in Trump’s worldwide tariff salvo.
Perdue was grilled by Jeanne Shaheen, the Senate committee’s senior Democrat, and other members of her party on Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of foreign aid in the form of a spending freeze for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
They asked repeatedly how to prevent China from strengthening its influence in the Global South, Eastern Europe and other regions in the absence of US support, to which Perdue stressed the need to work with “allies”, whom he expected to help in this regard.
“The parties that are not being discussed here are the other democratic countries in the world. Where’s the EU in this we’re talking about ... taxpayer money. How much is coming out of the UK, out of the EU and other democratic countries?” he said.
“We have to face the reality that this is a coalescing need that we have in the democratic, free world to stand up to these types of challenges.”
More from South China Morning Post:
- Beijing will not attack Taiwan if it thinks trade will suffer, US senators hear
- Trump’s 32% tariff on Taiwanese imports stuns Taipei: ‘deeply unreasonable’
- From Guangdong to LA, tariff superstorm alters course of global business expansions
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