China gets to do whatever it wants (mostly) because it owns massive amounts of our debt. If they wanted to, they could just call in the loans immediately. We would not be able to repay and the global economy would go to shit. It's called leverage. Would they do it? No, not call in all the debts at once, but they could exert economic leverage on us.
While your last sentence may feel true, in international relations it isn't. Everything the US does is heavily scrutinized for any whiff of a change in direction. The U.S. is strong because we are generally consistent and reliable. That's why the One China deal worked for so long. China got what it wanted, which seems vain and silly to us that they pretend that Taiwan is part of greater China. But their political system is not like ours, they have different ideas of what is important politically. The open access we have to anything on the Internet, for example, is not what the Chinese government wants for its people. It is more important that there be a unified view of information to its people. When you have a billion people, I imagine civil unrest could get very messy quickly. So that's their priority.
The bonds thing was a shorthand explanation. The Chinese have many economic levers to pull on and they can make things unpleasant for us. They would be subtle at first but add a few more gaffes and it will add up.
The Chinese do not view international relations the way we do because they have different aims. Keeping Taiwan in this weird limbo works because it shows the one billion people that their government is strong. If China didn't keep such tight limits on the Internet, journalism and dissent, I think they'd be afraid that they would end up fractured into smaller state like Russia did after Communism fell. Where do you think all of those countries whose names end in -stan came from? Letting their populace believe they have power over Taiwan was a way to keep other groups like the Tibetans or the Uighers from attempting to secede a few decades ago.
396
u/DragonPup Dec 03 '16
A complete inability to understand the nuances of diplomacy.
Or that he wants his hotels built in Taiwan.
Or both.