Taiwan in America — TikTok’s Avengers — Biden’s democracy summit – POLITICO

Decoding transatlantic relations with Beijing.

By PHELIM KINE

with STUART LAU

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Hi, China Watchers. Today we look at the fraught politics of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s U.S. visits, do a deep dive into TikTok’s tangled web of government lobbying and check in on President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy. And with President Tsai in New York City today, we point her in the direction of Brooklyn’s unofficial culinary diplomatic outpost for the self-governing island and profile a book that renders a street-level exploration of its woefully underreported “out-of-bounds artistic creativity.”

Let’s get to it. — Phelim

WELCOME TO AMERICA, PRESIDENT TSAI. PARDON OUR BICKERING

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen lands in New York today for the first of two layover visits in the U.S. as she travels to and from Latin America. She’ll be in New York for one day Thursday to receive a leadership award from a conservative think tank and will meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles on April 5.

Tsai’s presence in the U.S. puts the administration of President Joe Biden in a bind. Biden needs to roll out a warm but unofficial diplomatic welcome mat to Taiwan’s leader without unduly infuriating the Chinese government which interprets any U.S.-Taiwan contacts as an affront to Beijing’s claim of sovereignty over the self-governing island.

Beijing is already signaling that Tsai’s presence in the U.S. will further damage already frosty U.S.-China ties. Tsai’s visit “could lead to another serious, serious, serious confrontation in the China-U.S. relationship,” the chargés d’affaires in the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., Xu Xueyuan, told reporters on Wednesday. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Xu warned.

Biden’s thornier dilemma is balancing the demand of GOP China hawks wanting deeper and more official military, economic and diplomatic links to Taiwan — starting with engagement with Tsai — to discourage Beijing from considering a military invasion of the island.

Read my full story here.

HOW TIKTOK BUILT A ‘TEAM OF AVENGERS’ TO FIGHT FOR ITS LIFE

TikTok finds itself under siege in the U.S. and in Europe. Congressional calls for a TikTok ban are picking up steam. Influencers have descended on Washington as part of a last-ditch effort to save the company, paid for by TikTok. And the company’s CEO met bipartisan denunciations before a Congressional committee last week.

TikTok’s battle for survival has become a vivid study in how a wealthy, foreign-owned corporation can use its financial might to build an impressive-looking network of influence. It also provides some insight into the limitations of what lobbying can do to protect a company at the center of a geopolitical firestorm. Beyond closed doors, an army of operatives have been preparing for this moment. Former members of Congress — including a former member of Democratic House leadership — helped the CEO get meetings on the Hill ahead of the hearing. Former aides to Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi helped prepare him.

SKDK, a firm that worked for the Biden campaign, has been assisting with policy communications. But the preparations for TikTok’s fight date back years, to at least 2018. With more than two dozen sources, we paint a picture of how TikTok amassed a network of operatives that connect the company to power centers across the world.

POLITICO’s Hailey Fuchs, Clothilde Goujard and Daniel Lippman have the full story here.

BEIJING SNEERS AT BIDEN’S DEMOCRACY SUMMIT

Today marks the conclusion of President Biden’s three-day Summit for Democracy.

Biden said the gathering — to which he invited the leaders of 120 countries — was a testament to his vision of democracies “getting stronger, not weaker.”

Biden put his money where his mouth is by announcing that his administration will channel — if Congress cooperates — $9.5 billion over the next three years to fund “efforts to advance democracy across the world.” And he’s creating a Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Governance operating out of USAID to allocate that cash.

Beijing is unimpressed. The U.S. insists that “only American and Western democracy is good and right, which is in itself at odds with the spirit of democracy,” the Chinese embassy’s Xu told reporters on Wednesday. That made Biden’s summit “much more about group politics than democracy,” Xu said.

Xu may be half-right. “The problem with the summit is it’s an issue of ‘who’s in, who’s out’ — who gets chosen and who doesn’t and that’s an unfortunate way it’s been organized,” said Derek Mitchell, former U.S. ambassador to Myanmar and the president of the National Democratic Institute. But Beijing’s criticism “shows China’s vulnerability and insecurity on the issues of real democracy,” Mitchell said.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Zelenskyy to Xi Jinping: Come to Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday invited Xi Jinping to Ukraine, for what would be the first direct communication between the two leaders since the beginning of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine. “We are ready to see [Xi] here,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with the Associated Press on a train to Kyiv, adding, “I want to speak with him.” POLITICO’s Nicolas Camut has the full story here.

TRANSLATING WASHINGTON

— DOJ: SURVEILLANCE NEEDED TO ‘FIGHT’ CHINA: Attorney General Merrick Garland defended the Justice Department’s surveillance authority — known as Section 702 — as an essential weapon against Chinese espionage. “This is what we need in order to fight the Chinese — we’re getting information about their cyber attacks, about their efforts to export our military information … [and] about their efforts to control dissidents who have fled China and now are in the United States,” Garland told a hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday.

— SULLIVAN, WANG YI TALK BILATERAL RELATIONS: National security adviser Jake Sullivan called China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, last Friday, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment and the Chinese embassy said in a statement that it had “no information” regarding the reported call. But if accurate it suggests that the Biden administration is on a diplomatic outreach spree given that deputy assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan, Rick Waters, made a low-key visit to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing from March 18-26 (a State Department spokesperson confirmed the details). The visit was devoted to “internal discussions with the U.S. embassy and consulates in China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Wednesday.

— RICHARD GERE DEFENDS TIBET IN D.C.: The actor Richard Gere lent some star power to a congressional hearing on Tuesday with sharply-worded criticism of China’s policies in Tibet. CCP control of Tibet has been “characterized by cruelty, collective violence and extreme persecution,” Gere told a hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China.   The committee timed the hearing — whose panelists included Uzra Zeya, the State Department’s special coordinator for Tibetan issues, and head of the Tibetan government in exile, Sikyong Penpa Tsering — to coincide with the 64th anniversary of the CCP’s overthrow of the Dalai Lama-led Tibetan government. Gere has asserted that China-leery Hollywood studio executives placed him on a blacklist due to his blamed his advocacy for Tibet over the past three decades

— TAIWAN REP SLAMS HONDURAS’ DIPLOMATIC DEFECTION: Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry announced on Saturday — and Beijing confirmed on Sunday — that the government of Honduras had broken diplomatic relations with the self-governing island in favor of Beijing ties. Honduras’ decision followed Taiwan’s refusal to provide $2.45 billion in aid to the Central American country, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told reporters. Honduras’s new ties with Beijing will render “nothing but empty promises and malign influence,” Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the U.S., Bi-khim Hsiao, tweeted on Saturday. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning shot back by accusing Taiwan’s government of “dollar diplomacy.”

TRANSLATING EUROPE

EU’S HARD-HITTING SPEECH TO CHINA: Europe needs to be “bolder” on China, which has become “more repressive at home and more assertive abroad,” according to the president of the European Commission.

Von der Leyen, who will be visiting China next week together with French President Emmanuel Macron, warned Beijing not to side with Moscow in bringing compromised peace to Ukraine, saying: “How China continues to interact with Putin’s war will be a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward.”

She implied, for the first time, that the EU could terminate pursuing a landmark trade deal with China, which was clinched in 2020 but subsequently stalled by the European Parliament when its members were sanctioned by Beijing authorities. “We need to reassess CAI [agreement] in light of our wider China strategy,” she said. Read our full story here.

ANTI-COERCION: EU negotiators have reached a major breakthrough in new rules that will allow the bloc to retaliate when foreign governments (read: China) try to use economic blackmail against one of its members (read: Lithuania). In the early hours of Tuesday, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU struck a deal on the anti-coercion instrument, after 11 hours of negotiations.

The instrument is “not a teeth-less tiger; it’s a tiger with teeth. It’s not a water pistol, it’s a gun,” said Bernd Lange, the lead lawmaker on the file. “Sometimes, it’s necessary to put a gun on the table, even knowing it is not used day by day.” Camille Gijs has the full story here.

LONDON SEALS DEAL: Britain will today be welcomed into an Indo-Pacific trade bloc called CPTPP (the successor to the one from which the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out), as ministers from the soon-to-be 12-nation trade pact meet in a virtual ceremony across multiple time zones, Graham Lanktree reports. 

Meanwhile, the opposition Labour Party of the U.K., which is hoping to return to power after next year’s general elections, will pursue legal routes toward declaring China’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims a “genocide,” according to the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy. Here’s the report by Eleni Courea.

HOT FROM THE CHINA WATCHERSPHERE

— APPLE CEO GETS ‘OPENING UP’ EARFUL: Apple CEO Tim Cook got a whack of Chinese government sweet talk about the country’s rosy investment climate in Beijing on Monday. 

China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao told Cook that China has “steadfastly pushed forward a high level of opening up … and is willing to provide a good environment and services for foreign-funded enterprises, including Apple,” said a statement posted on the ministry’s website on Monday. That rhetoric echoed pledges that the Chinese government has been making for more than two decades — with questionable follow-through. Cook is one of a gaggle of U.S. senior corporate executives who have converged on Beijing this week for the 2023 China Development Forum to try to revive in-person business ties effectively suspended for three years due to China’s now-defunct zero-Covid policy.

TRANSLATING CHINA

— BROOKLYN’S TAIWAN CULINARY CULTURE OUTPOST: Don’t be surprised if visiting Taiwan President Tsai’s motorcade makes a detour to Brooklyn during her layover in New York today. The likely destination: The Yun Hai (雲海 — “sea of clouds”) Taiwanese General Store. Since the online specialty store opened its brick and mortar location in 2022 it has become an East coast outpost of Taiwanese culinary, cultural and political identity. It led an initiative to support Taiwanese farmers during a 2021 Chinese import ban on Taiwanese pineapples and has become the Lunar New Year snacks supplier of choice for Taiwan’s unofficial diplomatic outpost in the Big Apple. China Watcher spoke to Lillian Lin, who co-owns Yun Hai with Lisa Cheng Smith, about the tasty intersection of Taiwanese food and politics.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What was the idea behind Yun Hai?

There are still a lot of people who don’t know what Taiwan is and confuse it with all sorts of other places. Including Thailand. Through the lens of food we’re shedding light on Taiwan’s history and bringing an awareness of Taiwan as a distinct place versus just some other random place they might have heard of in Asia.

We’re trying to share specific foods and dishes from Taiwan that have a holistic story about the people that are making it. It’s inevitable that when we talk about the history of where it all comes from, it acknowledges Taiwan as something that has its own identity. And that in itself should not be political, but unfortunately it is. We explain the history of Taiwanese foods and why it is Taiwanese and how you can’t find this stuff in China anymore.

What do Americans need to know about Taiwan?

All the politics make people question whether Taiwan is a country or not. But there’s a president, there’s a telephone country code, there’s a Taiwan website domain. It’s really a country, but that’s shrouded in the politics. And people are surprised when I tell them how progressive Taiwan is. Taiwan has gay marriage and press freedom that a lot of people don’t usually associate with Asia. And Taiwan is the only Mandarin-speaking democracy out there. So it’s a place where you can access Chinese history in a very open way and that’s of huge value.

How did Yun Hai get involved in the China pineapple export dispute?

When Taiwan’s pineapples got banned by China, there was a huge “freedom pineapple” movement where everybody in Taiwan was trying to eat as many pineapples as possible to help offset that canceled trade. In the U.S., there was a lot of interest in helping with that, but there wasn’t really an easy way to do that. So we thought — why don’t we try doing dried fruits instead? The goal was to create a new export channel for Taiwanese farmers so that they can diversify their export options and not solely rely on China. So we did a Kickstarter, raised about $110,000, bought 14 tons of fruit and now we’ve reordered from the farmers three times and are growing the quantity every time.

HEADLINES

WNYC: Rep. Jamaal Bowman Says Republicans Are Scapegoating TikTok. Agree?  

Associated Press: Amid strained US ties, China finds unlikely friend in Utah

New York Times: How China Keeps Putting Off Its ‘Lehman Moment’

HEADS UP

— CHINA’S BOAO FORUM FLAGS ‘UNCERTAIN WORLD’: The annual Boao Forum for Asia opens today in Hainan’s Boao city and its organizers are channeling the global zeitgeist by making “an uncertain world” its central theme. The four-day event — Beijing’s attempt at a regional Davos — will host world leaders including Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

ONE BOOK, THREE QUESTIONS

The Book:  Formosa Moon.

The Authors: Joshua Samuel Brown is a former journalist and author of more than a dozen Lonely Planet guides. Stephanie Huffman is an artist who earned her masters in Asian studies from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What is the most important takeaway from your book?

That cross-strait tension doesn’t define Taiwan. Despite the precariousness of its geopolitical situation, Taiwan’s zeitgeist isn’t one of anxiety and endless preparation for a conflict that’s been called various stages of “imminent” since 1949. Taiwan’s story is infinitely more complex and nuanced than the boilerplate — and historically dubious at best — “breakaway island” narrative that’s been dutifully copy-pasted into nearly every article published about Taiwan over the last 30 years. 

What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing this book?

The out-of-bounds artistic creativity of the Taiwanese. We encountered dozens of strange, wonderful and highly improbable venues seemingly willed into existence by folks with the energy, enthusiasm — and capital — to bring their dreams to life. From an inland hotel boasting an indoor scuba diving tank to a tourist village based entirely on the concept of cats, from the nearly endless array of colorful temples and food streets in every conceivable configuration to dozens of absolutely bonkers annual festivals that oversaturate the senses in every way.

What insights does your book offer about Taiwan that can’t be found in travel guides?

Travel guides generally stick to where to go, how to get there and what things should cost. There’s a bit of pragmatic logistics in the book — old habits die hard because I spent 10 years writing guidebooks for Lonely Planet. But we focused more on the 人情味 (rén qíng wèi: human warmth, friendliness) we experienced. By taking a more experiential travelogue approach, we hope to inspire readers to visit Taiwan, make their own discoveries and come to their own conclusions about the nation.

Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at [email protected].

MANY THANKS TO: Heidi Vogt, Christian Oliver, Matt Kaminski, Jamil Anderlini,  Stuart Lau, Hailey Fuchs, Clothilde Goujard, Daniel Lippman, Nicolas Camut, Josh Gerstein, Camille Gijs, Graham Lanktree, Eleni Courea, and digital producers Tara Gnewikow and Jeanette Minns. Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week’s items? Email us at [email protected].

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