With US Making Messes, China is Making Moves

Xi Jinping meets KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing

The following strikes me as a very cogent essay about how China is taking the opportunity created by U.S. mess-making in the Middle East to make moves with Taiwan.

The essay is written by Shanaka Anslem Perera, author of The Ascent Begins. He is an independent analyst who studies money, geopolitics, AI, science, and sovereignty with a special interest in the rise and fall of great powers.

JUST IN: While every camera in the world is pointed at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad today, Xi Jinping shook hands with KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The first high-level KMT-CCP leadership meeting in nearly a decade. Xi told her: “Compatriots on both sides of the strait are all Chinese, one family.” He added: “Taiwan independence is the chief culprit undermining peace.” Cheng called her six-day trip a “journey for peace” and invoked the 1992 Consensus.

This did not happen by accident. It happened today.

The Iran war pulled American military assets out of the Pacific. Carriers, Marines, THAAD, Patriots, all redeployed to the Middle East since February 28. Brookings explicitly identified this as “strategic space” for Beijing. China then used its leverage over Iran (1.5 million barrels per day, Tehran’s largest customer) to nudge Tehran toward the ceasefire. Trump confirmed: “I heard yes” when asked if China persuaded Iran. The ceasefire was the entrance fee for the May 14-15 Beijing summit. Today’s KMT meeting is the pre-summit positioning play.

The sequence is architectural. China vetoed the UN Hormuz resolution on April 7 (preserving Iran’s leverage and its own intermediary status). China nudged Iran toward the bilateral ceasefire the same day (building goodwill with Trump). China scheduled the Xi-Cheng meeting for April 10 (the day Islamabad talks begin, when US attention is maximally diverted). And the May summit sits five weeks away, where Taiwan language will be tested in a room where China arrives with three diplomatic receipts: we helped you get the ceasefire, we kept the KMT dialogue alive, and we are the only power that can deliver Iran.

Meanwhile, the KMT-controlled legislature has stalled Taiwan’s $40 billion special defense budget for asymmetric capabilities. The same party whose chairwoman is shaking Xi’s hand today is the party blocking the weapons purchases Washington needs Taiwan to make to sustain the First Island Chain deterrence strategy that underpins US containment of China. Bloomberg reported that Beijing will “use the sitdown to argue that Taiwanese people are in favor of closer ties, sending a key signal to the US.” The New York Times said Xi is using the meeting “to cast Beijing as a peacemaker and squeeze the island’s president.”

Taiwan produces over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. TSMC commands 72 percent of the global foundry market. A full conflict over Taiwan would erase $10.6 trillion in global GDP in year one. This is not a sideshow. This is the main event wearing a mask.

Trump is a transactional president. He has already shown willingness to use allies as leverage (NATO “freeloaders,” Greenland, Panama Canal). China is betting that a president who just watched his NATO allies refuse to join the Iran war, who needs rare-earth supply chains for AI and defense, who wants a trade deal before midterms, will be receptive to a framing in which Taiwan is “handled” through dialogue rather than deterrence.

The Islamabad talks are about Iran. The Beijing handshake is about everything else. And the country that brokered the ceasefire, blocked the UN vote, moved its tankers freely through a closed strait, and met the opposition leader of America’s most strategically vital partner all did it in the same week.

The real negotiation is not at the Serena Hotel. It is already underway at the Great Hall of the People.

See ORIGINAL POST on X by Shanaka Anslem Perera.