Reshaping Global Power
All eyes are fixed on the 2024 Lok Sabha election. But three months before that, and six months after, are two key elections in Taiwan and the United States. Taken together, the three general elections could shape geopolitics through this decade.
In November 2024, Joe Biden will seek a second term in the US presidential election. In January 2024, Taiwan’s fiercely anti-China president Tsai In-wen would have completed her second successive term. Taiwan restricts presidents to a maximum of two terms, making Tsai ineligible to contest in 2024.
That will please China’s President Xi Jinping, now serving his precedent-breaking third term. Tsai has been the most vocal Taiwanese president in recent years to oppose reunification with China. Xi regards reunification of Taiwan with the mainland as his personal legacy. Following his three-day visit to Russia, Xi is putting in place a new Great Power template for China. The template has four elements: diplomatic, political, economic and military.
The first diplomatic coup for Beijing was mediating an entente cordiale between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. The two Middle East rivals had cut diplomatic relations in 2013 following tit for tat sectarian attacks.
The rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh, choreographed by Xi in Beijing to wide global publicity, not only gives China a toehold in the Middle East’s febrile politics but reduces Washington’s influence as the sole power broker in the region. With Russia’s military deeply entrenched in Syria, the China-Russia axis poses a significant future challenge to the US-led West in a volatile geography.
The second key agenda for Xi is economic. He knows that the era of high Chinese growth is over. The greying of China, with the average Chinese now nearly 40 years old, will lower productivity and increase the fiscal burden on pensions.
Its attention fixated on the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the US was blindsided into enabling China’s technological growth for over 30 years. Finally waking up to the threat Beijing poses to a US-led world order, Washington has unleashed an economic war on China across trade and technology. The ban on accessing advanced US semiconductor technology is forcing Beijing to fall back on locally made chips. The technological edge China enjoys could moderate as Western sanctions on Chinese companies begin to bite.
China’s third priority is political. It sees Taiwan’s January 2024 general election as an opportunity to coerce Taipei’s new government into peaceful reunification. The Opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party favours a negotiated settlement with Beijing over reunification.
Significantly, Taiwan’s former President Ma Ying-jeou, a KMT member, is visiting China from 27 March to 7 April, the first senior Taiwanese leader to do so since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Chang Chih-hao, a spokesman for Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was livid: “The Chinese communists intimidate us and woo our allies, as in the recent case of Honduras. It is totally unthinkable that Ma would make such a visit.”
If peaceful negotiations don’t work, Beijing has warned that an armed invasion of the breakaway island is not ruled out. Will the US intervene militarily in such an event? President Biden has issued mixed signals. Asked in a CBS interview in September 2022 if US troops would militarily defend Taiwan, Biden said: “Yes, if there was an unprecedented attack.”
The China-Russia axis is feared in Washington as the most potent threat to the Western world order since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. China’s military build-up has caused deep worries in the Pentagon. Beijing’s new defence budget is $225 billion, more than the combined defence budgets of Britain, France and Germany.
China has meanwhile softened its approach to India. It knows that the US-led West, Japan and South Korea, allied with India, constitute a powerful alliance. Beijing attempted to keep India neutral in the geopolitical rivalry between the US and China by holding three informal summits with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad (2014), Wuhan (2018) and Mahabalipuram (2019). The ploy failed. Galwan Valley and the three-year-long standoff at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) followed.
*Historic election
Between the potentially game-changing Taiwan general election in January 2024 and the inevitably fraught US presidential election in November 2024 lies the 2024 Lok Sabha election. It could be historic as well. If Modi wins, he will be the first Indian leader to be elected for three successive prime ministerial terms since Jawaharlal Nehru (1952, 1957 and 1962).
With Xi already serving his third (non-elected) term as president and Biden likely, at 82, to be the oldest US president re-elected for a second term, the stage would be set for a new triangular relationship between the US, China and India.
The economic, security and technological alliance that is fast developing between the US and India is a formidable force arrayed against a slowing, ageing China. The US-India strategic partnership allied with Europe and East Asia adds an edge to the geopolitical challenge for China.
Xi’s diplomacy in the Middle East, deepening ties with Russia and an outreach to Africa and Latin America have taken on new urgency. If China annexes Taiwan – by diplomacy or force – and with Hong Kong scheduled to merge with the mainland in 2047 under the Sino-British agreement, China’s economic and technological heft will receive a significant boost.
Ironically, it was US subterfuge that helped China grow into a global power. In the 1960s, the US was obsessed with driving a wedge between two communist giants, the Soviet Union and China. The US helped China grow into an economic and technological powerhouse. Instead of driving a wedge between Beijing and Moscow, the US today faces a powerful China-Russia axis that challenges its role as the world’s gendarme.
Minhaz Merchant is the biographer of Rajiv Gandhi and Aditya Birla and author of The New Clash of Civilizations (Rupa, 2014). He is founder of Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd. which was acquired by the Indian Express group
