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Donald Trump is confident that Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attack Taiwan during his time in the White House, according to US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent.
Speaking on CNBC, Bessent said Trump was “confident that President Xi will not make that move during his presidency”. Bessent was responding to a question about whether he thought China would attack Taiwan.
US intelligence officials said Xi had told the People’s Liberation Army to develop the capabilities to invade Taiwan by 2027, but they had also stressed this does not mean 2027 is a deadline for war.
The White House did not respond to a question about whether Bessent’s assertion was based on any new intelligence.
Tensions over Taiwan have risen significantly over the past few years, and particularly since Nancy Pelosi in 2022 became the first US House Speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years.
The PLA has rapidly expanded operations around Taiwan. Speaking at the Honolulu Defense Forum last month, Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of US Indo-Pacific command, said the exercises were no longer just training.
“Their aggressive manoeuvres around Taiwan right now are not ‘exercises’, as they call them, they are rehearsals . . . for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland,” Paparo said in response to a question from the Financial Times.
Bessent’s comments on China and Taiwan come as Taipei has become nervous that Trump’s stance on Ukraine could herald a weakening of the US’s decades-long support for the Asian country.
US-China tensions spiked during the Biden administration because the countries were at loggerheads over a range of security-related issues. Since Trump took office, tensions have centred on trade. The US president has imposed a 20 per cent tariff on imports from China.
The White House said the tariffs were designed to pressure Beijing to crack down on the export of ingredients for the deadly opioid fentanyl.
It added that they were also intended to end subsidies for groups that make the dual-use chemicals sold to cartels in Mexico and used to produce fentanyl that is smuggled into the US.
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi on Friday described Trump as “two-faced” and said Beijing would take “countermeasures in response to arbitrary pressure” from Washington.
“No country should fantasise that it can suppress China and maintain good relations with China at the same time,” Wang said at a press conference. “Such two-faced acts are not good for the stability of bilateral relations, or for building mutual trust.”
Earlier this week, the Chinese embassy in Washington said it was ready to respond to any fight with the US, including war. “If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” the embassy wrote on the social media platform X.