In recent years, the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have found it particularly challenging to interpret one another’s foreign policy signals. Misinterpretation of each other’s signaling may contribute to a bilateral action-reaction dynamic and can intensify into an action-reaction cycle and escalation spiral. The United States, for example, may take a particular action, and China might view that action as being provocative, rather than interpreting it as it was intended to be seen — as a reaction by the United States to China’s own behavior. This interpretation challenge can inadvertently elevate bilateral tensions and escalate into a crisis or even war.
Taiwan continues to be the most contentious issue in US-China relations. Moreover, the Taiwan Strait is routinely identified as the most plausible location of a military confrontation between the United States and China. Thus, it is important that each side accurately interprets the other side’s signals regarding Taiwan to avoid unintended escalation and unwanted conflict.
This project examines US-China signaling and action-reaction dynamics related to the visit to Taiwan of Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in August 2022. Some have dubbed this episode the “Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis.” Visits by senior US officials to Taiwan have been infrequent, especially since 1979 when Washington severed formal diplomatic relations with Taipei and established ambassador-level ties with Beijing. The PRC considers visits by senior US officials to Taiwan as violating the “One China Policy,” because such travel implies that the United States recognizes Taiwan as a political entity distinct from the PRC. Before 2022, the last time a senior member of the US Congress visited the island was when Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich did so in 1997. The PRC attaches considerable significance to the fact that Speaker of the House is third in line to succeed the US president. Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan came at a tense moment in US-China relations, and China launched a series of massive, multiday military exercises at multiple locations around Taiwan’s periphery and canceled or suspended several exchanges with the United States in response.
This report is the outcome of research conducted on the US side by United States Institute of Peace (USIP), one in a USIP series on signaling between the United States and China. The first report titled “US-China Signaling, Action-Reaction Dynamics, and Taiwan: A Preliminary Examination” was published by USIP in September 2022. It focused on the first ten weeks of the Biden administration and arrived at several preliminary judgments. One of the most notable of those conclusions was that there were multiple areas where the two sides missed, misperceived, or misunderstood each other’s signals. In some instances, signals sent by one side, or the other were unrecognized and therefore ineffective; in other instances, efforts to reduce tensions were understood as provocations and contributed to escalating tensions. Thus, it was possible that in some cases, US-China signaling was increasing rather than decreasing the risk of crises developing between the two countries.
The first report focused on a period that was not one of crisis but rather one when the governments of both capitals were beginning to interact following a change in US administration. The then new Biden administration in Washington was beginning to put together its relevant staff and establish the parameters and tone for its approach to the US relationship with China. For Beijing, the period represented an opportunity to convey its own posture toward the new administration, even before the two sides had engaged in significant bilateral diplomatic interaction. Although there were some action-reaction dynamics at play, the report’s findings were weighted toward the communication and interpretation issues in US-China signaling, rather than toward the action-reaction dynamics that are also an important dimension of bilateral signaling.
In contrast to the first study, this second report on signaling between the United States and China focuses on a period of high tension between the two countries, defined by some but not all experts as a crisis.
The project on which this report is based was designed jointly by experts at USIP and the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS), and the research was conducted in parallel efforts by USIP and SIIS. Two central research questions drove this project:
- How accurately do US and Chinese policymakers interpret each other’s signaling?
- Do these interpretations impact bilateral action-reaction dynamics and, if so, how?
To answer these questions, researchers at USIP and SIIS prepared to conduct a series of not-for- attribution interviews with policymakers and analysts in their respective countries. The first task was to develop a timeline of key bilateral actions for the period from April to August 2022. This timeline (which is reproduced in the appendix to this report) was generated by the SIIS research team and revised and expanded with input from the USIP research team. The research effort was conducted by the two teams in parallel, with the USIP team interviewing more than a dozen Americans in the United States and the SIIS team interviewing an equivalent number of Chinese citizens in China. Researchers began each interview by providing a brief background on the project and then shared a copy of the timeline and asked interviewees to study the document. Each interviewee was asked to identify any events or episodes they deemed to be particularly important and to justify their selections. Each interviewee was also asked to identify any attempts at signaling by one side or the other and to offer an opinion as to whether this signaling had been successful. In addition, each interviewee was asked to identify any action-reaction dynamics. Lastly, interviewees were asked to offer additional comments or raise questions. Subsequently, the interview data were collated and analyzed separately by the USIP and SIIS research teams. The two teams then shared the data each had aggregated from its interviews and its overall findings.
This report distills the project’s major findings into three sections: “Perspectives,” “Analyses,” and “Policy Implications.” The subsections were written either by the USIP team or by the SIIS team, as indicated in the subsections’ titles. The report concludes with a call by the USIP team for further research into the interpretation, and more particularly the misinterpretation, of signaling between the United States and China in order to inform efforts to create a more stable bilateral relationship.
About the Authors
Dr. Andrew Scobell is a distinguished fellow with the China program at USIP. Dr. Carla Freeman was a senior expert for China at USIP at the time of writing and is currently a senior lecturer in foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and director of the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute. Ms. Alison McFarland was a program specialist at USIP at the time of writing and is now a graduate student at Princeton University. Dr. Shao Yuqun is the director of the Institute for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau Studies at SIIS. Dr. Wu Chunsi was the director of the Institute for International Strategic and Security Studies at SIIS and is now the director of Center for American Studies at SIIS. Ms. Ji Yixin is a research fellow in the Institute for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau Studies at SIIS.