Harris and Taiwan
Harris and Taiwan
If elected, Harris is unlikely to chart a radically different course from her predecessor.
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By John Rodden
Kamala Harris has little foreign policy experience, and has never visited Taiwan or gone on the official record as to her foreign policy views about the island. Are there, however, any indications since her becoming the official Democratic presidential nominee as to how a Harris administration would approach Taiwan?
Harris is widely expected to continue the pro-Taiwan foreign policy pursued by President Joe Biden. Her supporters note that, although Harris has never visited Taiwan, she did meet Taiwan’s president during a trip when both of them attended a state occasion in Honduras in 2022.
Is Tim Walz a Plus or Minus for Harris on China?
The credibility of Harris to stand as a staunch opponent of China has nevertheless come under fire recently as a result of revelations about the business dealings her vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz, currently governor of Minnesota, has had with mainland China. Walz has visited China more than thirty times before and during his term of office as Minnesota governor. He also possesses some degree of proficiency in Mandarin Chinese. During his years as a congressman, he co-sponsored some China-focused bills. His detractors point to what they consider overly close relations between Walz and Chinese economic interests, suggesting that he has benefited financially from his contacts with Chinese businessmen.
Walz’s supporters say, however, that his interactions with China are a positive. They note that he is already familiar with the Chinese Communist Party’s outlook on economic and diplomatic matters. These supporters also note that Walz spoke out in Congress in favor of the Hong Kong democracy protests in 2017, and that he met the Dalai Lama in 2016. Support for Hong Kong and Tibet directly contradicts claims that Walz is “soft” on the Chinese Communist Party, his advocates stress. Walz has also been vocal in his support for Taiwan as governor of Minnesota, a state that has established ties with the island.
It moreover seems overwhelmingly likely that Harris will continue to honor the framework of foreign policy endorsed not only by Biden but also Trump in the last decade, which has been shaped by a series of agreements, including six statements of defense policy “assurances” (as they are known), the Taiwan Relations Act, and three separate communiques issued in the last dozen years. These repeatedly voiced statements of support from the United States on Taiwan have resulted in a relationship that has been strong, close and warm, both in terms of defense policy and economic policy.
But although the Biden administration has been a firm supporter of Taiwan, it has also followed a long-standing U.S. policy approach that goes back several decades and is usually termed “strategic ambiguity.” That phrase refers to the American stance of warnings and vocal opposition to any changes in the Taiwan Strait, though the American policy stops short of spelling out how Washington would respond to Beijing if it did pursue aggressive military or economic measures against Taiwan. The United States has not officially voiced, for example, an explicit commitment to defend Taiwan if it is invaded.
However, President Biden has done so in remarks to the press. Unofficially his support for Taiwan has been loud and unwavering. As president, he has issued five public statements specifically taking up the issue of Beijing launching an invasion of Taiwan, announcing in strong terms that the United States opposes any policy changes by Beijing—though “strategic ambiguity” prevails as to what a concrete American response would entail. Beijing claims most of the South China Sea as its own, putting it in conflict not only with Taiwan but also a number of other neighbors: Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. On several occasions in 2024, Beijing has employed water cannons against its rivals’ ships and otherwise impeded their movement in the disputed waters. The United States has voiced criticism of these policies.
There is no reason to believe that Kamala Harris would depart from this stance. However, unlike Biden—who chaired the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a decade before gaining even wider foreign policy experience as vice president for eight years in the Obama administration—both Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have limited foreign policy experience (Walz’s business trips to China notwithstanding).
Is Harris “a Female Obama”?
And Harris’s experience? Having lectured at the National Academy of the Arts in Taipei on several occasions and taught in a provincial university in Taiwan—Tunghai University, located in the island’s third largest city—I can attest that Taiwan’s citizens are intrigued by Harris. Some of them describe her—as does the mainland Chinese media—as a “female Obama.” By this they also mean that they expect her to continue the policies of the Obama and Biden administrations. Her supporters in the United States and sympathetic observers in Taiwan note that she co-sponsored legislation that sanctioned Chinese officials for their human rights violations in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. (The latter is a Chinese province in the far west where millions of ethnic Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim minority, have been persecuted with deliberate or tacit government approval.)
Furthermore, regarding Taiwan, she voted for legislation in 2018 allowing high officials from both Washington and Taipei to visit each other in their official capacity with fewer restrictions. And as I have already noted, she met in January 2022 with Lai Ching-te, then Taiwan’s vice president, during the inauguration ceremony for Honduras’ president.
Still, compared with Biden—and even with Michelle Obama, who visited dozens of countries as a presidential ambassador during her eight years as First Lady—this record is extremely thin. Harris served a mere four years in the Senate, where she had no foreign policy assignments, and she has made few foreign policy trips to Asia as vice president. Harris’ single short encounter with Chinese leader Xi Jinping was at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bangkok in 2022, when they had a few moments of conversation. She reportedly stressed the importance of maintaining “open lines of communication to responsibly manage the competition between our countries,” according to a campaign press release.
All these circumstances increase the likelihood that Harris and Walz would rely heavily on the State Department diplomatic corps and the Washington foreign policy establishment. That suggests a very moderate course in Asian policy, guided by advice from experienced diplomats, foreign policy makers, and Democratic Party strategists. Unlike Donald Trump, who has vast experience with Asian policy both as a former president and an international businessman, their course on Taiwan is likely to be highly predictable and dependent on consensus and recent history. At present, Harris is surrounded by a capable foreign policy team. Philip Gordon, the vice president’s trusted national security advisor, has championed the Obama and Biden style of competitive engagement with Beijing. (The vice president is not shy about offering her own take regarding imminent foreign policy issues, however, as shown by her enduring concerns about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in the wake of Israeli retaliation against Hamas after the October 2023 attack.)
A few observers do voice doubts, however, that Harris will support Taiwan as strongly as President Biden has done. She has never endorsed Biden’s statement that he would dispatch U.S. forces to shield Taiwan from Chinese military incursion. Harris spoke ambiguously in September 2022 when she was explicitly asked about this during a press interview at Japan’s Yokosuka Base. Her remarks were viewed as distancing herself from Biden, since they followed his CBS interview a few days earlier in which he affirmed a commitment to respond with military force if Beijing violated Taiwan’s territorial integrity. Invited by a questioner to comment on Biden’s CBS interview, she answered hazily—what her critics have come to call her incoherent “word salad”—that “the relationship and the alliance is based on shared principles in terms of international rules and norms, such as sovereignty, territorial integrity. It is also about what we know to be our commitment to security and prosperity for all these nations.”
It warrants emphasis, however, that some Taiwan politicians favor a Harris presidency, believing that she would be both a more predictable and a stronger advocate for Taiwan. Trump’s recent statements about applying his “American First” doctrine to Taiwan policy makes these politicians uneasy. (Trump’s defenders point out that his actions as president repeatedly showed unequivocal support for Taiwan and that a second Trump administration would never dream of abandoning Taiwan to the Chinese communists.)
However, gender politics feature prominently in the current American election: Harris supporters believe that she has youth, race, and gender “on her side.” They argue that the American electorate compares her favorably with Trump, whom by contrast voters see as an “old white man”—three strikes and he’s out. However true all that is in the American context, her supporters also go on to apply it to Taiwan. That is more questionable; my colleagues and former students in Taiwan have mocked this view as a combination of “American PC” and “American collective solipsism.” They note that Asia, and most especially Taiwanese and Chinese culture, do not align with American cultural norms promoted in the mainstream American media.
Nonetheless, a few political commentators in Taiwan have stated that, if she becomes America’s first woman president, she may have the advantage of being able to establish deep and immediate rapport with influential women in Taiwan politics. Taiwan is, after all, notable in Asia for electing women to senior leadership positions, including former President Tsai Ing-wen and current Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim.
John Rodden has taught at various universities in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia. He writes often about American foreign policy.
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