Beijing: In the feverish run up to the US presidential election, China's state-controlled media spun Donald Trump's loose and unpredictable style as potential for Beijing's strategic gain - a businessman who could consider pragmatic trade-offs where an ideologically hawkish Hillary Clinton would not.
With one 10-minute phone call to Taiwan's president Tsai Ing-wen, Trump has broken with nearly four-decades of diplomatic convention, tread upon what has long been the most sensitive issue in the US-China relationship, and signalled that his administration's foreign policy calibration may be far less benign than Beijing had hoped.
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Trump's Taiwan call concerns China
China resolutely opposes any form of official exchanges between the US and Taiwan, says a Chinese official after US President-elect Donald Trump spoke directly with the Taiwanese leader.
As well as being the first president or president-elect to have spoken to a Taiwanese leader since at least 1979, when the US severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan as part of its recognition of the People's Republic of China, Trump is likely to have infuriated China by referring directly to Tsai as "President of Taiwan".
The telephone conversation, hailed by Taiwan's Central News Agency as "historic", will prove a test for the flexibility of Beijing's foreign policy calculations. It may deem it more prudent to privately remind Trump's transition team of the sensitivity of straying from the delicate diplomatic dance practised by previous US presidents.
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Hardliners will hope it fuels further strategic mistrust and prevents reaching common ground on economic and security conflict.
"This is a petty trick on the part of the Taiwan side, it absolutely has no possibility of altering the One-China consensus reached in the international community," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters on Saturday, according to Phoenix Television. "The One-China policy is the bedrock of the healthy development of Sino-American relations; we do not wish to see this political foundation meet with any disruption or damage."
Beijing may well take its time to ascertain whether the Trump transition team intended the call with Tsai to indicate sweeping changes in US policy toward Taiwan.
But under President Xi Jinping, more than his recent predecessors, China has taken a hardline approach to any perceived threat to its sovereignty. That, despite an environment where Taiwan is led by the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, public attitudes in Hong Kong are increasingly toxic toward the mainland, and bitter territorial disputes fester in the South and East China Seas.
"Chinese leaders will believe that [Trump's] message will encourage Tsai Ing-wen to continue even further to resist pressure from the mainland so this is a very serious and negative development," Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University told Fairfax Media.
"This is a reminder that the Chinese media's and many scholars estimation about Trump's possible attitude toward China have proved somewhat too optimistic."
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