How China may capitalize on damage made by Trump: The Guardian
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A former PLA colonel, Zhou Bo, believes that Donald Trump will tarnish the US image and sink the country's international standing.
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US President Donald Trump shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping during a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 29, 2019. (AP)
Donald Trump's harm to the US reputation is generating possibilities for China, notably in Taiwan, a former senior colonel from China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) divulged.
Trump is harming the US reputation "more than all of his predecessors combined," Zhou Bo, told The Guardian in Beijing.
Zhou believes that by the end of Trump's term, the US global image will "become more tarnished," and its global position will "just go down further." The people of Taiwan "know that America is going down," which "might affect their mentality" toward China, he noted.
In 2024, Trump stated that Taiwan should pay the US for its defense, even though the self-governing island currently pays billions of dollars on US armaments.
Taiwan is allegedly considering acquiring an additional $7-10 billion in weaponry this year, but Zhou questioned, "How confident would the Taiwanese be with the United States, especially with the Trump administration?"
“Maybe the Taiwanese will one day consider, ‘Well, we cannot move away anyway. We will have to stay here. Maybe it’s not bad for us to be a member of the strongest nation on earth.”
In 2024, Taiwan elected the pro-sovereignty Democratic Progressive Party for a third consecutive term, with a significant majority of Taiwanese identifying more as Taiwanese than Chinese, especially among younger generations.
China considers the island a part of its territory and has hinted at using force to reunify it with the mainland.
Trump's stance on Taiwan has remained uncertain. Earlier this month, the State Department deleted a sentence from its Taiwan fact sheet that read, "We do not support Taiwan independence," a decision that Beijing protested.
Zhou stated that the fate of Taiwan was not only up to the Taiwanese people. Taiwan has a population of 23 million, while China has 1.4 billion people. “We can just not only think about what the Taiwanese think about it. We have to think about what mainlanders think about it.”
Despite tensions over Taiwan, Zhou views Trump as generally “rather friendly” toward China, noting that the tariffs on Chinese imports in Trump’s early days were much lower than the 60% initially threatened.
Recently, Trump’s comments on China have been subdued, and early in the Ukraine war, Western leaders urged China’s President Xi Jinping to use his influence with Russia to end the war.
Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke with Xi, who emphasized the strong, unique, and unaffected nature of Sino-Russian relations.
According to Zhou, China's role will be "indispensable" when the time comes for a ceasefire or armistice. China may send troops to Ukraine, along with other non-NATO European nations and countries from the Global South, because peacekeepers from NATO countries would be perceived as "wolves in sheep's clothing" by Russia. China is the second-largest donor to the UN's peacekeeping budget, after the US.
Zhou described the China-Russia relationship as "strong but short of an alliance."
“I describe it as two lines in parallel. That means no matter how close they are, they won’t overlap.”
