Great Power Competition in the Taiwan Strait

There are growing concerns about the risk of conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan. This presentation explores the rising tensions by analyzing three different abstract terms: the pursuit by Beijing of "peaceful" unification with Taiwan; the U.S. commitment to "unofficial" relations with Taiwan; and U.S. opposition to unilateral changes to the "status quo" in the Taiwan Strait. For decades, these terms served as a bargain for maintaining peace and stability, but the agreement was only theoretical, because the United States and China never reached a joint understanding of what these terms mean in practice. Against the backdrop of great power competition, the discrepancies in the U.S. approach has been laid bare, raising the risk that the bargain could unravel entirely and lead to war between the United States and China.

Join the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and 21st Century China Center for a talk with Dr. James Lee, assistant research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and an affiliated researcher at IGCC. His research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Business and Politics, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and the Journal of Chinese Political Science. His policy writing has been published in Global Asia, the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, East Asia Forum, Political Violence at a Glance, and The Diplomat. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2018 and subsequently held research positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the University of California, San Diego. In the fall of 2023, he will be an Eisenhower Defense Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome.

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