Donald Trump Thrusts Taiwan Back on the Table, Rattling a Region

Mr. Trump expressed no misgivings about taking the call from President Tsai Ing-wen, which was arranged beforehand. He bridled at suggestions that he had committed a faux pas, writing on Twitter on Friday evening that it was “interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”

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President Richard M. Nixon greeted Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972 during Mr. Nixon’s trip to China. Credit Associated Press

Nor did Mr. Trump or his aides make a gesture to reaffirm the One China policy, much to the chagrin of the White House, and it fell to a spokesman for the National Security Council to affirm that the United States was not changing the policy. Under that policy, the United States formally recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1979, abrogating its ties with Taiwan, as the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, sought to bolster China’s economy and create closer ties to the West.

Whether Mr. Trump views the call as the beginning of a change in approach toward Taiwan is not clear. A person close to him insisted that he was just being polite in taking Ms. Tsai’s call.

Among hard-line Republicans, there has always been a push to confront China by reaching out to Taiwan. In a statement on Friday, Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who was briefly believed to be a candidate for Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, praised him for taking the call, saying it “reaffirms our commitment to the only democracy on Chinese soil.”

And some China experts said that shaking up the cross-strait relationship would not be the worst thing in the world. “We have had a status quo of sorts in the Taiwan Strait that has kept the peace, but it recently has not looked all that durable, nor was it very agreeable to most citizens of democratic Taiwan,” said Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society.

“Whether a new kind of Trumpian brinkmanship will now cause China to reconsider its hard-line position towards Taiwan, or to respond in a dangerous and militant way, remains to be seen,” he said.

Mr. Trump spoke harshly about China before and during the campaign, accusing it of concocting climate change as a hoax to undercut American manufacturers, branding it a currency manipulator (when it in fact is trying to prop its currency up), and threatening to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods. And Mr. Trump’s trade advisers have also advocated punitive responses to what they portray as unfair Chinese actions. A few days after he was elected, however, Mr. Trump spoke with China’s president, Mr. Xi, and released a statement afterward that said the two men had a “clear sense of mutual respect.”

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President Xi Jinping of China and President Obama at a ceremony in Hangzhou in September announcing the formal adoption of the Paris climate agreement. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Taiwan is also likely to seek a closer relationship with the United States. After many years under a Kuomintang government, which pursued closer ties with China, Taiwan elected Ms. Tsai as its second president from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. Analysts said that Ms. Tsai, though not a firebrand, was seeking to diversify Taiwan’s economic partners and carve out more space for it in international affairs.

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“Tsai Ing-wen was pretty shrewd in making the call in the first place,” Mr. Huntsman said.

There are also lingering questions about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in Taiwan. The news media there has reported that the Trump Organization sent a representative to Taiwan to explore building a luxury hotel in a government-backed development near Taipei’s airport.

The Trump Organization does not dispute that one of its employees â€" assigned to promote hotel sales related to Asia â€" was in Taipei, the capital, in October for a work-related visit. The duties of the executive, Anne-Marie Donoghue, include trying to find guests for the company’s hotels worldwide, and she is not involved in developing new real estate projects for Trump Hotels.

Separately, the mayor of Taoyuan, where Taiwan’s main airport is, told reporters in Taiwan last month that he had spoken in September with what appears to have been a different woman who suggested that she was associated with the Trump Organization and that the group was interested in discussing a hotel project. The mayor, Cheng Wen-tsan, did not respond Saturday to a request for comment.

In a statement on Friday, Amanda Miller, the vice president for marketing at the Trump Organization, disputed that the company was pursuing any real estate deals in Taiwan. “There have been no authorized visits to Taiwan on behalf of Trump Hotels for the purposes of development, nor are there any active conversations,” she said. “We are not planning any expansion into Taiwan.”

For the Chinese government, as for many other governments around the world, Mr. Trump’s freewheeling diplomacy poses a challenge. At first, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, played down the episode, saying it was a “petty action by the Taiwan side” that would not upset the longstanding policy of One China.

But hours later, the Chinese Foreign Ministry lodged a formal complaint with the Obama administration. It urged the United States to “handle issues related to Taiwan carefully and properly to avoid causing unnecessary interference to the overall U.S.-China relationship.”

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