Taiwan’s Representative to the United States Alexander Yui (俞大㵢) said in an interview on CBS on Sunday, September 27, that he believes U.S. policy toward Taiwan has not changed. Referring to the events preceding World War II, he stated that Japan is not the provocateur today, but rather China is the one driving a wedge between the United States and its allies.

Yui was interviewed by Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Sunday political program Face the Nation. He said that Taiwan was not a topic of discussion at the recent meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Furthermore, neither side mentioned Taiwan in released statements summarizing the outcomes of the talks.

Yui noted that both Trump and Xi referenced events of World War II and Japan’s aggression against China in the late 1930s. He said Trump referenced the heroic actions of the First American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, but Xi sought to connect this to the notion that during World War II, it was the Chinese Communist Party that fought against Japanese forces. Yui called this characterization inaccurate.

Yui explained that the CCP government had not yet been established prior to 1949, and that during World War II, resistance against Japan on the communist side consisted of only limited guerilla activity, if any combat at all. He emphasized that what Trump said was correct, in that the U.S. and China fought bravely together during the war, but it was the Republic of China government, not Xi Jinping, and that this distinction must be correctly understood. 

Yui said China’s current framing suggests that the U.S. and China are jointly opposing a resurgence of militarism, with implicit references to Japan and the Philippines, and even characterizing Taiwan as a provocateur in order to argue against arms sales to Taiwan. He said this ignores and distorts the facts, and that it is China that is taking aggressive actions and creating tensions along the first island chain and in the Asia-Pacific region. He emphasized that Japan is not the provocateur today, it is China that is working to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies, including Japan.