Rising international support for Taiwan

In 2021, a growing number of countries have been willing to join the United States in making statements supporting peace and stability in Taiwan, and some, including Canada and the United Kingdom, have sent military vessels to transit the Taiwan Strait. This can be explained at least in part as a reaction to Beijing’s crackdown on political autonomy in Hong Kong in 2020, which effectively ended the ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement that had been in place. The US, under presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, has in recent years departed from several long-standing norms in its relations with Taiwan and is offering higher levels of political and military support to the island. In this environment it will be more difficult for China to isolate Taiwan when the two disagree.