A Typology Analysis of US Strategic Intervention to the Taiwan Question in the US-China Competition Era

How does the US intervene in the Taiwan question? To answer this question, existing studies have formulated three schools of thought-the strategic perspective, the congressional perspective, and the agenda-setting perspective-but these perspectives still suffer from the problem of a single attribution and fail to provide a comprehensive typology of explanations. By applying high/low politics as indicators, this article categorizes the US's strategic interventions as hybrid interventions, hard interventions, soft interventions, and maintaining the status quo. Additionally, this article argues that the US's China policy and Taiwan's mainland China policy are the two independent variables shaping the different types of strategic intervention. Empirical studies have demonstrated that US intervention activities related to the Taiwan question have transitioned from the status quo to hybrid interventions. The new typology breaks the traditional boundaries of tactics and may help deepen the theoretical understanding of the increasingly diversified and complicated the US's Taiwan policy, particularly as the US-China rivalry intensifies and grows.