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President Bill Clinton's nine-day visit to the People's Republic of China earlier this month was a success in public relations, resulted in a few substantive agreements, but distinctly altered American diplomatic posture in Asia to favor China. Fundamentally, Mr. Clinton was the first U.S. president to accept Beijing's concept on the issue of sovereignty over Taiwan, the island nation of 21 million people who consider themselves independent but that Beijing claims is a province of China. Beijing has called on Taiwan to "face realities," a demand quickly rejected by Taipei. The foreseeable consequences of Mr. Clinton's tilt toward China are several: It has become more difficult for the Republic of China on Taiwan to negotiate with the PRC because Beijing believes it has gained the upper hand over Taiwan. It has caused dismay in Japan, long considered to be the main ally of the U.S. in Asia, and in India, which asserts that it is threatened by the PRC. It has caused consternation in the U.S. Congress, where the Senate and the House have passed resolutions without dissent to reaffirm American support for Taiwan. It comes as the PRC is shifting tactics intended to intimidate Taiwan from the threat of invasion to the menace of subversion, sabotage, and electronic warfare. Less clear is whether the new Clinton policy will stimulate more debate within Taiwan about formally declaring independence; until now, a solid majority has favored the status quo of separation from the mainland but without a formal declaration of independence. It is also not clear about how much of a political issue the new Clinton policy will become in the U.S., particularly during the Congressional election campaign in the fall. The Republicans are kicking up some dust but foreign policy, especially on complicated questions such as the future of Taiwan, rarely makes a good campaign issue. The change in President Clinton's policy on China and Taiwan took place between the visit of President Jiang Zemin of the PRC to Washington last October and President Clinton's journey to China this year, much of it evidently under the prodding of Chinese diplomats. During a joint press conference with Mr. Jiang in Washington, Mr. Clinton suggested that he had put U.S. relations with Taiwan and China on an equal footing. American policy, the President contended, "has allowed democracy to flourish in Taiwan and provides a framework in which all three relationships can prosper--between the United States and the PRC, the United States and Taiwan, and Taiwan and the People's Republic of China." Over the winter, that changed as American and Chinese diplomats met extensively to prepare for Mr. Clinton's trip to China. In those negotiations, the Chinese demanded that the Clinton visit be on a par with Jiang's trip to the U.S. to show that President Clinton considered China to be equal to the U.S. Clinton officials thus agreed that the President would travel for nine-days in China, the same as Jiang in the U.S. and far more than seasoned diplomats could remember any U.S. president traveling in one country before. Even President Nixon, in his historic journey to China in 1972, stayed only seven days. When Clinton officials suggested that the President would stop off in Japan, as many of his predecessors had on trips to Asia, the Chinese insisted that Mr. Clinton come directly from Washington to China and go directly home after the visit, just as Mr. Jiang had done. The Chinese urged that the president visit China in June, the month marking the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations in which unknown hundreds of Chinese dissidents were killed by the People's Liberation Army; Chinese leaders wanted Mr. Clinton's help in putting that sorry episode behind them. The White House initially said the president could not travel until after the November elections, then changed their minds when it seemed that scandals dogging Mr. Clinton might erupt. Thus Mr. Clinton got out of Washington to Africa in March, Latin America in April, Europe in May, and China in June. The Chinese also wanted a fresh commitment in writing on the Taiwan issue. Clinton officials declined but signaled the shift in policy with testimony before Congress and in press briefings. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Susan Shirk, for instance, told Congress in May: "We do not support two Chinas' or one China, one Taiwan,' Taiwan independence, or Taiwan's membership in the UN." After President Clinton and President Jiang met in Beijing on Saturday, June 27, the Chinese leader repeated in a press conference China's current mantra: "The Taiwan question is the most important and the most sensitive issue at the core of China-U.S. relations." Unlike China's revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong, who said the Taiwan issue could wait for time to resolve it, Mr. Jiang appears anxious to see China take control of Taiwan while he is in office. China's leaders are obsessed with Taiwan because they see the island, ceded to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, as a vestige of China's humiliation by Japan and Western colonial powers in the 19th Century. After China's civil war ended in 1949, the defeated forces of Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. An emotional nationalism on the mainland, which erupted when Britain returned Hong Kong to China last year, demands the conquest of Taiwan. The Portuguese colony in Macao, across the estuary from Hong Kong, is scheduled to be returned to China at the end of 1999. Moreover, Taiwan has assumed strategic importance to Beijing, which has secured China's land borders and turned its attention to its coast. Taiwan is centered in a chain of islands running from Indonesia and the Philippines in the south to Japan and the Russian Kamchatka peninsula in the north. "Within this zone of active defense,' China plans to be the dominant power," according to a fresh study from the National Defense University in Washington. In the press conference in Beijing, President Clinton said only: "I reaffirmed our long-standing one China policy." Later that day, Samuel Berger, the president's national security adviser briefed the press, saying: "We don't support independence for Taiwan, or one China, one Taiwan, or Taiwan's membership in organizations that require statehood." He ducked a question on whether the President had said that to President Jiang. The next day, at Beijing University, President Clinton went further, saying: "United States policy is not an obstacle to the peaceful reunification of China and Taiwan." Until then, U.S. policy had been confined to asserting that the Chinese should settle the issue themselves peacefully; nothing had been said about "reunification." Two days later, during a roundtable discussion in Shanghai, President Clinton disclosed that he had told Mr. Jiang: "We don't support independence for Taiwan, or two Chinas, or one Taiwan-one China. And we don't believe that Taiwan should be a member in any organization for which statehood is a requirement." Clinton officials quickly sought to play down the statement as nothing new, asserting that the President was only repeating what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had said and others had given in testimony before Congress. The President's acceptance of the "three no's"--and doing it in China itself-- carried far more weight as could be seen by the trumpeting of Chinese officials and press. The People's Daily commented: "Clinton is the first president who openly articulated the U.S. policy toward Taiwan, focusing on the three issues that the United States will not support. Clinton's remarks indicate that the U.S. government has clearly realized the importance of the settlement of the Taiwan issue." The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Tang Guoqiang, asserted: "We hope that the Taiwan authorities will have a clear understanding of the current situation, face realities, bear the just national cause in mind, return to the 'One China' stand as soon as possible and respond promptly to our call on holding political negotiations." (In fact, Taiwan has been urging Beijing to resume the talks that Beijing broke off three years ago after President Lee Teng-hui was permitted to travel to Cornell University. Taipei has insisted that resumed talks be based on equality and without conditions.) A strong Taiwanese reaction to the President Clinton's new policy came from President Lee, who said the U.S. "should not have to and should not hold bilateral talks with the Chinese Communists" about Taiwan. He warned that Taipei would resist negotiations with Beijing "if the overwhelming majority of people on our side believe the U.S. position isn't balanced." A leading newspaper in Taiwan, Commons Daily, contended that the damage to Taiwan's sovereignty caused by Mr. Clinton's support for the "three no's" was "very obvious and serious." The paper said in a separate comment: "The Americans must by no means help an undemocratic country oppress a democratic country." On Capitol Hill, the President had hardly arrived home when the Senate repudiated his new policy by voting 92-0 for a resolution reaffirming support for Taiwan. Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss) asserted that the U.S. "should not take action in concert with the dictatorship in Beijing." Earlier, just before Mr. Clinton left for China, the House of Representatives had voted 411-0 for a similar resolution praising Taiwan's economic progress and democracy and calling on China to renounce the threat of military force against Taiwan. The Japanese government politely applauded the few agreements reached in Beijing, even as it was unhappy with the overall policy development. But the mass-circulation Mainichi newspaper said: "We cannot help becoming apprehensive about some of the remarks President Clinton made in China" that overlooked Japan. The Indian government and press, which had contended that India's recent explosion of a nuclear bomb was justified by a threat from China, were miffed by Mr. Clinton seeking Chinese help in heading off an arms race in South Asia. "Practically every day brings evidence of America's bias against India," said the Indian Express. "The latest is that President Clinton wants Beijing to be South Asia's policeman." The President thus found himself in the awkward position of aligning the U.S. with an autocratic regime in Beijing while slighting democratic governments in Taipei, Tokyo, and New Delhi. The record on American policy toward Taiwan, going back to the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972, which marked the opening of contact between the U.S. and the PRC, shows that the U.S. had not before committed itself on the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty. The question was not settled in 1972 as the communiqué says only that the U.S. "acknowledges" that Chinese in Taiwan and on the mainland claim to be the rulers of China, including Taiwan. Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon's national security adviser, wrote later: "We needed a formula acknowledging the unity of China, which was the one point on which Taipei and Peking [Beijing] agreed, without supporting the claim of either." In his book, White House Years, Kissinger said the Shanghai communiqué "put the Taiwan issue in abeyance." Further, the U.S. retained that formula in 1979, when President Carter switched U.S. diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing; in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which governs unofficial U.S. relations with Taiwan; and in the communiqué of 1982, in which President Reagan set U.S. policy on arms sales to Taiwan. In 1982, moreover, the Reagan Administration gave Taiwan six assurances, one of which was that the U.S. had not altered its position on sovereignty over Taiwan. Mr. Clinton appears to have ignored those assurances. In contrast, the Clinton Administration reviewed U.S. policy on Taiwan in 1994 and consequently upgraded relations between Washington and Taipei to include visits to Taiwan by American cabinet officers. The president's change in policy comes as China has adopted new tactics intended to intimidate Taiwan. Two years ago, the People's Liberation Army fired missiles and maneuvered on the shore of the Taiwan Strait as it trained to invade Taiwan. It was dissuaded, however, when President Clinton dispatched two aircraft carrier task forces to the seas nearby. The PLA also discovered that it would take 10 years to acquire the ships, planes, and weapons to leap across the 120 mile wide Taiwan Strait. Instead, according to the study from the National Defense University, the PLA plans to develop "capabilities sufficient to intimidate Taipei into accepting a political solution on Chinese terms." Those capabilities include subversion, sabotage, and disruption of Taiwan's banking, commercial, and stock market electronic systems seeking to destroy public confidence in Taiwan's government. "This would be an electronic version of the old people's warfare,'" said a China expert at the Pacific Command in Hawaii, referring to the guerrilla origins of the PLA. "They've never gotten rid of it." Altogether, the outlook for Taiwan seems murkier than ever. Senior officials at the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, which is responsible for American military operations in Asia, say they don't see an immediate danger of hostilities. But they worry about the future because time appears to be on Taiwan's side as it, in reality, becomes more independent with each passing day. The concern is that Beijing, sensing that it may be losing ground on the Taiwan issue, may feel compelled to take military action, with unpredictable consequences. Senior American military officers have repeatedly cautioned the PLA not to miscalculate and will continue to do so. "Miscalculation," said one, "is the main thing we are trying to prevent." *Richard Halloran, formerly with The New York Times in Asia and Washington, writes about Asia from Honolulu. He is a consultant to the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, and a regular contributor to the Global Beat. For reprint rights, please contact him at tel: 808-395-0511, fax 808-396-4095, or e-mail: oranhall@compuserve.com
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