Asia: World in the Balance
Kissinger, Henry
t the beginning of a new American administration, two schools of thought dominate the American debate over China. The view of the Clinton administration was summed up in the slogans...
...much more likely, it will cause the Asian nations to move away from the United States...
...As this claim evolves, it may inflame the issue of Taiwan's future, but it does not necessarily translate into a quest for hegemony in Asia...
...On the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, President Truman interposed the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait, thereby preventing a Communist conquest of the island and indirectly making the United States a party in the Chinese civil war...
...Faced with a threat of hegemony in Asia--whatever the regime---America would resist as it did Japan's in the Second World War and the Soviet Union's in the Cold War...
...Washington, having allies and a restive public opinion to consider, emphasized tactics that would give Moscow an opportunity to settle or shift to it the onus for confrontation...
...This coincided with a period (beginning in the mid-1970s) of increased emphasis on human rights in the industrial democracies and especially in the United States...
...Some perspective is also called for with respect to the Chinese military capacity to challenge the United States directly...
...The groups pressing for this change of policy by a series of seemingly marginal modifications need to understand that an explosion can occur because any one step in a sequence that was barely tolerated could well turn out to be a step too far...
...In most countries undergoing comparable economic transitions, innovative managers at lower levels must overcome resistance from a more conservative senior leadership...
...Based on the Wilsonian premise that a world of democracies can hold no enemies--at least none prepared to vindicate their views with forcemthe multiplication of contacts on trade, environment, science, and technolo- - - . . . . - - . gy is believed to strengthen the forces favoring international cooperation...
...Simply put, this meant resisting Soviet attempts to upset the global or Asian balance of power and some tacit agreement on an appropriate strategy to achieve this end...
...The challenge to American foreign policy is how to deal with Chinese nationalism without inflaming it while standing firm when it turns to threats...
...Were Taiwan to achieve formal American recognition of a separate status, as some of its spokesmen and supporters now seem to seek, this would risk a military confrontation and guarantee a political crisis that would divide Asia and turn Taiwan's role in the resulting tensions into a global issue...
...During the George H.W...
...At the same time, China's military modernization, which had been postponed during the first decade of Deng's reforms, attracted growing attention...
...Bill Clinton began his term with rhetoric that made improvement in Chinese human rights practices the key to SinoAmerican ties even in the economic field...
...Unscrupulous bureaucrats and entrepreneurs could shift assets between Conflict with the United States would free all the countries around the vast Chinese periphery to pursue their various ambitions and claims...
...The debacle of the Camp David Middle East summit of 2000 that ended in a military confrontation demonstrates that even the best-intentioned efforts to produce a final outcome for which the parties are not ready maymindeed, almost must-lead to a blowup...
...The challenge is how to live with a problem that should be alleviated but does not yet permit a final agreement...
...A permanent dialogue is needed as the best means to create a more stable world or, at a minimum, to demonstrate to the American people and America's allies why it is not possible...
...For a key constraint on China's Taiwan policy has been China's stake in its relationship with the United States...
...The question of which government the United States "really" recognizeduBeijing or Taipei---was shelved in the Shanghai Communiqu6 of 1972...
...In geopolitical terms, there were powerful reasons for a rapprochement with China to balance the Soviet Unionmeither to restrain it or to induce it to negotiate seriously...
...To be sure, as China develops what it calls its "comprehensive national strength," its military power will become a more significant challenge...
...It is the subject of domestic pressure on the mainland as well as in the United States, and it is governed above all by a process with its own imperatives...
...The Chinese think in terms of stages in a process that has no precise culmination...
...China, in its long history, has rarely had the experience of dealing with other societies on the basis of equality...
...Despite its complexity, this balancing act was carried out successfully for 20 years by five presidents of both partiesman extraordinary bipartisan achievement...
...The United States should therefore treat China as it treated the Soviet Union during the Cold War: as a rival and a challenge, reduc- """" ing trade wherever possible to nonstrategic items, creating an alliance of Asian states to contain China or, failing that, building up Japan to help America share the burden for the defense of Asia and the containment of China...
...America's European allies would eagerly step into the economic and political vacuum...
...All other issues were both submerged by the concern with China's domestic structure and distorted by it diplomatic relations had served as head of the United States Liaison Office in Beijing, sought to keep the relationship on some sort of even keel even after the events in Tiananmen Square...
...Nor does China challenge the domestic structure of other states on ideological grounds...
...In Clinton's second term, the slogan of engagement was raised to "strategic partnership," which implied some kind of global cooperation--a proposition which proved politically controversial and substantively empty in the face of continuing crises and the absence of any sustained political dialogue (for exampie, during President Clinton's entire nine-day visit to China in June 1998, there were only four hours of discussion at the summit level--reduced further by the need for translation...
...The answer to these questions will resolve the shape of the twenty-first century world...
...They are skillful in devising measures which seem marginal to Americans but are certain to inflame Beijing...
...The inadequacy of both the dominant schools of thought was brought home by the incident of the American reconnaissance plane...
...And around its periphery, China is obliged to cope with a strategic situation far more difficult than the Soviet Union experienced in Europe...
...In 1949, after the Communist victory on the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek withdrew to Taiwan and made it the seat of his Nationalist government, which claimed to represent all of China and which, until diplomatic relations with the mainland were restored in 1979, was recognized by the United States as the government of all of China...
...Conflict with the United States would free all the countries around the vast Chinese periphery to pursue their various ambitions and claims.A far more prudent course for China would be to implement the basic maxim of its traditional statecraft--of pitting the far-off barbarians against those close by...
...Korea would turn into a tinderbox...
...America's ability to influence Japan would decline...
...Many--including those of us who engineered the opening to Chinauhad great sympathy for the effort of the Chinese on Taiwan to create a meaningful and democratic basis for an autonomous existence...
...China faces militarily significant neighbors, including India, Vietnam, Japan, Russia, and the two Koreas, each of which would be difficult to overcome individually and even more so in combination...
...The fundamental question is whether either of these approaches meets America's needs...
...The opposing point of view regards China as a morally flawed inevitable adversarymat the moment with respect to Taiwan, eventually the Western Pacific, and, in time, the global equilibrium...
...What brought the two nations together was their leaders' awareness of a common threat...
...If they occur, they must be resisted...
...An all-out attack on the United States was technically feasible and strategically not inconceivable (though never very likely...
...Taiwan was where the dismemberment of China started--the first province to be annexed by colonialists...
...Communist...
...By that time, Taiwan had become a deeply symbolic issue for many Americans...
...What Deng and his associates did not foreseemor thought they could avoid--was the political consequences of overcoming the economic stagnation of Mao's China which had fallen prey to the inevitable diseases of mature Communism, rewarding stagnation and discouraging initiative as prices established by administrative fiat lose their relationship to costs...
...Yet, after diplomatic contact was restored in 1971, five American administrations of both parties went on to pursue a broadly bipartisan policy based on Sino-American cooperation...
...History has recorded it above all as a failure of statesmanship, a blunder that produced costs out of proportion to any conceivable gains for all the parties...
...Long-range surveillance from just outside the territorial limits, while consistent with international law, is a challenge to traditional notions of sovereignty based on the premise of the impermeability of frontiers and now made irrelevant by modern technology...
...in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, it was humiliated by the imperial powers...
...For two decades after the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution, the party's legitimacy was based on its ability to produce stunning economic progress (which had the unintended effect of weakening its political monopoly...
...militarily, American resistance is certain...
...But it will not be the only one: India, Brazil, and Russia have options similar to China's and, in some respects, face less daunting obstacles...
...The United States responded by sending a two-aircraftcarrier task force by way of warning...
...Z - 2 , . L . L . . I . o _ , ~ . . And the American left, always uncomfortable with a policy based on geopolitics, returned to its emphasis on human rights and the promotion of democracy as the main priorities in American foreign relations...
...To what extent is America alone in a position to impede China's growth in the face of the near-certainty that such a policy would find no significant international support...
...This bipartisan consensus was shattered by two events: the collapse of Communism and the bloody repression of the students in Tiananmen Square...
...It is important to get this conjunction of motives straight if one wishes to analyze the relevance of the incident to future Sino-American relations...
...It was returned to China by the victorious World War II allies in 1945 after President Franklin Roosevelt had declared it to be part of China in 1943...
...It is one of history's ironies that Communism, which claimed to be the harbinger of a classless future, in the end generated a privileged class comparable to that of traditional feudalism...
...Then, a single ideological adversary threatened all the nations of Western Europe, which eagerly sought American assistance...
...The shift to a market economy actually magnified opportunities for corruption, at least initially...
...In such a context, the United States is cast in the role of a geopolitical option for China-even as a potential safety net~rather than an innate adversary...
...to maintain America's self-confidence amidst the painful withdrawal from Indochina...
...Despite its complexity, this balancing act was carried out successfully for 20 years by five presidents of both parties--an extraordinan/ bipartisan achievement...
...And when, over the next decades, the Chinese acquire multiple warheads for a larger number of solid-fuel missiles, an American missile defense will serve to maintain the equilibrium...
...This is why the challenge to America did not come from the ideological part of Chinese society, the Communist party, but--by all accounts--from students and the military...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001...
...On the whole--and despite some ups and downs, largely over Taiwan--this has, in fact, been the thrust of Chinese policy...
...Or should it attempt to bring about an Asian structure open to cooperation with all states, a structure based not on the assumption of any one country's inherent aggressiveness yet supple enough to resist any country's hegemonic aspirations...
...A serious effort is needed to find a way to ease the confrontational atmosphere...
...I am still a reformer," Deng said to me six months after the suppression of the Tiananmen Square revolt, "but if stability had been lost, it would have taken a generation to restore it...
...The Brezhnev Doctrine affirmed Soviet determination to maintain Communist parties in power, by force if necessary, and the Soviet Union intervened militarily in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and threatened to do so in Poland and-indirectly--in China...
...Whatever public pressures for it existed derived not from geopolitics but from a general idea that "good relations" were their own reward and that the Cold War could best be ended by overcoming the hostility as a kind of psychological exercise...
...If the United States chips away at the "oneChina" principle, first affirmed by Roosevelt in 1943 and reiterated by all six American presidents since Nixon, a military confrontation is probable...
...Strait produced a period of nearly a quarter-century in which the two countries had no diplomatic relations and very little contact of any kind...
...If Taiwan abandons restraint and upsets the tacit bargain that has preserved peace in the Taiwan Strait for decades, either locally or by skillful lobbying in Washington, it will unleash a conflict whose consequences cannot be foreseen but are unlikely to redound to Taiwan's long-term benefit...
...Nations with ambitions or territorial claims would sense new opportunities...
...Even then, the different histories and geopolitical situations of the two sides produced disagreements on tactics...
...insistence is therefore treated as a sign of weakness, and good personal relations are not themselves considered a lubricant of serious dialogue...
...In fact, they grew out of the dilemmas of reform as much as out of Communist ideology...
...In the early 1900s,America's approach to China was heavily influenced by missionaries and traders, both largely oblivious to the humiliation Chinese society felt when subjected to the colonialist pressures of the European powers...
...The Chinese leaders saw an awesome buildup of Soviet military power along their border, including nuclear missiles and forty modern combat divisions--over a million men...
...I have sketched the circumstances surrounding the upheavals of Tiananmen Square because they marked the turning point at which China began to be perbecause disagreements that before that time had been considered the normal by-product of relations between great powers now came to be treated in much of American public discussion as conflicts with a totalitarian evil...
...Relations With China: The Strategic Context Should the United States use all the means at its disposal to delay as long as possible the emergence of China as a major power...
...To be sure, Chinese public statements often criticize American mil46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 itary alliances in Asia, giving credence to the view that China's long-term objective is to undermine the American role and presence in the region.Yet one need not postulate Chinese goodwill or permanent peaceful intentions to conclude that prudent Chinese leaders will not lightly risk confrontation with the world's dominant military power at this stage of China's evolution...
...The new links between China and the United States flourished so long as the two sides were in a position to concentrate on the common objective of resisting what their communiques came to describe as "hegemony...
...China policy should be liberated from familiar slogans...
...Since then, Taiwan has elected a new president whose party platform used to advocate independence, and China has backed off a bit, hinting that it would use force only if Taiwan formally declared itself independent...
...The prospects of "engagement" were overwhelmed by the realities of Chinese domestic politics...
...To Americans, Chinese leaders seem polite but aloof and condescending...
...Americans think in terms of concrete solutions to specific problems...
...As a result, at the end of the Clinton administration, China policy remained hostage to domestic politics.What has been lacking is a definition of the national interest that gives the relationship some geopolitical content...
...The Chinese strategic force of some thirty liquid-fueled missiles with single warheads, requiring hours to launch, is not an instrument for offensive operations...
...It is nationalism, not Communism, which could lead to confrontation with the United States and then not over the issue of global hegemony but over Taiwan...
...This potentially combustible combination must not be left in its present state for the sake of the stability of Asia and the peace of the world...
...If China seeks to bring matters to a head This potentially combustible combination must not be left in its present state for the sake of the stability of Asia and the peace of the world...
...Deng opted to live with the paradox of insisting on political stability in order to complete an economic and social revolution...
...The Soviet Union threatened weak neighbors unable to resist Soviet ground forces, either alone or in combination...
...For Deng Xiaoping, who ruled China at the time and for the decade preceding it and who was excoriated by the Western media, the Tiananmen Square uprising represented an ironic reversal...
...The challenge for the United States was to make sure that it always had more options than either of the other two parties within the triangle...
...An Asian version of the containment policy of the 1980s will find few, if any, takers except perhaps in Vietnam, thus turning history on its head...
...Even on the assumption that a new Cold War is inevitable--an assumption I do not share--a wise American policy would seek to shift the onus for conflict to Beijing to prevent America's isolation...
...In 1971 and 1972, President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong reestablished diplomatic contact, not because American and Communist ideologies had become more compatible but because of their respective geopolitical necessities.During the early period of renewed contacts, much innocent nonsense was disseminated about how "unnatural" the estrangement between the American and Chinese peoples had been, as if rapprochement had fulfilled some deep emotional need on both sides...
...This obliged the United States to stay closer to both Moscow and Beijing than they were to each other, with a tilt toward Beijing since it was the Soviet Union which represented the more immediate and by far the more powerful threat...
...The facts were far more prosaic...
...Since 1972, every American president has confirmed America's commitment to a "oneChina" policy and the rejection of a "two-China" or a "one-China, oneTaiwan" policy...
...It would exhaust America's resources and psychological equilibrium if permanent interventions and crusades became the defining characteristics of American foreign policy...
...Applying to China policy its domestic THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • Summer Reading Issue 2001 45 tactics of co-opting the goals of critics while claiming it had a better way of accomplishing them, the Clinton administration proclaimed a policy of "engagement...
...In addition, modern China has a huge stake in the international economic system--more than the Soviet Union ever had--generating powerful incentives not to challenge the status quo in Asia...
...Cooperative relations are not a favor either country bestows on the other...
...By 1969, it was obvious to China that Marxist theory not only did not shield it from Soviet military pressures but provided a pretext for them...
...Since 1972, every American president has also affirmed his abiding concern for a peaceful resolution of the issue--a Taiwan had become a deeply symbolic issue for many Americans...
...As for Chinese ground forces, they are capable of defending the home country through a strategy of attrition but they are not suitable for sustained offensive operations against a major opponent...
...Which of the statesmen who went to war in 1914 would not have jumped at the chance to revisit their decision when they looked back a few years later and saw the catastrophe they had inflicted on their societies, on European civilization, and on the longterm prospects of the entire world...
...Soviet ideology had insisted on its universal applicability, and every Soviet leader until Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed the worldwide triumph of Communism as the ultimate goal...
...His task was made all the more difficult by the ambivalence of many in the ruling Communist elite...
...The top leadership's emphasis on incentives and market forces had to be implemented by executives without experience with such measures and no ceived by many as an ideological and geopolitical adversary...
...China was suspicious of any negotiation between Washington and Moscow-explicitly concerned that the appearance of progress would undermine the West's willingness to stand up to the 8 ~ r Soviet Union, implicitly fearful that it ~. might lead to some unspecified U.S.Soviet arrangement at China's expense, if only by permitting the Soviet Union c~ to direct its attention to Asia...
...Z...
...And that world has few analogies to the Cold War...
...The attempt to make prices reflect real costs leads to price increases, at least in the short term...
...Deng had been perhaps too daring in his economic reforms and surely too cautious in the political reforms his policies made inevitable--ironically, the opposite mistake of his contemporary, Mikhail Gorbachev...
...At the same time, even as China rejects the proposition that the United States has a right to intervene in the future of Taiwan, it should take account of the seriousness with which successive presidents have affirmed America's concern for a peaceful resolution of the issue...
...Beijing, being directly threatened, favored resolute confrontation with Moscow...
...Bush and Clinton administrations, the political and psychological basis for constructive Sino-American relations was gradually weakening...
...For Chinese conduct was shaped much more by nineteenth-century ideas of nationalism than by nineteenth-century Marxism...
...Mao had imprisoned him for a decade as a "capitalist roader," and history is likely to treat him as a reformer who launched China on the road to modernization...
...and, finally, to demonstrate America's undiminished capacity to master an international environment that was turning multipolar...
...Deng had to fight, therefore, on two fronts: against the corruption tempted by reform, and against the survivors of Maoism insisting on their version of a Communist economy.While he won the battle in the economic field, he settled for continued Communist dominance in the political arena...
...The Soviet Union possessed some twenty-five hundred strategic delivery vehicles, many with multiple warheads capable of high accuracy...
...A prudent American leadership should balance the risk of stoking Chinese nationalism against the gains from short-term pressures...
...But at a moment when capacity for it does not exist, what is the purpose of a confrontational strategy conducted for its own sake...
...the two sectors for personal gain...
...While these questions apply to some degree in every part of the world, they are particularly relevant to relations between the world's most powerful industrial nation and the world's most populous nation...
...A combination of Maoist militant ideology, China's intervention in the Korean War, American distaste for Beijing's domestic institutions, and the interposition of the American Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • Summer Reading Issue 2001 greatest part, it was dominant in its region...
...Under the impact of the Vietnam War, the United States--or, to be more specific, Richard Nixonmrecognized the role China might play in establishing a new Asian balance of power...
...Soviet armies occupied Eastern Europe...
...The events in Tiananmen Square had been more complex than a simple anti-Communist revolt, having at least three causes: the revolt of students based on Western principles of democracy...
...In what way does America gain by conducting relations with China by analogy to the Cold War unless Beijing gives the United States no other choice...
...While insisting on ultimate unification as a sacred principle, China nevertheless expressed on several occasions its willingness to defer a final resolution in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR I Summer Reading Issue 2001 49 the interest of its relationship with other countries, especially the United States, provided Taiwan did not stake a formal claim to sovereignty...
...Least of all can it be in the interest of China's leaders to provoke the United States, the most distant country, which historically has never threatened China's unity and integrity...
...The human rights issue quickly became the dominant theme of America's relations with China...
...In the first two decades of its rule, the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist party was based on having unified the country and expelled the colonialists (Japanese and Western...
...In Asia, barring major Chinese provocation, the United States would have to conduct a containment policy alone...
...But there is lurking on the scene a wild card that could force the hand of either Beijing or Washington: the future of Taiwan...
...It was the inheritor of the legacy of goodwill acquired by the Nationalists for their staunch resistance to Japanese imperialism in the Second World War...
...What is to be the strategic goal...
...The nature of the issues is clear, and the self-restraint this imposes on all sides has become increasingly obvious...
...The Chinese reacted by initiating military exercises and missile launches in the Taiwan Strait~carrying, however, no warheads...
...Americans believe that international disputes result either from misunderstandings or ill will...
...While the Clinton administration did consolidate the economic relationship with China by supporting World Trade Organization membership for China and normal United States-China trade relations, it never did settle on a convincing geopolitical rationale...
...Indications of restraint and flexibility on Beijing's part should be credited as constructive--such as statements by Deputy Prime Minister Qian Qichen that Taiwan would no longer be viewed as a renegade province of the People's Republic of China but as one of two separate (and presumably equal) components of a single China.This idea, coupled with China's previously mentioned hint that it would not use force to bring about unification short of a formal declaration of independence by Taiwan, deserves careful exploration...
...The conditions of Asia are not analogous to the Cold War...
...In a mood of fatalism, the emergence of China is often compared to that of Germany in the nineteenth century, which ultimately led to World War I. But there was nothing foreordained about that war...
...Chinese moves were increasingly interpreted in terms of a geopolitical and ideological design on its neighbors...
...A wide consensus present itself...
...For the able to stand aloof and self-contained, as a culture whose uniqueness placed it beyond the reach of outsiders--and, until approximately 1500, also as the most advanced nation in science and technology...
...T he weakening of executive authority in the United States due to Watergate and its aftermath reduced Beijing's confidence in America's ability to resist Soviet pressures and blandishments...
...2 THE AMERICAN SPECTAT( To be sure, it is in the American national interest to resist the effort of any power to dominate Asia--and, in the extreme, the United States should be prepared to do so without allies...
...But a wise American policy would strive to prevent such an outcome...
...It is one thing to ~\\,~ ~l,~,~,~@ ~.,~,~ ~i ,~ ,~ ' NN . .~gi ~ "~ reject a strategic partnership that never functioned...
...But, unlike other nations, the United States was also supplying the bulk of defense equipment enabling Taiwan to remain free of the political control of what was at the same time recognized as the legitimate government of all of China, including Taiwan...
...The issue is not whether to oppose Chinese attempts to dominate Asia...
...President Bush, who, in the mid-1970s before the establishment of with a growing market economy, and two sets of prices resulted...
...The Chinese Communist leadership conducts no such policies abroad and makes no such universal claims...
...Chinese conduct was shaped primarily by an attempt to navigate the shoals of Chinese domestic politics on the part of a government whose ideological element is in decline and which is facing a succession decision within two years...
...Within this framework, Taiwan has prospered, become democratic, and participated in international forums that did not require formal state-to-state relations...
...The antiCommunist right, always uncomfortable with close ties with a Communist country, began to treat the Beijing government as the new evil to be extirpated...
...Trade and other New Age issues such as the environment and narcotics are not enough to distill a sense of direction or to overcome the mixture of cooperation, suspicion, mutual misunderstanding, and stagnation that characterize SinoAmerican relations at the turn of the century...
...If China remains domestically cohesive, it is destined to become a major power and, as such, will have an enhanced capacity to challenge the United States...
...the Middle Kingdom has a horror of appearing to be a supplicant...
...For China, there was nothing unnatural about living apart from the United States...
...Its unification with the mainland is considered even by Chinese who do not share the views of the governing party as a "sacred national obligation" which can be deferred for practical or tactical reasons but never abandoned...
...This would make it the policeman of the world and eventually turn most of the other nations against it...
...To the Chinese, Americans appear erratic and somewhat frivolous...
...The view of the Clinton administration was summed up in the slogans "engagement" and "strategic partnership...
...Where Washington looks to good faith and goodwill as the lubricants of international relations, Beijing assumes that statesmen have done their homework and will understand subtle indirections...
...In short, the beginning of reform can--and, in China, did--produce severe short-term dislocations among the constituencies at the core of the discontent...
...the remedy for the former is persuasion--occasionally quite insistent--and, for the latter, defeat or destruction of the evildoer.The Chinese approach is impersonal, patient, and aloof...
...it does not have at its beck and call a worldwide network of Communist parties or radical organizations proclaiming their loyalty to Beijing...
...He industrialized the drab, gray, fearful China of the Cultural Revolution by emphasizing consumer goods...
...Embracing market economics and decentralized decision making, Deng combined initially the problems of central planning with those of a free market...
...The issue is not how to label the relationship but what content it can be given...
...This tacit bargain began to unravel in 1995 when a visa was granted to . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . President Lee Tenghui of Taiwan for a visit to Cornell University...
...Advocates of this view would treat Taiwan as an independent country and a military outpost and, in practice, scrap the "one-China" policy on which Sino-American relations have been based since diplomatic contacts were reestablished in 1971...
...A policy that is perceived as having designated China as the enemy primarily _ because its economy is growing and its ideology is distasteful would end up isolating the United States...
...and the internal struggle within the Communist Party largely about the political consequences of the reform of the economy...
...Now that a so-called socialist market economy has been established and is growing, the governing group may be tempted to rest its claim to a monopoly of power on nationalism...
...This came after Secretary of State Warren Christopher had assured the Chinese I I foreign minister that the existing policy of nonrecognition of Taiwan as a sovereign state would remain in force and that the ban on visits by Taiwan's top leaders would not change...
...For the United States, opportunity was merging with necessity...
...But it would also seek to convey to China that opposition to hegemony is coupled with a preference for a constructive relationship and that America will facilitate China's participation in a stable international order...
...The most explicit affirmation of that policy was a joint communiqu6 with Beijing in 1982 during the Reagan administration, which was repeated by President Clinton when he visited China in late June 1998...
...Taiwan and China Normally many of these issues confounding Sino-American relations would be clarified by the passage of time...
...And it became a symbol for the so-called China lobby, which was outraged by the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and was determined to prevent its culmination in the takeover of Taiwan...
...By 1995, his administration had, however, returned to the pattern of regular dialogue established by predecessors even while justifying it with slogans that evoked a more Wilsonian theme...
...Before that, it had felt most comfortable when it was The challenge to American foreign policy is how to deal with Chinese nationalism without inflaming it-and how to stand firm when it turns to threats...
...But the ideological interpretations of the challenge provided no guide to the Bush administration either...
...But for the foreseeable decades, the United States possesses diplomatic, economic, and military advantages allowing it to shape the future without resorting to preemptive confrontation with China...
...Of course, the choice is not entirely up to the United States...
...High-level Chinese-American meetings rarely dealt with technical or day-to-day issues (in those days, there was little, if any, commercial contact...
...it is another to treat China as a permanent adversary...
...They are in the common interest of both countries.There are enough issues to test the seriousness of both sides...
...Placing wide discretionary authority in the hands of bureaucrats leads to corruption...
...Unless their own survival is directly and clearly threatened, the Asian nations ASIA: o World the Balance BY HENRY KISSINGER will not join a common crusade as did the nations of Europe in opposition to a single threat...
...But the issue is also profoundly symbolic for Beijing...
...In the end, every44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 thing from food to housing is subsidized without any criterion for efficiency...
...At the same time, the United States proceeded in 1979 to recognize Beijing as the legitimate government of China, as did the vast majority of the world's governmentsmmost of them before the United States had...
...Some of their supporters act as if it is in Taiwan's interest to exacerbate tensions between Washington and Beijing and to press for congressional and administration measures implying a de facto "two-China" policy...
...It is the state with the greatest potential to become a rival of the United States at some point in the new century~though, in my view, not in the first quarter...
...For its part, Beijing tended to compete with o THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 43 Moscow in the developing world by appealing to radical movements, and this often caused it to back leaders or causes that were hardly America's favorites...
...The collapse in Moscow destroyed the common fear while the domestic upheaval in Beijing undermined domestic American support for a policy based on common purposes...
...But insofar as the choice depends on American action, it should be made with great care...
...All the parties involved have an interest in not driving matters to the point of combustion...
...Despite differences, an unusual coordination of strategies and, on the whole, of policies was achieved...
...The crisis subsided, but SinoAmerican relations have never fully recovered...
...After the Communist victory in the civil war, China was transformed in the American public mind into the incarnation of ideological and strategic hostility...
...The sensitive issue of Taiwan falls into the category of problems--like the future of Palestinemthat permit no definitive solution at this point...
...It asserted that it would bring China over to the American perception of human rights and domestic governance by multiplying contacts in all fields but especially in trade...
...The United States must resist the domestic pressures to abandon the "one-China" principle...
...For the first few years after diplomatic contact with Beijing was reestablished, this issue did not euphemism for opposition to the use of force--as did the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which enshrined the principle in American law...
...A still very large public sector coexisted enthusiasm for the process of reform...
...to isolate Hanoi and thereby spur an end to the Vietnam War...
...Is the United States to define its security in terms of preventing the emergence of any possible major power...
...It would nurture cooperative relations with all the significant nations of Asia to keep open the possibility of joint action should circumstances require it...
...workers rebelling to remove, or at least to alleviate, the inequities, abuses, and dislocations generated by economic reform...
...most of the dialogue involved sharing long-term global geopolitical assessments, projections, and strategies...
...Such a strategy is shortsighted because the existing framework is very much in Taiwan's interest...
...Taiwan would be less, not more, secure in such an environment...
...In the 1930s and during the SecondWorldWar, China was idealized as a victim of Japanese aggression and as a heroic democratic ally...
...A cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies followed, accelerated not a little by occasionally heavy-handed Chinese tactics...
...This was compounded by Chinese obsessions regarding perceived colonial conduct...
...Deng abolished the agricultural communes and made China nearly self-sufficient in food...
...Viewed from Beijing, the geopolitical challenge is likely to be perceived not as the conquest of neighboring countries but as preventing a combination of them against China...
...China's foreign policy is patient and long-range...
...China has the longest uninterrupted history of any country in the world and is controlled by the last major government to call itself In Clinton's second term, the slogan of "engagement" was raised to "strategic partnership" which implied some kind of global cooperation -- a proposition which proved politically controversial and substantively empty...
...Partly because of the difficulty the two sides have had in understanding each other's culture and code of conduct, they have rarely succeeded in getting Sino-American relationships into a stable balance for any extended period...
...At a minimum, this imposes on China a diplomacy that does not threaten all its neighbors simultaneously...
...The ultimate intentions of China would become evident, and a consistent American policy would develop with experience and patience...
...In this they express not only a personal preference but the overwhelming view of American public opinion...
...The United States "acknowledged" that Chinese living on both sides of the Taiwan Strait affirmed there was only one China and did not challenge that proposition...
...In his mind, he was fighting chaos, not democracy...
...For its part, the United States, while reaffirming its opposition to the use of force in every administration of both parties since 1971, did so invariably within the framework of a "one-China" policy...
...In November 1973, Mao told me that China could wait one hundred years...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 A part of China since the seventeenth century, Taiwan was annexed by Japan in 1895 in what proved to be the first step toward the eventual attempt to conquer the mainland...
...They were almost totally dominated by considerations of Chinese domestic politics and did not represent a philosophy meant to be applicable elsewhere...
...A permanent dialogue on such issues as the future of Korea and proliferation of nuclear weapons and missile technology could test the prospects of a stable relationship.Then there is the entire range of New Age issues: the environment, cultural and scholarly exchanges, among many others...
...Nor was there in 1971 any groundswell of demand for an opening to China...
...Jobs, education, and most perquisites depend on some kind of personal relationship...
...Whatever the legal status of these declarations in Chinese eyes, Beijing must take care to not slip into a confrontation with the United States, with all its attendant consequences, through a miscalculation...
...For the newly promulgated Brezhnev Doctrine claimed for the Kremlin the special right to use military power within the Communist world to enforce its unity...
...It was only in the 1990s that the idea of confrontation between the two countries gained momentum again, threatening to return the relationship to the tensions of half a century before.At this point, a digression tracing that evolution may help to define the nature of the existing choices...
...But whatever Deng's motives, the brutality of the repression at Tiananmen Square witnessed on television by the entire world stigmatized China as a repressive regime...
...ii:'i:i!il i~ii has always existed in the United States opposed to the forcible return of Taiwan to China...
...Confrontation with China should be the ultimate recourse, not the strategic choice...
...In China, the opposite occurred...
...The Deng reforms initiated in 1979 sent tens of thousands of Chinese students to Western countries, where they were exposed to values for which they shed their blood in Tiananmen Square...
...A significant measure of responsibility to exercise restraint falls on Taiwan's leaders as well...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
