America’s opening to China by president Richard Nixon and secretary of state Henry Kissinger in 1971-1972 was a historic breakthrough. Less famous, but of equal importance, was the next major step, taken by president Jimmy Carter exactly 30 years ago, establishing full diplomatic relations between China and the US. Without this action, announced on Dec. 15, 1978, US-China relations could not have moved beyond a small, high-level connection with a limited agenda.
As they left office in 1977, president Gerald Ford and Kissinger left behind an incomplete and therefore unstable relationship with China. The US still recognized Taiwan, under the name Republic of China, as the legitimate and sole government of China. Since 1972, the US and China maintained small “liaison offices” in each other’s capitals, without recognition. Official communications were very limited, and annual bilateral trade was under US$1 billion. Today, it is a staggering US$387 billion.
Carter took office hoping to normalize relations with China. This would require switching US recognition from Taiwan to China. Some saw this as a simple acknowledgement of reality, but in fact it was a momentous step that required diplomatic skill and political courage.
A way would have to be found for the US, while recognizing China, to continue dealing with the government on Taiwan without recognizing its claim to represent China. Most important, the US had to retain the right to sell arms to Taiwan. From a political point of view, there was the famed Taiwan lobby, one of the most powerful in the US, still dominated by the conservative wing of US politics.
Led by America’s “Mr Conservative,” Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, and the leading contender for the 1980 Republican nomination, Ronald Reagan, the Taiwan lobby would fight normalization all the way. (Goldwater took the US government to the Supreme Court to challenge, unsuccessfully, Carter’s action; Reagan, in the 1980 presidential campaign, pledged partially to undo normalization, only to abandon that position after he was elected.)
The saga unfolded over the first two years of the Carter administration, entirely out of public view, except for two important trips to China — one by secretary of state Cyrus Vance, the other by national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Incredibly, those of us involved in the process (I was then assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs) managed to keep our intense negotiations completely secret.
The Chinese demanded a complete severing of all official ties between Taiwan and the US, including arms sales. Knowing that such a move would provoke an enormous backlash domestically, we looked for a formula for continuing official contacts and arms sales with Taiwan even after we had de-recognized them and terminated the mutual security treaty ratified during the Eisenhower presidency.
There was no precedent for this in US or international law. With advice from Eisenhower’s former attorney general, Herbert Brownell, State Department lawyers drafted the Taiwan Relations Act, a law like no other in US history, which allowed the US government to conduct business with Taiwan, including arms sales, without recognition.
But when we explained to China why this was necessary in order to recognize them, they balked. They wanted trade and other benefits of recognition, which would benefit both nations in those Cold War days, when China was fiercely hostile to the Soviet Union, with which it had almost gone to war only a few years earlier. But Taiwan remained a huge, seemingly impossible obstacle.
The breakthrough came in late 1978, and was carefully timed by Carter to follow the mid-term congressional elections. The most important factor in the breakthrough was probably the emergence of Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) as China’s paramount leader.
Deng, who had been forced to wear a dunce cap and denounce himself during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, had achieved the greatest comeback imaginable, and in the fall of 1978, he finally got enough power to cut a deal with the US: China would not “agree” to US arms sales or other activities with Taiwan, but they would proceed with normalization anyway. It was a classic example of the Chinese negotiating style: firm on principle, flexible on specifics.
I am leaving a lot out here — this was a very complicated negotiation — but that was the essence of it. In January 1979, Deng made his historic trip to the US, which began with a private dinner at Brzezinski’s house and climaxed with the most sought-after state dinner of the Carter years (also remarkable for Nixon’s first visit to Washington since he resigned; I sat at Nixon’s table, and retain a menu that everyone signed that night).
At Brzezinski’s house, Deng talked of his dreams for a China that he knew he would not live to see. He believed China could leapfrog the lost years in which the world had passed it by, but only with US support. He was ready to cooperate on containing the Soviet Union, even agreeing to the installation of secret US intelligence listening posts along China’s border to track Soviet missiles.
Deng accurately foresaw a vast exchange of students, modern technology and trade. More than any US official, he anticipated what the US opening to China would accomplish. But even Deng could not fully imagine what would be unleashed by that announcement of Dec. 15, 1978 — nothing less than the development of the most important bilateral relationship in the world today.
Richard Holbrooke, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs at the time of normalization of relations with China in 1978, writes a monthly column for the Washington Post.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS