CIAO DATE: 10/04

The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Future With Hope

Abstract

You have clearly worked over the complicated relationship between Taiwan and China. I can only try to build on what Dr. Lin Chong--pin and Mr. Rostow have already described so lucidly. I would like to point out first that China chooses, for both tactical and emotional reasons, to place a special heavy emphasis on its relationship with Taiwan and to its point that Taiwan is part of China. Emotional, because this stirs up nationalism among a skeptical Chinese elite who have lost ideology. Tactical, because driving home the unity and sovereignty themes forces the U.S. on the defensive, i.e., the U.S. interferes in China's internal affairs, a cardinal sin in China's own lexicon. In reality, however, China has been practical. For almost fifty years Chinese propaganda has focused on Taiwan as a pure target, but objective circumstances have changed and so has China's strategy. China took over the Ta Chen Islands peacefully in 1954, its last significant territorial acquisition in the Taiwan Strait. Its later more militaristic approach against a well--defended Quemoy (Chin men) failed in 1958, and China retreated with much bluster and firing of cannons, many of them empty.

The Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), passed in 1979 after the U.S. and China normalized relations, provided much needed continuity to U.S. assurances concerning Taiwan's security after the Mutual Defense Treaty had been terminated. The assurances were given teeth for the first time since Quemoy, when, in March 1996, the U.S. sent two carrier battle groups off the east coast of Taiwan in response to Chinese missile shots and its threatening military live fire exercises. This action was consistent with Admiral Arleigh Burke's admonition that the best preventive of war is a credible deterrence. But as often seems to be the case, the dramatic actions by the U.S. and China were obscured by caricature and demagoguery as well as with simplistic judgments. "The [*744] Chinese had backed down" was one cry, or that the U.S., by its actions, had provoked a Chinese military build--up was another. And further, that the U.S. was afraid to send its carriers into the actual Strait out of fear of Chinese missiles, or that the Chinese military got a black eye because of its ineffective adventurism.

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