Taiwan question knotted up in US internal politics

By Yu Donghui

It is never an easy job being a journalist in Washington DC. When certain sensitive issues arise between the US and China, the natural American impulse is to back the home team and slam China. It is sometimes hard to carry out balanced reporting or find a US expert willing to speak for China.

It is the same case with the latest US arms sales to Taiwan. While Chinese people feel outraged by repeated US arms sales to Taiwan, most Americans support the sales and think they are in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act passed by the US Congress shortly after the establishment of US diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1979.

The Taiwan Relations Act is the outcome of checks and balances created by the US government, and also the product of the Cold War mentality.

When the Carter administration established diplomatic relations with the PRC, it was natural that Congress, which held strongly anti-communist views at the time, would pass the law to regulate future government actions.

Sino-US relations have repeatedly been marked by such checks and balances. When the Clinton administration agreed to China's accession to the WTO and encouraged Congress to approve permanent normal trade relations with China, Congress required the establishment of a "US-China Economic and Security Review Commission" to assess the risks that China's accession brought for the US from an economic and security perspective.

Over past years, the Three Joint Communiqués, as well as the Taiwan Relations Act, have been considered the cornerstones of this issue by six US presidents. In many press conferences, when questions about Taiwan were asked, reporters basically know the answers without waiting for the US officials to reply.
They could even recite every word, "We insist on the one-China policy based on the Three Joint Communiqués and the Taiwan Relations Act." Even subtle changes would cause intense cross-Straits media attention, especially in the Taiwanese media.

Last November, I accompanied US President Barack Obama on his visit to China and personally felt his sensitivity over dealing with the media on this issue.

Obama deliberately avoided mentioning the Taiwan Relations Act when holding his dialogue with young Chinese, nor did the Sino-US Joint Statement published in Beijing mention it. His actions were like dropping a heavy bomb on cross-Straits relations, and left many people wondering whether it meant a change in US policies.

But in my opinion, he acted only according to the circumstances he was in, and the goals he had. He avoided mentioning the Act because it might have made his hosts unhappy; there was no indication of significant change.

In the eyes of most Americans, the consistent US cross-Straits policies have maximized US interests in the region, and need no adjustments. There are few voices calling for a cessation of arms sales to Taiwan.

But the US approach is fundamentally self-contradictory, driven by conflicting interests. On the one hand, it wants to cooperate with a rising China to meet its own needs, while on the other, it feels threatened by China's growing strength in the international order and is happy to use Taiwan to contain that power.

In the long run, perhaps it needs to decide whether to treat China as a real strategic partner, or just a utilitarian one, but for the moment policy-makers believe that the second option better meets US interests in a realist world.

I once interviewed Chas W. Freeman, who was one of the major drafters of the US-PRC Joint Communiqué of August 17, 1982, in which the US agreed to gradually reduce and eventually halt arms sales to Taiwan. He said that even in this Communiqué, the issue of arms sales to Taiwan was just put aside instead of being fundamentally solved. Freeman, a veteran American civil servant, supports solving the question of arms sales to Taiwan.

Thus he was considered as part of the "Pro-China faction" and was later excluded and edged out by the "Pro-Taiwan faction." The unsolved problem of arms sales is the biggest regret in Freeman's diplomatic career. He said, "This issue is still a heavy burden on US-China relations."

I asked him whether he had any suggestions he could give to solve the question. Freeman shook his head, "No. Both the approaches of shelving disputes and seeking common ground are double-edged swords." Indeed, between the pressures of realist foreign policy and domestic party politics, without major and unlikely adjustments of US strategies toward China, the question of arms sales to Taiwan still has no answer.