Taiwan Gets Bold
What the United States should do

Mark P. Lagon
National Review
August 9, 1999

The issue of Taiwan and the mainland has come again to the fore. On July 10, Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui gave an interview to German radio in which he suggested that dialogue between his island and Beijing should be seen as "state-to-state" negotiation. Two days later, one of his national-security officials identified these remarks as a departure from the "one China" policy that has Taipei and Beijing-and Washington-pretend that Taiwan and the PRC make up a single country.

This provoked a predictably hostile response from China, which warned of the direst consequences. Beijing decided it was a good time to confirm its possession of the neutron bomb-the design for which, according to the Cox report, was stolen from the United States.

How did we get to this point? It's important to remember who provoked whom. In July 1995 and March 1996, China conducted missile tests close to Taiwan during the island's first significant democratic elections. After administration officials unwisely suggested to the press that the U.S. maintained "strategic ambiguity" about whether it would assist Taiwan if the island were attacked, President Clinton sent two aircraft carriers to the Taiwan Strait to put an end to the tests, which were effectively blockading the island's main ports.

The carrier deployment might have suggested the benefits of firmness-but the administration subsequently sought to appease Beijing by urging Taiwan not to be provocative. A delegation of former Clinton officials-including William Perry and Gen. John Shalikashvili-took this message to Taiwan in January 1998. Shortly thereafter, ex-defense official Chas Freeman published an article in Foreign Affairs calling, in its title, for "Restraining Taiwan." His position is all the more interesting in light of the fact that, during the 1995-96 crisis, he was the man to whom a Chinese general delivered an infamous threat-that China might go nuclear if the U.S. defended Taiwan. "You care a lot more about Los Angeles than you do about Taipei," the general said.

Beijing's 1995-96 saber-rattling toward Taiwan had chiefly to do, not with Taiwan's independence, but with Taiwan's democracy. China conducted its missile tests during the island's elections because those elections posed a threat to the legitimacy of the Beijing regime. Yet President Clinton formally denounced the idea of Taiwanese independence-and the notion of any Taiwanese role as a state in international bodies-during his visit to China last summer. His aides suggested that his pronouncement was made outside the capital of Beijing to be less an affront to Taiwan. But it was in Shanghai that he spoke, sight of the historic U.S.-PRC communique of 1972. In that document, the United States recognized that both Beijing and Taiwan believed there to be only one China. But Clinton's 1998 Shanghai statement held that the United States subscribed to the same, with no room for recognition of an island that had become democratic.

So why did Taiwan shift its own position in July 1999? Domestic politics played a crucial role. This wouldn't be the first time Lee Teng-hui, a Kuomingtang politician, has undercut the opposition Democratic Progressive Party by coopting its only tangible agenda item-independence. Lee is also trying to help his handpicked successor fight off a more gregarious rival who is calling for closer ties with Beijing.

Taiwanese politics aside, Taipei may have wished to claim statehood before the military balance between Taiwan and China got any worse. The PRC is intensely about the business of acquiring high-tech weapons, a larger missile arsenal, and the means for air superiority-all making the seizure of Taiwan feasible in about ten years.

To his credit, Lee realizes that it will take boldness to lay the groundwork for the only permissible term of reunification: the democratization of the mainland. Lee is hardly a status quo politician. For instance, he turned Taiwan into a multiparty democracy, giving voice to the indigenous Taiwanese, who had been excluded in favor of the Nationalists who fled the mainland in 1949.

What should the United States do? First, stop criticizing Taiwan for being provocative. Doing so only prolongs the current crisis by giving Beijing the sense that we do not back Taiwan, and it undermines efforts to deter China from taking military action against the island.

Second, find tangible ways to give Taiwan the help and respect it deserves. Putting ceilings on levels of consultation with a democracy is simply wrong. Higher-level contacts, arms sales, and theater-missile-defense cooperation will likely deter a PRC attempt at reunification by force. Those steps would indicate that the United States will help Taiwan should the island be attacked. And these are precisely the steps prescribed by the Helms-Torricelli Taiwan security bill under consideration in Congress.

Third, give Taiwan "face" internationally. For instance, Taiwan has met the standards for joining the World Trade Organization as a customs territory. But Beijing insists that the PRC be admitted first (a position that Hong Kong, as a separate customs territory in the WTO, is assisting by holding up the last necessary accord with Taiwan). Open and prosperous enough to import more than one and a half times as many U.S. goods as the mainland colossus, Taiwan is a model for the market reforms that China will need before it can legitimately enter the WTO.

Taiwan also offers the best model for China's political evolution-neither a Singapore that squelches free speech in the name of "Asian values" nor a Hong Kong that (as it has recently) behaves as a lackey. If the U.S. disputes Taiwan's de facto statehood, it will subvert the message that China should move from a one-party system to a democracy-as Taiwan has.

Last, in order to encourage the domestic evolution of China and to bolster regional stability in the meantime, the United States should upgrade cooperation with real partners in the region-namely, the democracies: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and perhaps India. In lieu of Clinton's imprudent pursuit of a "strategic partnership" with China, a "real partners" doctrine would signal to Beijing, and every other government, what kind of nation the U.S. rewards with friendship. And a very good place to start would be to treat Taiwan-an admirably assertive democracy with 22 million citizens-as a state.

Mr. Lagon is Council on Foreign Relations Fellow at the Project for the New American Century.