U.S. Slightly Elevates Ties With Taiwan : Diplomacy: Policy boosts economic contact but keeps tight curbs on official relations. Taipei and Beijing are displeased.

The Clinton Administration, completing the first full-scale review of U.S. contacts with Taiwan in 15 years, opened the way Wednesday for a slightly higher level of regular economic contact between Washington and Taipei but preserved a series of tight curbs on official relations between top-level political leaders of the two governments.

The changes appeared to please neither Beijing nor Taipei.

While the Chinese government had no official response, it reportedly voiced a strong private protest, complaining that even the small new steps go too far toward giving official U.S. recognition to Taiwan.

Taiwan also expressed disappointment. Its Washington office said in an official statement that the changes in U.S. policy “have not sufficiently addressed the needs arising from the close relationship” between the United States and Taiwan.

A senior U.S. official said, “We are trying to strengthen our unofficial economic and cultural ties (with Taiwan), but we are also continuing our one-China policy.” He insisted that “both Beijing and Taiwan should be ecstatic” about the changes.

Under the new rules, approved by President Clinton after more than a year of study, senior U.S. economic and technical officials will be authorized to visit Taiwan. And Taiwan will be permitted to change the name of its 13 unofficial offices in the United States from the baffling “Coordination Council for North American Affairs” to a more identifiable “Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.”

However, largely in deference to China, which considers Taiwan a renegade province, the Administration also kept intact many of the detailed restrictions that were imposed when the United States established diplomatic relations with China and broke off ties with Taiwan in 1979.

The new rules permit Taiwan’s leaders to make “transit” stopovers in the United States. But Taiwan President Li Teng-hui, who remained inside his plane during a brief stopover in Honolulu earlier this year, will still be prohibited from visiting Washington and conducting official business in the United States. So will other top Taiwan officials.

Taiwanese officials will still be barred from meetings at the White House, the Executive Office Building and the State Department.

Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), a longtime supporter of upgrading U.S. ties with Taiwan, called the changes “small steps and this was an opportunity for truly significant, constructive and realistic adjustments. . . . Many of the terms of our relations with Taiwan were outdated long ago. Today, they seem like official pettiness.”

What was once China’s Nationalist government fled to Taiwan and established its headquarters there after the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. For more than three decades after that, the Nationalists maintained that they were the legitimate government for all of China. In recent years they have gradually abandoned this claim, opening the way both for democratic elections in Taiwan and for contacts between Taiwan and the mainland.

The continuing awkwardness in U.S. dealings with Taiwan was on display Wednesday when the Clinton Administration announced its new policy.

Even though the policy included a series of detailed steps, State Department officials refused to release a written accounting of them--apparently because that might have been perceived by China as official State Department recognition of Taiwan. Remarks to reporters by a top State Department official were not transcribed for a written record, as they customarily are.

By permitting senior U.S. economic officials to visit Taiwan, the Clinton Administration is, in effect, giving permanent status to changes that were imposed in the final days of the George Bush Administration. After the 1992 elections, Carla Anderson Hills, then the U.S. trade representative, visited Taiwan--the first Cabinet-level official to do so since 1979.

Brown University Prof. Michael Ying-mao Kau said Wednesday that the Administration’s new policy is “very much a political response to lots of pressure from Congress, particularly after the humiliation of Lee Teng-hui.” He said that people in Taiwan could gain some satisfaction from the changes.

“Even though it doesn’t go as far as a two-China policy, the direction is certainly laid,” Kau said. “You have an improving relationship that shows movement in that direction.”

However, James R. Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to China and now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, called the Administration’s policy review “basically a nothing. . . . I just don’t see anything new in it.”

Ralph Clough, a Taiwan expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said: “I don’t know why it took (the Clinton Administration) so long to make such small steps. But they are useful and will help to improve the links between the United States and Taiwan, and I don’t think it will do anything to harm relations with the People’s Republic of China.”

Taiwan is now America’s sixth-leading trading partner, with $41 billion in trade between the two last year, which is still considerably higher than U.S. trade with China. And Taiwan has about $90-billion worth of foreign-currency reserves, more than any nation in the world except Japan.