Taiwanese Opposition’s Independence Drive Shows Need for New U.S. Policy

Parris Chang flew from Taiwan two weeks ago to open a Washington office, one he hopes he won’t have to keep for too long. His new office illustrates how the Clinton Administration’s status quo policies are failing to keep up with fast-moving events in Asia.

Chang represents Taiwan’s political opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party, which argues that Taiwan should be considered an independent nation, separate from China, with its own diplomatic relations with the United States.

In recent elections, the DPP has been gaining on the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. The Kuomintang (which has ruled Taiwan for nearly half a century, ever since Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek dispatched his troops to the island as he was losing China’s civil war) opposes independence and favors eventual reunification with China. Last year the DPP garnered about 40% of the vote and won the election for mayor of Taipei; over the next year, it could well force the KMT to share power in a coalition government.

Chang says the DPP’s Washington office will be used “to tell the American people that Taiwan is not a province of China.” In fact, he says, “Taiwan is already an independent state.”

Those views, by a political party with considerable support in Taiwan, demonstrate why Taiwan is now a ticking time bomb for American policy. China has often threatened to invade Taiwan if it declares its independence. For decades, that seemed like a remote possibility, because the KMT ruled Taiwan as a one-party, authoritarian state. But the independence scenario is no longer so implausible. Taiwan is now a democracy, and its 21 million people aren’t exactly thirsting for reunification with China.

Winston Lord did not attend Parris Chang’s party for the opening of the DPP office. Lord, the Clinton Administration’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia, serves as the keeper of the flame for the decades-old American policy toward Taiwan. That policy is to go along with the idea that Taiwan is part of China.

The U.S. policy was fixed in the earliest moments of Henry A. Kissinger’s now-famous secret trip to Beijing in 1971. In a book published last year, one of Kissinger’s top aides on that trip, John Holdridge, reveals what Kissinger left out of his own memoirs: that relinquishing the idea of an independent Taiwan was, essentially, the price of admission for the Richard Nixon Administration to begin to talk with China. Holdridge reports that at the outset of the first day’s meeting in Beijing, Kissinger “said what I had written for him: no two Chinas; no one China, one Taiwan; no independent Taiwan.”

Holdridge recounts Chinese Premier Chou En-lai’s reaction: “Good. These talks may now proceed.”

Lord, who was one of the few other Kissinger aides on that 1971 trip, is spearheading the Clinton Administration’s efforts to hold the line on Taiwan policy. He is not alone. In Beijing, U.S. Ambassador to China J. Stapleton Roy has sent strongly worded cables warning the Clinton Administration against changes in American policy that would convey a degree of official recognition to Taiwan.

This month’s opening of the DPP’s office was merely the latest of several recent developments in Washington that have threatened to upset America’s one-China policy. In Congress, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) announced two months ago that he would support admission of Taiwan into the United Nations. Just before the Senate and House left for their Easter recesses, both bodies began moving toward the adoption of measures calling upon the Clinton Administration to let Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui enter the United States to get an honorary degree and attend his college reunion at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Congress is responding to appeals from Taiwan’s Kuomintang government, which has been trying to compete with the DPP by pushing for upgrades in American policy toward Taiwan. The Kuomintang is one of the world’s richest parties, and it is throwing lots of money into the cause. Last year, a Taiwanese research group associated with the ruling party hired a Washington lobbying firm, Cassidy & Associates, for a three-year contract at a cool $1.5 million a year to lobby for Taiwan in Washington.

Money never hurts in Washington, and Taiwan’s lobbying firm is all over town. Suddenly, members of Congress who probably don’t even attend their own college reunions are becoming extremely fervent about making sure the president of Taiwan can have a drink with his Cornell classmates this June.

The Clinton Administration is quietly opposing the idea of letting the Taiwanese president visit Cornell. And on this particular issue, the Administration has a point. Congress shouldn’t be a blunderbuss on a serious foreign policy issue. Taiwan or its lobbyists can disguise this as a college reunion, honorary degree or “private trip” all they want, but the reality is that it would be the first visit to the United States by the president of Taiwan since the United States recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1979. If Lee was to visit, he wouldn’t come incognito. Taiwan and its lobbyists would treat him with the respect he deserves as president, and would no doubt expect Americans to do likewise.

Still, concedes one senior Clinton Administration official, “I don’t think they (Taiwan’s lobbyists) would be making a dent if Taiwan were not such a success story.” The fact is that over the past eight years, Taiwan has become a working democracy and a rich country, with $95 billion in foreign-exchange reserves, second in the world behind Japan, and enough wealth to become America’s seventh-leading trade partner. It buys almost twice as many goods from the United States as does China.

These changes, and Taiwan’s flirtation with independence, would seem to call for fresh American thinking. Yet we don’t seem to be getting it. To those who question the longstanding U.S. policy, Lord tirelessly offers the same old answers, in which he deeply believes: The policy has worked for more than two decades, and Taiwan is thriving. But you can argue that Taiwan is thriving in spite of, rather than because of, U.S. policy. And it is a big mistake to assume something will work in the future merely because it did in the past.

Lord also regularly tells Congress that the Clinton Administration conducted a comprehensive review of Taiwan policy after taking office. In reality, however, it was largely a phony review, designed both to relieve the pressures for change from outside the Administration and, say Administration officials, to answer some questions from an incoming President who, as governor of Arkansas, had visited Taiwan five times. After more than a year of delays, American policy was left mostly unchanged.

It’s time for some creative new approaches. Even China and Taiwan themselves are becoming more flexible; there may even be a summit meeting between the two governments within a year or two. America’s policy toward Taiwan shouldn’t be altered by congressional lobbyists or Cornell reunions. It’s too serious for that. But the United States can’t hang on forever to the old policy, which is explicitly based on the increasingly questionable assumption that Taiwan considers itself part of China.

At the ceremonies opening the DPP’s new Washington office, a Taiwanese reporter asked Parris Chang what would happen if his independence-minded party won elections on the island next year.

“Maybe we will rent this office to the Kuomintang,” he said, giggling at the notion that Chiang Kai-shek’s heirs might be relegated to a small room in the National Press Building.

The DPP’s new office is a symbol of change. Taiwan’s unsettled future is fast blowing up into the sort of problem that could jeopardize all of American policy toward Asia. Right now, the Clinton Administration is offering little but the fast-fading hope that the formulas of the early 1970s will still work.