China’s Feelings of Betrayal on Taiwan Fed Anger at U.S.

It seemed, at the time, like a minor contretemps in an out-of-the-way location.

Yet when Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s plane touched down in Honolulu on May 4, 1994, it ended the sleepy peace that had prevailed for more than a decade between the United States and China over the island of Taiwan.

Lee, furious because the Clinton administration had refused to let him spend a night on American soil, sat fuming inside the Taiwan-owned Boeing 747. Wearing a sweater and slippers, he refused even to disembark for the reception the U.S. government had set up in a dingy transit lounge at Hickam Air Force Base.

“I can’t get too close to the door of the plane,” Lee, his voice tinged with sarcasm, told diplomat Nat Bellocchi, the lone U.S. representative sent to greet him. “I might slip and enter America.”

The following year, Congress forced President Clinton to reverse course and let Lee become the first Taiwanese president ever to visit this country. That incident, in turn, led to missile firings and military exercises by China off Taiwan. In March of this year, the United States countered by sending two aircraft-carrier battle groups to help protect Taiwan.

The specter of a new war in Asia briefly loomed, with the United States right in the middle of it because of long-standing ties with Taiwan and a desire to reassure other countries in Asia that China could not dominate the region by the threat of force. At one point, a military official in Beijing reminded an American visitor that Chinese missiles can reach Los Angeles.

For the first time in two decades, the dispute between China and Taiwan had taken on a military dimension. Although tensions have eased since the height of the crisis in the spring, the underlying pressures remain.

Over the last two years, U.S. intelligence officials said, Chinese military training, planning, doctrine and procurement--once aimed primarily at protecting against an invasion by the Soviet Union--have shifted to one narrow focus: Taiwan.

“Short-range ballistic missiles, very advanced air systems and submarines are the top priorities now . . . because these are all things that give them immediate benefit in strengthening the credibility of their military with Taiwan,” a U.S. intelligence analyst observed.

History of Tensions

How did Taiwan reemerge as the main point of contention between the United States and China?

To some extent, it may have been inevitable. The carefully worded agreements between the United States and China were worked out in the 1970s at a time when both countries were willing to put aside contentious issues as they worked together during the Cold War. These communiques merely postponed Taiwan’s ultimate status.

Taiwan was occupied by Japan from 1895 until the end of World War II and then, in 1949, by Gen. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist forces as they fled the Chinese mainland after losing to the Communists in their civil war. Most of the island’s 21 million people are native Taiwanese whose ancestors came from the Chinese mainland centuries ago.

China’s Communist regime has always maintained that Taiwan is part of its own territory. In Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, the ruling Nationalist Party long insisted that it should govern the mainland, although party leaders have recently backed away from that claim in response to an active independence movement in Taiwan.

During his historic trip to China in 1972, then-President Richard Nixon signed a carefully worded document in which the United States “acknowledged” that Chinese people on both the mainland and Taiwan considered Taiwan to be part of China. The document did not say that the United States agreed with this arrangement, nor did it spell out exactly what Taiwan’s future should be.

“You had no other choice in ’72 if you wanted to open up China,” recalled Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, who was among the advisors on that Nixon trip. “The Chinese were not going to let you forget the Taiwan problem, and there was no way we were going to solve it the way they wanted to solve it. The best you could do was to agree to disagree and buy time.”

In the 1990s, the U.S. effort to postpone the hard questions on Taiwan began to run out of time.

In this country, public and congressional attitudes changed after China’s repression of the massive pro-democracy demonstration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Meanwhile, Taiwan opened up to democracy, and its leaders--particularly Lee--pushed ever harder for international recognition.

“It’s a very different situation now because Taiwan is a democracy, and the Chinese, I think, just don’t come close to understanding that,” said former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, a member of Clinton’s initial foreign policy team.

As a result, said Stanley Roth, a former Clinton administration official, Taiwan “had enormous support in the United States--not just in Congress, but in general.”

Present and former administration officials said that the recent crisis over Taiwan might well have been avoided if the administration had worked out its policy, stuck to it and explained it to officials in both China and Taiwan.

“I persist in thinking we could have pulled off a visit by Lee Teng-hui at a time of our choosing, with proper preparations,” said a senior U.S. official who took part in the policy deliberations.

Instead, the administration at first adamantly resisted Lee’s efforts to travel to this country and then abruptly shifted course, infuriating China.

“Their sense of betrayal, to some extent, is reasonable,” said Roth, who helped manage Taiwan issues for the Clinton administration’s National Security Council. “Any time you have a flip-flop in policy, you have this problem.”

A New Administration

When Clinton came to the White House, relations between China, Taiwan and the United States already had become unsettled.

In 1992, then-President George Bush had opened the door for the sale of modern F-16 fighter planes to Taiwan’s Nationalist government--an action that, China claimed, violated a decade-old agreement to reduce U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

Moreover, as a lame-duck president after his defeat by Clinton, Bush dispatched U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills to Taiwan, making her the first Cabinet-level visitor to the island since the United States cut off diplomatic ties with the Nationalists in 1979.

And so, with a new administration taking office in early 1993, Taiwan was pushing the United States for continuing contacts and a higher level of recognition, while China was warning against any changes.

The new president had other things on his mind. He was concentrating on domestic policy and foreign policy problems such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia and Haiti. Even when he had time to pay attention to China, Taiwan came below human rights, arms proliferation and North Korea’s nuclear program on his agenda.

To fend off congressional pressure to develop a Taiwan policy, the new administration chose a time-honored tactic: It ordered a policy review. Bellocchi, who until his retirement last year headed the Washington office of the American Institute in Taiwan, said that the 18-month review solved a major problem: “How can we get Congress off our backs?”

Since 1979, the American Institute, staffed by U.S. officials on leaves of absence, has been in charge of the day-to-day handling of America’s unofficial ties with Taiwan.

The policy review focused on “trivial” details, said China scholar Harry Harding of George Washington University in the capital. “It missed the central issue: What is the long-term goal? Reunification, independence or something else?”

Some of the review’s results were less than breathtaking. The administration announced in September 1994, for example, that Taiwan could change the name of its offices in the United States from the Coordinating Council for North American Affairs to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative’s Office. More significantly, the administration said that it would let some Cabinet members involved in economic matters visit Taiwan.

Taiwan was not satisfied, but China was irate, arguing that allowing Cabinet-level visits to Taipei violated the agreements in which the United States had cut off official ties with Taiwan.

Bellocchi said that the review was “badly mishandled. It raised expectations.” In past administrations, he said, reviews of Taiwan policy “were carried out the way they are supposed to be done--internally, quietly.”

“In retrospect, it might have been wiser not to do it, since there wasn’t enough room to play to make anyone satisfied. . . ,” Roth conceded. “It came down to an incredible series of nits. There couldn’t be a huge, fundamental shift because you were working within the parameters of a one-China policy.”

A Flight to Honolulu

By the time the review was completed, it was already being overtaken by events.

Lee, preparing for Taiwan’s first direct presidential election, in March of this year, had been pressing for greater international recognition of his Nationalist government. In the spring of 1994, Taiwanese officials asked the Clinton administration to let Lee spend a night in Hawaii as a transit point while he was traveling to Costa Rica.

At that point, no president of Taiwan had ever set foot on American soil. According to administration officials, Chinese Ambassador Li Daoyu quietly warned that there would be “serious consequences” if the Taiwanese president’s request was granted.

Some U.S. officials took China’s threats seriously. Others argued that China could tolerate a brief Hawaii stopover and that if Lee’s request was not granted, the administration’s policy would run into trouble in Congress, where Taiwan had strong support.

In the end, the administration decided that Lee could not be allowed to spend the night in Honolulu. It said that it would permit Lee’s plane only to refuel there. Bellocchi, the head of the American Institute in Taiwan, was assigned to welcome Lee at a brief reception at the airport.

Taiwanese officials were angry that, in their minds, the Clinton administration had yielded to Chinese pressure. Then-Foreign Minister Frederick Chien reportedly told an American official in Taipei that U.S. leaders were “a bunch of spineless jellyfish.”

“What people don’t remember is that this was a step forward, not a step backward,” Lord said. “No Taiwan president ever had landed in the United States. So in effect, we did more than any other administration had ever done. Now, should we let him stay overnight and play golf or something? People disagreed.”

On May 4, 1994, Bellocchi arrived at the Hickam base in Honolulu prepared to greet Lee on behalf of the United States. He found that the reception for Lee and several other members of Taiwan’s Cabinet was going to take place in a tiny, dingy room with a few old, rickety chairs. There was little security. “It was embarrassing,” Bellocchi recalled.

Ding Mou-shi, the head of Taiwan’s Washington office, had similar thoughts and called Lee’s plane to tell the officials aboard what was awaiting them. And when the plane landed in Honolulu, Lee refused to get off and attend the small reception.

When Bellocchi boarded the aircraft, Lee pointedly told him that Taiwan was not going to accept quietly the second-class status to which it had been relegated. “He was telling us, ‘Taiwan is now a democracy, and they [Taiwanese leaders] are responsible to the people,’ ” Bellocchi said.

The shock waves reached to Washington and Taipei.

In Congress, Taiwan’s supporters denounced the administration for refusing to let Lee get off his plane. That was not true--the administration had been willing to have Lee disembark but had denied permission for him to spend the night--but the distinction was lost on Capitol Hill.

“Lee very cleverly changed the debate by not getting off the plane,” Roth said. “He made it look like he’d been a prisoner and had been insulted.”

Upon his return to Taipei, meanwhile, Lee decided to hire a lobbying firm, Cassidy & Associates, to push more aggressively in Congress for increased American support for Taiwan. The firm was retained for $4.5 million over three years, with the money to be paid by a research group affiliated with Lee’s Nationalists.

“They decided to go to Congress and stir things up,” Lord said.

The Cornell Reunion

Early last year, Taiwanese officials were back in Washington with a new request. Lee wanted to come to America as a private citizen to attend a reunion at Cornell University, which he had attended as a graduate student. The administration, once again, sought to stop him.

This time, Taiwan took its case to Congress and the American public with a full-scale lobbying campaign. A nonbinding resolution supporting Lee’s visit to Cornell passed the House, 360 to 0, and the Senate, 97 to 1.

“When you have all but one member of Congress, in both Houses, voting in one way, plus the entire media establishment and local political leadership . . . it was enormous pressure,” said Roth, who was in charge of Asia policy for Clinton’s National Security Council at the time.

The administration began offering last-ditch compromises of the sort that it had rejected the previous year. State Department officials suggested that Lee might want to visit Honolulu instead of Cornell. Taiwan rejected the offer.

So the administration bowed to Congress and switched its policy. In mid-May, the White House announced that Lee would be granted a visa to travel to Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., with a stopover in Los Angeles.

Afterward, Clinton argued that denying the Taiwanese president permission to attend his reunion would have conflicted with a constitutional right to travel in the United States. He did not explain why his administration had been seeking for more than a year to prevent Lee from exercising this right.

“We said, ‘No, no, no,’ and then we got rolled” in Congress, Bellocchi said. “It was just plain mismanaged.”

Not only were Chinese officials furious that Lee got his visa, but they also believed they had been misled.

The month before the visa was granted, Secretary of State Warren Christopher had informed Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen that permitting the president of Taiwan to travel to Cornell would be inconsistent with the administration’s one-China policy.

“We told them that we were opposing it, which we were,” Lord said. “[Christopher] also told Qian, however, that he couldn’t guarantee we could hold out on this, [that] the pressures in Congress were building up.”

In an effort to limit the damage to U.S. relations with China, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep Lee’s trip as low-key as possible, with no activities that smacked of official or presidential business.

But there was one aspect of Lee’s trip that the administration failed to control: his speech in Ithaca. At his reunion, Lee politely but unmistakably pleaded for American support for Taiwan.

“Today, the institutions of democracy are in place in the Republic of China [Taiwan],” he declared. “Human rights are respected and protected to a very high degree. Democracy is thriving in my country. . . . We say to friends in this country and around the world, we are here to stay.”

In a series of recent interviews, present and former administration officials repeatedly blamed Lee’s speech for causing the trouble that followed.

“The speech clearly was political, and clearly we were blindsided by it,” Lord said. “We kept trying to get an advance copy, and they just didn’t play straight with us. I think that is a large part of [China’s] reaction. . . . When they looked at that speech, they went bananas.”

China called its ambassador home from Washington, canceled a series of meetings and exchanges with the United States and unleashed a campaign of personal vilification against Lee. The military exercises and missile firings toward Taiwan started in the summer and resumed early this year in the weeks before Taiwan’s presidential election in March.

American visitors to Beijing were warned that in the event of an all-out conflict, China could reach the United States with nuclear weapons--unlike in the 1950s, during the last Taiwan Strait crisis, when the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons against a China that didn’t have them.

Chas W. Freeman Jr., then a Defense Department official, was told last fall that Chinese missiles could reach Los Angeles. He said that the remarks were “deterrent, not aggressive. . . . The context was: ‘We can retaliate, so you do not have the strategic superiority you once had. If you hit our homeland, we can hit yours.’ ”

In March, the administration dispatched two aircraft carriers, the Nimitz and the Independence, with battle groups to show its determination to protect Taiwan and maintain security in the Pacific.

“I think the Chinese need to be made aware that when they do things like those missile launches, it has consequences,” said former CIA Director Woolsey. “Two carrier battle groups speak for themselves, and relatively loudly.”

The Fallout

Lee won Taiwan’s election and was inaugurated in May. The military exercises and missile tests have stopped.

And Clinton administration officials said they believe they have now secured Taiwanese officials’ agreement to work with them rather than going to Congress to try to overturn administration policies.

“I think Taiwan has learned some very significant lessons,” Roth said. “There are limits to what China is going to put up with.”

Nevertheless, U. S. officials admitted that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to bring Taiwan and China back to the state of tranquillity that prevailed in the 1980s.

“I don’t think [Chinese leaders] want war with Taiwan,” said one U.S. intelligence analyst. “They know what the cost would be, economically and internationally. But they don’t have the initiative in that relationship. Lee Teng-hui does. . . . They have to threaten to use force if Taiwan moves toward independence. And they are making that threat credible now.”

Bellocchi argued that both Taiwan and China are trying to strengthen their positions for eventual negotiations over Taiwan’s future. China does not want to give up its threat to use force, a potential bargaining chip in negotiations. For the same reason, Taiwan does not want to give up its efforts to gain international recognition and sympathy.

Taiwan’s leaders “can’t stay low-profile,” Bellocchi said. “They can’t stop pushing for international status. That’s their lifeline.” Without it, he said, Taiwan could become the next Hong Kong, which Britain has agreed to return to Chinese sovereignty next year.

“The old status quo,” Bellocchi said, “is dead.”

NEXT: Human rights.

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The Military Face-Off

Taiwan has become China’s No. 1 military focus since the demise of the Soviet Union. A vast arsenal exacerbates tensions, which flared in March with Chinese military exercises near the island.

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China Taiwan Defense budget (1995) $7.5 billion $9.6 billion Armed forces 2,930,000 376,000 Armored personnel carriers 4,500 1,175 Principal surface ships 50 38 Submarines 52 0 Fighter planes 4,400 365 Nuclear capacity Yes No

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Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies