Clinton’s Balancing Act Keeps China, Taiwan at Bay

This is the story of a clandestine meeting--and of the larger effort it represents by the Clinton administration to come to grips with a government that, in its eyes, doesn’t officially exist.

In January, Ding Mou-shih, the national security advisor to Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, flew to New York City. There, he sat down for a round of talks with Clinton Deputy National Security advisor James Steinberg, who had come up from Washington for the occasion.

With any other country, such a meeting would seem like routine diplomacy. With Taiwan, it’s not. The United States has had no relations with Taiwan since 1979, when it formally recognized the People’s Republic of China. Both Washington and Taipei have kept the Ding-Steinberg meeting secret until now, and neither government was eager to answer questions about it this week.

America has talked to Taiwan at lower levels over the years. Both governments maintain what might be called non-embassies in each other’s capitals: that is, offices through which they transact the sort of business that embassies often carry out.

Indeed, Ding’s clandestine visit to New York was not his first. In March 1996, he met Steinberg’s predecessor, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, in a similar session. Berger is now Clinton’s national security advisor.

But that earlier meeting was depicted as a one-shot affair, an attempt to deal with a crisis. At the time, China was firing missiles into Taiwan’s offshore waters and Clinton responded by sending two aircraft carriers near the island. The administration also was urgently trying to cool down passions in both China and Taiwan.

This time, no crisis prompted the New York meeting. Washington and Taipei simply decided to talk at high levels--unofficially, they insist. And administration officials acknowledge that there will probably be similar meetings with Taiwan in the future: not regularly, but from time to time.

Does the Communist regime in Beijing, which considers Taiwan to be part of its own territory, know about these talks? “They [Chinese officials] know that this meeting occurred,” replies one U.S. official carefully. “They understand that we have to have an authoritative dialogue with Taiwan.”

Yet he admitted that the administration had not told China in advance about the New York session. And another administration official responded icily that “we don’t seek their [China’s] approval” before talking to Taiwan.

These talks show, most of all, how hard Clinton and his foreign-policy team are striving to keep Taiwan happy. They want to prevent any new furor of the sort that erupted in 1995 after Clinton granted permission for Lee to make the first visit to the United States ever by a president of Taiwan. China reacted by launching military exercises and firing missiles near Taiwan.

Will Clinton’s secret diplomacy work? In the short term, probably so. Indeed, administration officials are proud that Taiwan is out of the headlines these days.

Yet there are other reasons for this period of quiescence besides the administration’s efforts.

China doesn’t seem to want new conflict with the United States over Taiwan this year--when Beijing has its hands full handling the takeover of Hong Kong in July and planning for a meeting with Clinton later this year. Taiwan seems to be lying low, too, eager not to be tarred with the brush of Washington’s fund-raising scandal.

Over the longer run, though, Taiwan isn’t going away as a problem for U.S. foreign policy. In fact, it is becoming an even bigger one. While this country has been paying attention to other things, democratic Taiwan has been quietly putting down the institutional and intellectual groundwork it needs to buttress its status of de facto independence from China.

In December, Taiwan took a new step toward ending the old fiction that it has one national government aiming to rule China and another provincial one to govern the island. Under Lee’s sponsorship, Taiwan decided to stop electing any new provincial officials. Thus, Taiwan’s “nation” is being slowly redefined as the island itself.

Meanwhile, Taiwan officials are proving ingenious at coming up with new formulas to describe the island’s status. They are drawing a distinction between China, which they describe as a larger cultural entity, and the People’s Republic of China, the government on the mainland.

“The PRC is part of China. It doesn’t represent the whole of China,” Taiwan’s unofficial ambassador to Washington, Jason Hu, explained in an interview this week. Speaking of the Nationalist (Republic of China) government that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek brought to Taiwan from the mainland in the late 1940s, he asserted: “We have always been an independent entity.”

Such words are anathema in Beijing, where Taiwan is viewed as a breakaway province. And they help explain why, despite the Clinton administration’s secret diplomacy, Taiwan still looms as by far the likeliest source of conflict between the United States and China.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every other Wednesday.