Broker a Cross-Strait Truce

America has concrete interests in East Asian peace and also in Taiwan’s democracy as a precursor to China’s. These interests will, after a decade or so, become difficult to serve together without a truce across the Taiwan Strait.

Terms exist for such an armistice. During a specified long time (perhaps 50 years), Beijing could forswear the use of military force against Taiwan, and Taipei could forswear the pursuit of independence from China.

Taipei’s and Beijing’s existing “private” foundations for cross-strait ties could negotiate this. They avoid all issues of stately pride that are not yet resolvable. To head off misunderstandings about truce violations, they could note a third party’s list of the diplomatic liaisons claimed by each side. They also could continue talks toward potential later agreements.

But no such truce is likely to be negotiated--because America unintentionally supports politicians in both Taipei and Beijing who benefit from reiterated cross-strait military crises. U.S. policy toward Taiwan and China has seemed totally successful since the early 1970s. It has fostered peace, trade, investment and political modernization on both the island and the mainland. But it also breeds separatism in Taiwan. And in China, it breeds anger and claims that the U.S. is the crucial factor preventing national reunification.

Official Washington ignores these problems. U.S. policy assumes that Beijing and Taipei will resolve their dispute by themselves. This premise is truly naive. Beijing hard-liners argue for waiting; they hope to impose terms after China grows stronger. On the island, seven-eighths of the voters increasingly elect anti-Chinese politicians. So the chance of a truce is declining.

This is a war process, not a peace process. Repeated violence portends war after a decade or so. If the U.S. then participated to maintain its global prestige as a peacekeeper, would America mainly be defending Taiwan’s democracy? Or would it be defending Taiwan’s separation from China?

Beijing’s halting trajectory toward domestic pluralism continues, but its trump card in negotiations with Taiwan is a threat of force. President Jiang Zemin says, “Chinese do not attack Chinese,” but the budgets to procure modern weapons for generals who support him depend on options to attack Taiwan. Taipei’s trump card is its exuberant democracy, which many islanders think will ensure U.S. defense support for separatism forever.

Abstract sovereignty issues frame all the discourse in Beijing, where practical ways to integrate Taiwan’s people without killing some of them might be a more fruitful focus. Statist symbols also frame Taipei’s debates, where the long-term security of the island’s people would be a more pragmatic focus. President Lee Teng-hui has agreed with Taiwan’s opposition parties that they will “fully participate in major policy decisions on relations with the Chinese mainland.” This nearly scuttles any accord in advance--even if Beijing, cocksure of its growing power, would agree to terms that Taipei could accept.

A temporary truce, however, would allow time for China’s institutions of revolutionary dictatorship to change further and conceivably to liberalize. In Taiwan, it would allow time to mellow the bitterness that remains after Chiang Kai-shek’s repression of Taiwanese leaders.

President Clinton should aim to convince each side that alternatives to a truce are more risky than accepting one. One risk for Taipei is eventual invasion. Another, oddly, is the effect on U.S. policy of conceivable democratization in China. Taiwan’s governing autonomists do not have a credible medium-term security policy, and a truce would give them one.

A risk for Beijing is that recurrent threats of force spur separatist politics and military technologies that a more desperate Taipei could develop are fast becoming cheaper, economically and politically. Beijing’s leaders can realize that China’s future power will prejudge the unification issue in their favor so their only real question is whether they want a war option as such.

Until our president publicizes America’s concerns for Taiwan’s democracy as consistent with America’s concerns for China’s unification, the implicit war factions in Taipei and Beijing will continue to trump U.S. policy.

The U.S. will not abandon Taiwan’s people to a regime that still imprisons peaceful dissenters. But the president should say plainly that Taiwan is Chinese and that U.S. commitments to the island’s people will be fulfilled when China’s post-revolutionary politics become more democratic or when Beijing offers Taipei terms for unification with practical autonomy that can be enforced for some decades by the island’s army.

Until America’s aims are clarified, U.S. policy will remain the pawn of extremists in both Beijing and Taipei. Washington cannot directly mediate the cross-strait dispute, but the president can pressure both sides to reach an interim truce before their symbolic violence becomes real. Otherwise, America will probably be drawn into a future war without a clear goal.