U.S. Attempt to Draw China, Taiwan Into Talks Backfires

The breathtaking change seemed to come from nowhere.

Three months ago, Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui ushered in an era of heightened confrontation in East Asia by redefining Taiwan’s relationship to China as that of one state to another. His statement--which he refused to retract and was scheduled to repeat in a National Day address early today--raised the possibility of military action by China, which claims Taiwan as part of its own territory.

At the time, Clinton administration officials wrote off Lee’s announcement as largely an outgrowth of electoral politics, Lee’s desire to establish a legacy and Taipei’s ceaseless diplomatic maneuvering with Beijing.

What U.S. officials didn’t say was that Lee’s milestone declaration also was directed at the Clinton administration, representing Taiwan’s response to a little-noticed American diplomatic initiative.

The administration’s campaign was aimed at bringing Taiwan into negotiations with China and reducing hostilities across the strait that divides them. Instead, the U.S. effort backfired, raising tensions instead of easing them. It left Taiwan with the impression--denied by administration officials--that Washington was taking Beijing’s side.

The United States has recognized the Communist regime in Beijing as the legitimate government of China, but it has never said exactly what Taiwan’s relationship to China should be or how it should be resolved, except to emphasize that any settlement should be peaceful.

Lee and other Taiwanese leaders “felt the United States was becoming more and more unbalanced, more and more leaning toward Beijing’s definition of what was happening, and they wanted to make clear that was unacceptable,” said Georgetown University historian Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, an expert on U.S. policy toward Taiwan.

Last spring, over a period of several months, the Clinton administration had exhorted Taiwan to enter into “interim agreements” with China without settling the ultimate question of the island’s future status.

Asked in a telephone interview last week to comment on the administration’s diplomacy, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Jason Hu answered in careful terms that left little doubt about his government’s unhappiness: “If you don’t face reality, and if you demonstrate an increasing tendency to accept the People’s Republic of China’s version of ‘one China,’ then there is no breathing room for us.”

For his part, Lee, in a speech prepared for delivery in Taipei early today, repeated the theme he has developed since July. “We deem the relationship between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait to be a special state-to-state relationship, which is a historical and legal fact,” he said.

U.S. officials insist that their unsuccessful diplomatic campaign was only an attempt to try out new concepts and wasn’t designed to stampede Taiwan.

“We did not offer this suggestion to put pressure on either side, only as an idea that might prove useful to both,” Susan Shirk, a deputy assistant secretary of State, later said in congressional testimony.

Yet a number of U.S. specialists say that in Taiwan, the Clinton administration’s effort was perceived as neither so mild nor so evenhanded as U.S. officials later claimed it to be.

Taiwan officials “saw pressures from Washington to move things faster than they were prepared for,” said Nat Bellocchi, the former director of the Washington organization that handles U.S. ties with Taiwan. He said Lee’s declaration in July “was a defense mechanism, to tell Washington, ‘Stop pushing us.’ ”

U.S. Policy Began With Lee’s Visit

The Clinton administration’s Taiwan diplomacy had its origins in 1995. That spring, President Clinton gave permission for Lee to visit the United States. His trip infuriated China, which subsequently began to launch missiles into the waters near Taiwan. Eager to defuse tensions, Clinton sent a letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin, offering him a series of assurances about U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan.

Over the following years, the Chinese government began to push hard for the Clinton administration to make these same assurances in public. After first balking, the Clinton administration eventually relented. In 1998, while visiting Shanghai, Clinton uttered in public a version of what he had told Jiang in the letter.

“We don’t support independence for Taiwan, or two Chinas, or ‘one Taiwan, one China,’ and we don’t believe that Taiwan should be a member in any organization for which statehood is a requirement,” Clinton said. This statement became commonly known in both Taiwan and China as Clinton’s “three noes.”

No U.S. president had ever uttered such a strong, unqualified public statement before. Clinton’s words, made on Chinese soil, were given great prominence and treated as a milestone by China, which promptly called upon Taiwan to “face reality” and enter into talks for its reunification with China.

U.S. officials have insisted that Clinton’s “three noes” merely restated past policy, because in the months leading up to Clinton’s statement, others in his administration had said the same thing. They also point out that during the opening of China in 1971-72, President Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger privately promised China that the United States would not support independence for Taiwan, the creation of two Chinas, or one China and one Taiwan. The Nixon administration’s formal public statements never went so far and were considerably more ambiguous.

“There was nothing new about the three noes,” said Chas. W. Freeman Jr., formerly the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

But other U.S. experts and scholars on Taiwan strongly disagree. Tucker of Georgetown said Clinton’s speech represented “significant movement” in the U.S. position, which previously had left ambiguous exactly how Washington views Taiwan’s relationship to China.

According to Douglas Paal, who was in charge of China policy at the National Security Council in the Bush administration, the U.S. government had always maintained that “the future of Taiwan was up to the two sides to work out, that all we [the United States] cared about was that it should be peaceful.” But with Clinton’s declaration, Paal added, “we were saying we cared what the outcome of negotiations would be, that it must be one China. . . . We were inching toward China’s position.”

The Clinton administration took its next big step this spring. In a Washington speech March 24, Assistant Secretary of State Stanley Roth suggested “interim agreements . . . on any number of topics” between China and Taiwan.

That idea sounds innocuous, but specialists say it is also sensitive, because Beijing won’t negotiate with Taiwan’s “Republic of China” government as an equal. China and Taiwan have held talks but have never addressed the question of how to define their relationship.

“Just talking is OK, but to negotiate an agreement, you have to recognize the jurisdiction of the other side,” Bellocchi said. “That’s been the problem all along.”

Hong Kong-Like Deal Proposed for Taiwan

The phrase “interim agreement” also had special significance in Taiwan. A year earlier, Kenneth Lieberthal, then a China scholar at the University of Michigan, had proposed in Taiwan the idea of an “interim arrangement,” in which the governments in Taipei and Beijing would sign on to the concept of “one China” but would put off the idea of reunification for 50 years.

Lieberthal’s idea “went down like a thud” in Taiwan, recalled one U.S. official, because it was feared that he might be suggesting a deal for Taiwan’s future akin to the one adopted for Hong Kong. In 1997, Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in exchange for promises that Hong Kong could keep its own institutions and way of life for 50 years.

By the time the administration launched its diplomatic campaign concerning Taiwan, Lieberthal was working for it as director of East Asia policy at the National Security Council. Nevertheless, administration officials say the U.S. call for “interim agreements” had no connection to Lieberthal’s earlier, 50-year proposal.

Lieberthal said in an interview that he hasn’t tried to introduce his academic proposal for Taiwan’s future since joining the government. “There is no relationship, conceptually or otherwise,” between the two ideas, he said.

After Roth’s speech, the Clinton administration sought to ease anxieties in Taiwan.

“Some people fear that maybe [Roth] had a specific type of agreement in mind, that the United States in effect was imposing such an agreement and that such an agreement would be bad for Taiwan,” said Richard Bush, chairman of the Washington office that oversees U.S. relations with Taiwan. “Frankly, I think that these people are overreaching.”

Yet the administration also kept on pressing its Taiwan initiative in a series of speeches and statements throughout the spring. When Taiwanese officials suggested that they might be willing to make agreements with China on some “technical issues” such as fishing rights, U.S. officials made plain that wouldn’t be enough.

In a speech June 29, Roth said “technical agreements” between Taiwan and China would not “do a heck of a lot.” Instead, he said, the two governments should try to reach agreement on “significant issues.”

Taiwan’s reply came less than two weeks later, with Lee’s bombshell announcement. The Clinton administration’s Taiwan initiative had failed.