Bush Scraps China Policy of Six Presidents

Last year, with U.S. attention riveted on the Middle East and terrorism, the Bush administration quietly revised the “one China” policy of six previous presidents. Seeing China as our potential No.1 enemy, the Pentagon prepared the way for the United States to kill millions of Chinese, if necessary, to protect the separate status of Taiwan. Beijing is angry. But only a few months after this policy change was highlighted in the leaked Nuclear Posture Review, the administration is hosting Vice President Hu Jintao, the likely next president of China, this week in Washington. In either capital, does the left hand know what the right is doing?

Over the past year, one-China traditionalists in the administration successfully moved U.S.-China relations ahead, not the least because they were overwhelmingly supported by U.S. business and by the president’s father. Economic ties between China and the United States continued to expand. The two countries closely cooperated on a range of issues, from Korea to terrorism, and Washington handled bilateral crises with patient diplomacy. As in the past, the U.S. government preferred jawboning to sanctions in pressing China to improve its human-rights record.

For almost 30 years, creative ambiguity was at the heart of the one-China policy: The United States warned China not to use force to resolve the Taiwan issue but did not categorically pledge to defend the island regardless of Taiwan’s position on sovereignty. The U.S. assured China that it would not support or recognize Taiwan’s independence but, at the same time, continued shipping advanced weapons to the island for its self-defense. This balanced approach provided a framework for U.S.-China detente, for Taiwan’s remarkable economic growth and democratization, and for the stunning expansion of cross-strait business, social, and cultural relations. Coupled with dramatic changes inside China, these developments also directly contributed to the opening of China’s closed society. From Richard M. Nixon through Bill Clinton, U.S. administrations believed that the one-China policy would lead eventually to a peaceful agreement formalizing, in some loose manner, the unity of China and Taiwan, and that this would be in the U.S. interest.

But early on, the Bush administration made repeated categorical pledges to do “whatever it takes” to protect the island. The rationale behind this change was the belief among the Pentagon’s top civilians that Taiwan is a strategic platform that must be denied to the emerging power of East Asia, the most dangerous potential rival to U.S. global preeminence. The administration declared that it still accepted the one- China principle, but it asserted as late as January that Taipei was free to reject the principle, as it has done since 1999.

While ending the ambiguity on Taiwan’s defense, the administration has muddied the waters on the previously clear U.S. opposition to the island’s independence. This switch was long advocated by leading revisionists on China, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and John Bolton, an undersecretary in the State Department. Evidence of the change is not hard to find. For the first time since 1978, the State Department last year permitted Taiwan’s president, vice president and premier to hold separate meetings with U.S. lawmakers on American soil. Most recently, the Taiwan defense minister held a “non-official” meeting with Wolfowitz in Florida.

China protested these departures from the one-China policy as “hegemonic acts of gross interference.” But Beijing has not threatened a major breakdown in relations, much less heightened tensions across the Taiwan Strait. China dearly wants to avoid any such crisis. Its booming economy depends in large part on America’s continuing purchase of more than $80 billion in Chinese-made products and huge capital investments in China. Beijing puts great stock in hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, and nothing spoils an Olympics like a war or even a whiff of its possibility. Furthermore, a new Chinese leadership will be chosen in the fall, and the incumbent pragmatists, led by President Jiang Zemin, and the incoming ones, led by Hu, do not want a building sense of national grievance against the United States to play into the hands of the more conservative faction, which would be happy to exchange nationalism for prosperity as the main raison d’etre of the regime.

Meanwhile, China has substantially enhanced its prestige and influence in East Asia through diplomacy and, in some cases, financial aid. It does not want to see this trend upset by an upsurge in tensions in the strait. Almost certainly, the Peoples Liberation Army has urged the regime to delay any showdown over Taiwan.

Beijing may also believe that Taiwan’s multiplying connections across the strait will advance the possibilities of a peaceful one-China resolution of Taiwan’s status, whatever the revisionists may want. Today, more than 50,000 Taiwanese companies have more than $60 billion in investments on the mainland, more than 1 million Taiwanese visit the mainland each year, and 400,000 Taiwanese citizens live in Shanghai.

Finally, the Chinese leaders calculate that the struggle for President Bush’s favor on the one-China issue is far from over. They know the president wants a constructive relationship with China and that many important interests and key individuals do not believe the United States should keep open the option of using Taiwan as a strategic base. Clearly, the Chinese don’t want to undercut traditionalists like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. So, Hu is coming to accentuate the positive.

Still, administration revisionists must take heart in the fact that Hu is in town. They have always contended that if the United States made clear its determination to defend Taiwan under any conceivable circumstance, China would live with it and eventually with Taiwan’s independence. Hu’s current visit, as well as Zemin’s eagerness to stay at Bush’s Texas ranch this fall, confirms this view, contends the revisionists.

They could be wrong, however. At some point, the Chinese people could feel so strongly about what they would see as the final violation of the unity of China that they would be willing to go to war. The revisionists, and those in the upper echelon of the Bush administration who apparently support them, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, no doubt have thought this war scenario through. They realize that with only 2% of the mainland’s population, no matter how many F-16s, submarines, or anti-missile missiles we sell Taiwan, the island would not likely prevail in a prolonged conflict with China. A Chinese blockade, which few nations would challenge, could quickly devastate the Taiwan economy. Furthermore, the hawks understand that if the United States intervened in such a conflict, regardless of how many thousands of smart bombs it rained down on the mainland, China might outlast the patience of the American people.

That brings up the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, which, for the first time, declared that the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons should take into account the possibility of a nuclear war with China “over Taiwan.” In other words, to maintain a potential strategic offshore base for use in a hypothetical conflict with China, we may have to fight a nuclear war with China. This would be “a self-fulfilling prophecy” of biblical proportions.