CHAPTER 14
Reagan and the Advent of Normalcy
ONE OF THE obstacles to continuity in America’s
foreign policy is the sweeping nature of its periodic changes of
government. As a result of term limits, every presidential
appointment down to the level of Deputy Assistant Secretary is
replaced at least every eight years—a change of personnel involving
as many as five thousand key positions. The successors have to
undergo a prolonged vetting process. In practice, a vacuum exists
for the first nine months or so of the incoming administration, in
which it is obliged to act by improvisation or on the
recommendations of holdover personnel, as it gradually adjusts to
exercising its own authority. The inevitable learning period is
complicated by the desire of the new administration to legitimize
its rise to office by alleging that all inherited problems are the
policy faults of its predecessor and not inherent problems; they
are deemed soluble and in a finite time. Continuity of policy
becomes a secondary consideration if not an invidious claim. Since
new Presidents have just won an election campaign, they may also
overestimate the range of flexibility that objective circumstances
permit or rely excessively on their persuasive power. For countries
relying on American policy, the perpetual psychodrama of democratic
transitions is a constant invitation to hedge their
bets.
These tendencies were
a special challenge to the relationship with China. As these pages
show, the early years of rapprochement between the United States
and the People’s Republic of China involved a period of mutual
discovery. But later decades depended importantly on the two
countries’ ability to develop parallel assessments of the
international situation.
Harmonizing
intangibles becomes especially difficult when leadership is in
constant flux. And both China and the United States witnessed
dramatic leadership changes in the decade of the 1970s. The Chinese
transitions have been described in earlier chapters. In the United
States, the President who opened relations with China resigned
eighteen months later, but the key foreign policy remained in
place.
The Carter
administration represented the first change in political parties
for the Chinese leadership. They had observed statements by Carter
as a candidate promising a transformation of American foreign
policy to embrace a new openness and emphasis on human rights. He
had said little about China. There was some concern in Beijing
whether Carter would maintain the “anti-hegemony” dimension of the
established relationship.
As it turned out,
Carter and his top advisors reaffirmed the basic principles of the
relationship—including those with respect to Taiwan personally
affirmed by Nixon during his visit to Beijing. At the same time,
the advent of Deng and the collapse of the Gang of Four gave the
dialogue between China and the United States a new pragmatic
dimension.
The most intense
strategic dialogue between the United States and China had barely
been established when another change of administrations brought in
a new Republican President with a landslide win. For China, the new
President was an unsettling prospect. Ronald Reagan was difficult
to analyze even for China’s meticulous researchers. He did not fit
any established category. A former movie star and president of the
Screen Actors Guild who had willed himself to political prominence,
Reagan represented a dramatically different kind of American
conservatism than the withdrawn and cerebral Nixon or the serene
Midwestern Ford. Defiantly optimistic about American possibilities
in a period of crisis, Ronald Reagan, more than any high American
official since John Foster Dulles, attacked Communism as an evil to
be eradicated within a finite period of time, not a threat to be
contained over generations. Yet he focused his critique of
Communism almost entirely on the Soviet Union and its satellite
states. In 1976, Reagan had campaigned against Gerald Ford for the
Republican presidential nomination by attacking the détente policy
with the Soviet Union, but had, on the whole, avoided criticizing
the rapprochement with China. Reagan’s critique of Soviet
intentions—which he continued with renewed vigor in the 1980
campaign—had much in common with the lectures Deng had been
delivering to top American officials since his first return from
exile. Yet in Reagan’s case, it was paired with a strong personal
attachment to the prevailing political order in
Taiwan.
In October 1971,
Nixon had encouraged Reagan, then Governor of California, to visit
Taiwan as a special emissary to affirm that the improvement of
relations between Washington and Beijing had not altered the basic
American interest in Taiwan’s security. Reagan left the island with
warm personal feelings toward its leaders and a profound commitment
to the relationship of the peoples of America and Taiwan.
Subsequently, while Reagan stopped short of challenging the
existing understanding with Beijing, he was highly critical of the
Carter administration’s move to sever formal diplomatic ties with
Taipei and downgrade the American Embassy in Taiwan to an
unofficial “American Institute.” In his 1980 presidential campaign
against Carter, he pledged that under a Reagan administration there
would be “no more Vietnams,” “no more Taiwans,” and “no more
betrayals.”
Technically, the
embassy in Taipei had been the American Embassy to China; the American decision, culminated under the
Carter administration, to relocate this embassy to Beijing was a
belated recognition that the Nationalists were no longer poised to
“recover the mainland.” Reagan’s implicit critique was that the
United States should have retained a full embassy in Taipei as part
of a two China solution recognizing both sides of the Taiwan Strait
as separate independent states. Yet in its negotiations with the
Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations (and with all other
governments negotiating the terms of diplomatic recognition), this
was the one outcome that Beijing consistently and adamantly refused
to consider.
Ronald Reagan thus
embodied the existing American ambivalence. A powerful commitment
to the new relationship with Beijing coexisted with a strong
residue of emotional support for Taiwan.
One of Reagan’s
themes was to advocate “official relations” with Taiwan, though he
never explained publicly exactly what this meant. During the 1980
presidential campaign, Reagan decided to try to square the circle.
He sent his vice presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, to
Beijing, where he had served with distinction as head of the U.S.
Liaison Office, which functioned in lieu of an embassy. Bush told
Deng that Reagan did not mean to imply that he endorsed formal
diplomatic relations with Taiwan; nor did Reagan intend to move
toward a two China solution.1 Deng’s frosty reply—surely not unaffected
by the fact that Reagan repeated his advocacy of formal relations
with Taiwan while Bush was in Beijing—induced Reagan to ask me, in
September 1980, to serve as an intermediary in delivering a
similar, somewhat more detailed, message on his behalf to the
Chinese ambassador, Chai Zemin. It was a tall order.
Meeting with Chai in
Washington, I affirmed that, despite his campaign rhetoric,
candidate Reagan intended to uphold the general principles of
U.S.-Chinese strategic cooperation established during the Nixon,
Ford, and Carter administrations and outlined in the Shanghai
Communiqué and the 1979 communiqué announcing normalization of
diplomatic relations. Specifically, Reagan had asked me to convey
that he would not pursue a two China policy, or a “one China, one
Taiwan” policy. I added that I was sure that the ambassador and his
government had studied Governor Reagan’s career, and that in doing
so they would have noted that he had many close friends on Taiwan.
Attempting to put this in a human context, I argued that Reagan
could not abandon personal friendships and that Chinese leaders
would lose respect for him if he did so. As President, however,
Reagan would be committed to the existing framework of
U.S.–People’s Republic relations, which provided a basis for shared
Chinese and American efforts to prevent “hegemony” (that is, Soviet
dominance). In other words, Reagan, as President, would stand by
his friends but also by America’s commitments.
It cannot be said
that the Chinese ambassador received this information with
unrelieved enthusiasm. Conscious of the favorable public opinion
polls projecting Reagan’s victory in November, he took no chances
in expressing an opinion.