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The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

The tensions surrounding the granting of Most Favored Nation status were in the process of being overcome when the issue of Taiwan reemerged. Within the framework of the tacit bargain undergirding the three communiqués on which the normalization of relations had been based, Taiwan had established a vibrant economy and democratic institutions. It had joined the Asian Development Bank and APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) and participated in the Olympic Games with Beijing’s acquiescence. For its part, Beijing had put forward, beginning in the 1980s, proposals for unification in which Taiwan was to be given total internal autonomy. So long as Taiwan accepted its status as a “Special Administrative Region” of the People’s Republic (the same legal status that Hong Kong and Macao were to have), Beijing pledged, it would be permitted to retain its own distinct political institutions and even its own armed forces.¹⁹

Taipei’s reaction to these proposals was circumspect. But it benefitted from the People’s Republic’s economic transformation and became increasingly economically interdependent with it. Following the loosening of restrictions on bilateral trade and investment in the late 1980s, many Taiwanese companies shifted production to the mainland. By the end of 1993, Taiwan had surpassed Japan to become the second-largest source of overseas investment in China.²⁰

While economic interdependence developed, the two sides’ political paths diverged significantly. In 1987, Taiwan’s aging leader, Chiang Ching-kuo, had lifted martial law. A dramatic liberalization of Taiwan’s domestic institutions followed: press restrictions were lifted; rival political parties were allowed to stand for legislative elections. In 1994, a constitutional amendment laid the groundwork for the direct election of the Taiwanese President by universal suffrage. New voices in Taiwan’s political arena that had had their activities circumscribed by the martial law–era restrictions now began advocating a distinct Taiwanese national identity and potentially formal independence. Chief among them was Lee Teng-hui, the mercurial agricultural economist who had worked his way up the ranks of the Nationalist Party and was appointed its chairman in 1988.

Lee incarnated everything Beijing detested in a Taiwanese official. He had grown up during the Japanese colonization of Taiwan, taken a Japanese name, studied in Japan, and served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Later he had received advanced education in the United States, at Cornell University. Unlike most Nationalist Party officials, Lee was a native Taiwanese; he was outspoken about regarding himself as “a Taiwan person first and a Chinese person second,” and was a proud and insistent proponent of Taiwan’s distinct institutions and historical experience.²¹

As the 1996 election drew nearer, Lee and his Cabinet engaged in a series of acts designed step by step to increase what they described as Taiwan’s “international living space.” To the discomfort of Beijing (and many in Washington), Lee and other senior ministers embarked on a course of “vacation diplomacy” that found large delegations of Taiwanese officials traveling “unofficially” to world capitals, occasionally during meetings of international organizations, and then maneuvering to be received with as many of the formal trappings of statehood as possible.

The Clinton administration attempted to stand apart from these developments. In a November 1993 meeting and press conference with Jiang Zemin in Seattle, on the occasion of an APEC summit of nations from both sides of the Pacific, Clinton stated:

In our meeting I reaffirmed the United States support for the three joint communiqués as the bedrock of our one China policy. . . .

The policy of the United States on one China is the right policy for the United States. It does not preclude us from following the Taiwan Relations Act, nor does it preclude us from the strong economic relationship we enjoy with Taiwan. There’s a representative [of Taiwan], as you know, here at this meeting. So I feel good about where we are on that. But I don’t think that will be a major stumbling block in our relationship with China.²²

For Clinton’s approach to work, Taiwan’s leaders needed to exercise restraint. But Lee was determined to push the principle of Taiwan’s national identity. In 1994, he sought permission to stop in Hawaii to refuel his plane en route to Central America—the first time a Taiwanese President had landed on American soil. Lee’s next target was the 1995 reunion at Cornell, where he had obtained his economics PhD in 1958. Vigorously urged by the newly elected Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, Congress voted unanimously in the House and with only one dissenting vote in the Senate to support Lee’s visit. Warren Christopher had assured the Chinese Foreign Minister in April that approving Lee’s visit would be “inconsistent with American policy.” But in the face of such formidable pressure, the administration reversed itself and granted the request for a personal and unofficial visit.

Once at Cornell, Lee delivered a speech straining the definition of “unofficial.” After a brief nod to fond memories of his time at Cornell, Lee launched into a rousing talk on the aspirations of Taiwan’s people for formal recognition. Lee’s elliptical phrasings, frequent references to his “country” and “nation,” and blunt discussion of the imminent demise of Communism all exceeded Beijing’s tolerance.

Beijing recalled its ambassador from Washington, delayed the approval of the American ambassadorial nominee, James Sasser, and canceled other official contacts with the American government. Then, following the script of the Taiwan Strait Crises of the 1950s, Beijing began military exercises and missile tests off the coast of southeast China that were equal parts military deterrent and political theater. In a series of threatening moves, China fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait—to demonstrate its military capabilities and to warn Taiwan’s leaders. But it used dummy warheads, thus signaling that the launches had a primarily symbolic quality.

Quiescence on Taiwan could be maintained only so long as none of the parties challenged the three communiqués. For they contained so many ambiguities that an effort by any party to alter the structure or to impose its interpretation of the clauses would upend the entire framework. Beijing had not pressed for the clarification, but once it was challenged, it felt compelled to demonstrate at a minimum how seriously China took the issue.

In early July 1995, as the crisis was still gathering momentum, I was in Beijing with a delegation from the America-China Society, a bipartisan group of former high officials dealing with China. On July 4, we met with then Vice Premier Qian Qichen and the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Li Daoyu. Qian laid out the Chinese position. Sovereignty was nonnegotiable:

Dr. Kissinger, you must be aware that China attaches great importance to Sino-U.S. relations, despite our occasional quarrels. We hope to see Sino-U.S. relations restored to normal and improved. But the U.S. government should be clear about the point: we have no maneuver-room on the Taiwan question. We will never give up our principled position on Taiwan.

Relations with China had reached a point where the weapon of choice of both the United States and China was the suspension of high-level contacts, creating the paradox that both sides were depriving themselves of the mechanism for dealing with a crisis when it was most needed. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, each side proclaimed friendship with the other less to pursue a common strategic objective than to find a way to symbolize cooperation—at that moment, in defiance of its actuality.

The Chinese leaders conveyed shortly after my arrival their desire for a peaceful outcome by one of the subtle gestures at which they are so adept. Before the formal schedule of the America-China Society began, I was invited to give a talk at a secondary school in Tianjin that Zhou Enlai had once attended. Accompanied by a senior Foreign Ministry official, I was photographed near a statue of Zhou, and the official introducing me used the occasion to recall the heyday of close Sino-American cooperation.

Another sign that matters would not get out of hand came from Jiang. While the rhetoric on all sides was intense, I asked Jiang whether Mao’s statement that China could wait one hundred years for Taiwan still stood. No, replied Jiang. When I asked in what way not, Jiang responded, “The promise was made twenty-three years ago. Now only seventy-seven years are left.”

The professed mutual desire to ease tensions ran up, however, against the aftermath of the Tiananmen crisis. There had been no high-level dialogue, nor a ministerial visit, since 1989; the only high-level discussion for six years had been at the sidelines of international meetings or at the U.N. Paradoxically, in the aftermath of military maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait, the immediate issue resolved itself into a partly procedural problem of how a meeting between leaders could be arranged.

Ever since Tiananmen, the Chinese had sought an invitation for a presidential visit to Washington. Both Presidents Bush and Clinton had evaded the prospect. It rankled. The Chinese, too, were refusing high-level contacts until assurances were given to forestall a repetition of the visit to America by the Taiwanese President.

Matters were back to the discussions at the end of the secret visit twenty-five years earlier, which had briefly stalemated over the issue of who was inviting whom—a deadlock broken by a formula by Mao, which could be read as implying that each side had invited the other.

A solution of sorts was found when Secretary of State Christopher and the Chinese Foreign Minister met on the occasion of an ASEAN meeting in Brunei, obviating the need of determining who had made the first move. Secretary Christopher conveyed an assurance—including a still classified presidential letter defining American intentions—regarding visits to America by Taiwanese senior officials and an invitation for a meeting of Jiang with the President.

The summit between Jiang and Clinton materialized in October, though not in a manner that took full account of China’s amour propre. It was not a state visit nor in Washington; rather, it was scheduled for New York, in the context of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the United Nations. Clinton met with Jiang at Lincoln Center, as part of a series of similar meetings with the most important leaders attending the U.N. session. A Washington visit by a Chinese President in the aftermath of Chinese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait would have encountered too hostile a reception.

In this atmosphere of inconclusive ambivalence—of veiled overtures and tempered withdrawals—Taiwan’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for December 2, 1995, raised the temperature again. Beijing began a new round of military exercises off the Fujian coast, with air, naval, and ground forces conducting joint maneuvers to simulate an amphibious landing on hostile territory. This was accompanied by an equally aggressive campaign of psychological warfare. The day before the December legislative election, the PLA announced a further round of exercises to take place in March 1996, just prior to the Taiwanese presidential election.²³

As the election approached, missile tests “bracketing” Taiwan hit points just off key port cities in the island’s northeast and southwest. The United States responded with the most significant American show of force directed at China since the 1971 rapprochement, sending two aircraft carrier battle groups with the carrier Nimitz through the Taiwan Strait on the pretext of avoiding “bad weather.” At the same time, walking a narrow passage, Washington assured China that it was not changing its one China policy and warned Taiwan not to engage in provocative acts.

Approaching the precipice, both Washington and Beijing recoiled, realizing that they had no war aims over which to fight or terms to impose which would alter the overriding reality, which was (in Madeleine Albright’s description) that China “is in its own category—too big to ignore, too repressive to embrace, difficult to influence, and very, very proud.”²⁴ For its part, America was too powerful to be coerced and too committed to constructive relations with China to need to be. A superpower America, a dynamic China, a globalized world, and the gradual shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific required a peaceful and cooperative relationship. In the wake of the crisis, relations between China and the United States improved markedly.

As relations began to approach previous highs, yet another crisis shook the relationship as suddenly as a thunderclap at the end of a summer day. During the Kosovo war, at what was otherwise a high point in U.S.-Chinese relations, in May 1999, an American B-2 bomber originating in Missouri destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. A firestorm of protests swept over China. Students and the government seemed united in their outrage at what was assumed to be another demonstration of American disrespect for China’s sovereignty. Jiang spoke of “deliberate provocation.” He elaborated with defiance revealing a latent disquiet: “The great People’s Republic of China will never be bullied, the great Chinese nation will never be humiliated, and the great Chinese people will never be conquered.”²⁵

As soon as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was informed, she asked the Deputy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accompany her to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, though it was the middle of the night, to express the regrets of the U.S. government.²⁶ Jiang felt obliged by the public mood, however, to express his own outrage but then to use that expression to restrain his public (a pattern similar to that of American Presidents on the human rights issue).

Chinese indignation was matched on the American side by arguments that China needed to be faced down. Both viewpoints reflected serious convictions, and illustrated the potential for confrontation in a relationship in which both sides were drawn by the nature of modern foreign policy into tensions with each other around the world. The governments on both sides remained committed to the need for cooperation, but they could not control all the ways the countries impinged on each other. It is the unsolved challenge of Chinese-American relations.

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The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

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