US-Taiwan Relations: Will China’s Challenge Lead to a Crisis?

"This is the one-stop shop to understand how US policy towards Taiwan has evolved over the past half-century. Richard Bush is a sort of god of US-Taiwan studies in the United States. He’s right now a non-resident Senior Fellow at Brookings , but for many years he served as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan , the de facto embassy, and for decades he has been one of the primary advisors to presidents and diplomats who want to understand what our One China policy actually means. The One China policy is unique in American diplomatic practice. It takes a long time to recite, as there are many explicit and implicit layers. To understand how flexible it is, how it can and cannot be reinterpreted, how it can and cannot be re-communicated, you really have to understand how it has been shaped through history, through crises both famous and less famous, not just with Beijing but also with Taipei. The US and Taiwan are democratic, open societies, and they are responsive to signals from one another. This book is not just a primer on the political history of Taiwan, but it shows how the US and Taiwan are so responsive to each other. So the US has a One China policy. Beijing has a One China principle. Beijing’s One China principle has three parts. There’s only one China in the world. The CCP regime, based in Beijing, is the only legitimate government, and Taiwan is a part of China. That’s that. The US One China policy, we would say, is guided by the three joint communiqués, the six assurances and the Taiwan Relations Act. So you can already see how it’s a policy that has emerged through accretion. The three joint communiqués, signed between 1972 and 1982, were the three major diplomatic agreements on the basis of which the United States and the PRC can have a relationship. They include a number of promises made, both explicit and implicit, and some of the key language is translated differently in English and in Chinese, which allows each side some flexibility to claim that the other has said things that the other side wouldn’t say that it has said. This is a recurring feature of this issue in cross-strait relations. There’s something similar called the ‘1992 consensus.’ The Taiwanese can’t agree on whether such a thing even exists, and if so, what it means. But the core idea of the One China policy is that the United States does not take a position on Taiwan’s status. It does not affirmatively support Taiwan independence. It believes that the status of Taiwan is something to be worked out peacefully through diplomacy, without coercion, between Beijing and Taipei, and that any unilateral attempt to resolve that issue by force or coercion would be a grave threat to peace and stability in the region, and therefore to the United States. So that’s the basic idea—any outcome should be freely agreed to and acceptable to the people of Taiwan. Those commitments to Beijing are counterbalanced by six assurances made to the Taiwanese under the Reagan administration, which essentially boil down to: we will not negotiate about you without you; we will not force you into negotiations from a position of weakness; there is not, and there will never be, pressure from us onto you to negotiate your autonomy away. Then the Taiwan Relations Act, which was passed in 1979 by Congress , makes a number of commitments that say, essentially, we will treat Taiwan de facto , though not de jure , as a state in pretty much every aspect of relations other than the military. We will deliver their mail. We will treat them as an autonomous economy that can make its own trade deals. We will issue visas. Moreover, it expresses the sense of Congress that if Beijing tries to change this situation through force or coercion, including economic coercion, we will regard it as a grave threat to our interests. Zooming out, the basic idea is dual deterrence. You’re deterring Taiwan from unilaterally declaring independence, going from its current ambiguous state to a formal declaration of independence, and you’re deterring Beijing from attacking or using equivalent methods of economic warfare. The idea is, then, if either side threatens to disrupt that status quo, you can remind them that we may adjust our policy or clarify our policy in a way that would be disadvantageous to them. This is one of the aspects of the policy which is established through norms and precedent, rather than explicit commitments. In the third communiqué, we made commitments about arms sales to Taiwan. The third communiqué promised to wind down arms sales to Taiwan over an unspecified period, but it implied that restrictions on US arms sales to Taiwan were contingent on China’s continued restraint. So as a matter of custom, the US won’t send active duty military to Taiwan, but we will send what I like to call ‘burly English teachers’ who may or may not be able to give very specific advice on how to organize, train and equip Taiwan’s armed forces. It has been publicly disclosed that the number of such military advisors on Taiwan has increased by an order of magnitude in recent years. So the last number that was revealed was several hundred of them. I think it’s appropriate, given all the ways that China is trying to change the status quo through salami slicing, for the United States to push back by reinterpreting its own limitations under the communiqués to create a balanced situation overall. But both sides, of course, point to the other and accuse it of salami slicing its way to change the status quo."