[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 26, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: January 26, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                             HENRY CLINTON

  Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I have introduced a resolution calling for 
a modified policy on the part of our Government toward the Government 
of Taiwan.
  Recently, The New Republic had an article by James Mann, a reporter 
for the Los Angeles Times, commenting on the administration's policy 
toward Taiwan.
  It seems to me, the James Mann article makes eminent good sense.
  The irony in the present situation is that we recognize the People's 
Republic of China--I favored that long before we did it--but we fail to 
recognize the Government of Taipei, called by them the Republic of 
China, a government that is clearly giant strides ahead of the People's 
Republic of China in terms of its human rights policies.
  This policy does not make sense economically because of the economic 
power that Taiwan has, and it does not make sense politically because 
it knuckles under to pressures from the People's Republic of China. 
They need to see strength on our part in policy, and our present policy 
shows weakness.
  Before the shift in policy, which took place under the Carter 
administration, I favored a two-China recognition policy. I still 
believe that make sense.
  That is a policy we followed in Germany. We recognized both West 
Germany and East Germany, and neither side was particularly happy with 
our policy on that. But that did not prevent the two Germanys from 
eventually unifying.
  If we were to take some greater steps toward practical recognition of 
the Government of Taiwan, without formally going through the 
recognition process yet, I believe it would make sense from every 
aspect, including sending a much-needed signal to the Government of the 
People's Republic of China.
  I ask that the resolution I have introduced and the article by James 
Mann titled, ``Henry Clinton'' be inserted into the Record at this 
point.
  The material follows:

                              S. Res. 148

       Whereas the United States has had a long history of 
     friendship with the government of the Republic of China, more 
     widely known as Taiwan;
       Whereas Taiwan has the largest foreign reserves of any 
     nation and a strong, vibrant economy, and now has the 20th 
     largest gross national product in the world;
       Whereas Taiwan has dramatically improved its record on 
     human rights and now routinely holds free and fair elections 
     in a multiparty political system;
       Whereas agencies of the United States Government or the 
     United Nations' working with Taiwan does not prevent or 
     imperil a possible voluntary union between the People's 
     Republic of China and Taiwan any more than recognizing 
     separate governments in the former West Germany and the 
     former East Germany prevented the voluntary reunification of 
     Germany;
       Whereas Taiwan has much to contribute to the work and 
     funding of the United Nations;
       Whereas governments of other nations that maintain 
     diplomatic relations with People's Republic of China, such as 
     France and Norway, have also had ministerial-level exchanges 
     with Taipei; and
       Whereas it is in the interest of the United States and the 
     United Nations to maintain good relations with a government 
     and an economy as significant as that on Taiwan: Now, 
     therefore, be it
       Resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that--
       (1) the President, acting through the United States 
     Permanent Representative to the United Nations, should 
     encourage the United Nations to permit representatives of 
     Taiwan to participate fully in the activities of the United 
     Nations and its specialized agencies; and
       (2) Cabinet-level exchanges between Taiwan and the United 
     States should take place in the interests of both nations.
       Sec. 2. The Secretary of the Senate shall transmit a copy 
     of this resolution to the President.

                 [From the New Republic, Dec. 27, 1993]

          Clinton's Kissingerian Taiwan Policy: Henry Clinton

                            (By James Mann)

       After President Clinton's recent summit meeting in Seattle 
     with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Chinese officials emerged 
     with smiling, contented looks on their faces. And with good 
     reason. Though they had conducted their usual public quarrel 
     with the United States over human rights, Jiang and his aides 
     had gotten what they wanted on another issue of even greater 
     importance to them: Clinton had reaffirmed the 21-year-old 
     Nixon-Kissinger policy toward Taiwan.
       Strange as it may sound, Taiwan is one issue on which the 
     Clinton administration is more conciliatory toward Beijing, 
     more wooden and backward-looking in its China policy, than 
     the Bush administration was. During his final year in office 
     Bush started to shift U.S. policy on Taiwan. Clinton has, in 
     effect, frozen this change and, with the help of some of 
     Henry Kissinger's old foreign policy team, is setting 
     American policy back on the course set in 1972.
       The basic American policy on Taiwan was set during 
     President Nixon's 1972 trip, when he signed the Shanghai 
     Communique. In it, the United States promised not to contest 
     the idea that Taiwan is part of China. That principle was 
     reaffirmed in a 1978 communique, when President Carter 
     established diplomatic relations with Beijing. And in a third 
     communique, signed by the Reagan administration in 1982, the 
     United States promised, vaguely, to phase out arms sales to 
     Taiwan by some unspecified future date. These three documents 
     are known as the ``three communiques,'' and mind-numbing as 
     they sound, they have become as much a part of the parlance 
     of Sino-American diplomacy as, say, the Camp David Accords 
     are to the Middle East.
       The problem with the policy is that Taiwan is changing. 
     When the first communique was signed, Taiwan was a poor, 
     repressive police state run by Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, 
     the loser in the Chinese civil war. Now Taiwan, which has 
     more than 20 million people, is so rich that it is America's 
     sixth-largest trading partner and has the world's largest 
     foreign currency reserves. Politically, it is moving--far 
     more rapidly than Japan did--from authoritarian state to 
     controlled one-party democracy to an open multiparty system. 
     Meanwhile, in opinion polls and in official statements, 
     Taiwan has been backing away from the Nationalists' claims, 
     which date back to 1949, that its government is the 
     government for all of China.
       The shift in policy toward Taiwan first came to light in 
     the 1992 presidential campaign, when Bush announced that the 
     United States would sell F-16 fighters to the Nationalist 
     government. Bush's action--which reversed more than a decade 
     of American refusal to sell Taiwan the warplanes--was 
     misperceived as a hasty political move to gain votes in 
     Texas. (The F-16s were built by General Dynamics in Fort 
     Worth.)
       That interpretation is wrong. Politics may have dictated 
     the timing of Bush's announcement, but the sale was, in fact, 
     the result of a year of ferment in the foreign policy 
     apparatus over whether to loosen Taiwan policy.
       The origins of the change date to the summer of 1991, when 
     James Lilley--the one-time CIA official who had just stepped 
     down as Bush's ambassador to Beijing--said in a speech that 
     China's claims over Taiwan were ``anachronistic.'' Lilley 
     asserted that the United States had been ``locked for too 
     long into the three communiques.'' Though Lilley was out of 
     public office at the time, his comments amounted to a 
     stunning high-level challenge to the basic tenets that had 
     governed America's China-Taiwan policy since the Nixon era.
       Beginning in the late fall of 1991, a small group of Bush 
     administration officials began meeting to reevaluate Asia 
     policy, including plans for China and Taiwan. Among them were 
     Douglas Paal, director of Asia policy for the National 
     Security Council, and eventually Lilley, who had rejoined the 
     administration as assistant secretary of defense. They were 
     concerned about China's growing military expenditures, its 
     purchases of advanced Sukhoi-27 warplanes from Russia and its 
     expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea.
       The first result of this policy review was the F-16 sale. 
     And the second result, at the end of 1992, was an official 
     trip to Taipei by U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, the 
     first Cabinet-level visit to Taiwan since the break-off of 
     diplomatic ties thirteen years earlier. These two moves made 
     the Chinese nervous.
       Enter Bill Clinton. During his presidential campaign, 
     Clinton had savaged Bush for ``coddling the dictators of 
     Beijing'' with regard to human rights. It is now fashionable 
     to say that Clinton has abandoned these promises, and that 
     his China policy is the same as Bush's. But those criticisms 
     focus on rhetoric rather than on policy, and they aren't 
     true, at least not so far: Clinton's human rights policy has 
     been demonstrably tougher than that of the previous 
     administration and is in line with his campaign statements.
       Under Bush, the Democratic Congress repeatedly passed 
     legislation that would have made renewal of China's most 
     favored nation trade benefits contingent on human rights 
     improvements. Bush, who favored unconditional MFN benefits, 
     always vetoed the legislation. Two of the architects of 
     Bush's policy of reconciliation with Beijing had been charter 
     members of the old Kissinger crowd: national security adviser 
     Brent Scowcroft and Assistant Secretary of State Lawrence 
     Eagleburger.
       Clinton's position on China during the campaign fell far 
     short of the Bush ``read my lips, no new taxes'' level of 
     specificity. While denouncing dictators, Clinton also added 
     the soothing homily that ``we don't want to isolate China.'' 
     More important, like the Democratic Congress under Bush, he 
     never came out for complete MFN revocation; he only promised 
     to make benefits conditional on progress in human rights.
       That is what Clinton has done in the White House. If in 
     recent months he has upgraded the level of contacts with 
     Beijing, it is largely because he changed the Bush policy of 
     unconditional MFN renewals--and now realizes that China may 
     refuse to satisfy his conditions for human rights progress, 
     thus jeopardizing trade between the two countries. On human 
     rights, the issue is not whether Clinton has been tougher 
     than Bush, but rather, first what he will do next year if his 
     new policy produces meager results, and second, whether while 
     pressing on human rights, he is quietly yielding to China in 
     other areas. That is where Taiwan comes in.
       It is testimony to Henry Kissinger's remarkable quarter-
     century of influence over American foreign policy and 
     personnel that when Clinton put together his administration, 
     two of his principal advisers on China policy, national 
     security adviser Anthony Lake and Assistant Secretary of 
     State Winston Lord, were Kissinger alums, just like Scowcroft 
     and Eagleburger.
       Neither of these two Clinton appointees would be happy to 
     be branded a Kissingerite. Lake resigned from the Nixon 
     administration after the 1971 invasion of Cambodia. Lord 
     broke openly with Kissinger after the 1989 Beijing massacre, 
     when Kissinger sympathized with Deng Xiaoping's decision to 
     stop the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. On questions of 
     human rights in China, both Lord and Lake stand 180 degrees 
     opposite that of their mentor.
       Yet the behavior of these two Clinton advisers seems much 
     like that of the son who rebels against his father, while 
     embracing some of his underlying values. On Taiwan, the new 
     administration quickly reverted to the old touchstones. At 
     his confirmation hearings in March, Lord, in the first public 
     statement of Asia policy, paid homage to the three 
     communiques, thus reassuring Beijing that the administration 
     wasn't planning to be too adventurous. And there has been no 
     sign of change since then. The administration's general 
     thinking on Taiwan was best summed up by one senior official, 
     who argued privately: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
       The result is that while the administration is giving new 
     emphasis to Asia, its approach to Taiwan (as well as one 
     other anomaly, Vietnam) is dragged down by the continuing 
     legacy of the Nixon era. Taiwan, arguably the one Asian 
     government whose political development has proceeded most 
     closely along the lines the United States would want, is 
     still treated as an untouchable. Indeed, while Clinton is 
     willing to meet in the White House with the Dalai Lama or 
     with Salman Rushdie, Taiwan's top officials are barred from 
     even visiting Washington. In the past year, Taiwan has 
     resorted to demeaning, manipulative gambits such as arranging 
     honorary degrees for its officials at American colleges in 
     order to circumvent its continuing status as international 
     pariah.
       In the wake of the Seattle meeting between Clinton and 
     Jiang, which produced no immediate agreements of any kind on 
     human rights, Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen was 
     ebullient. ``President Clinton emphasized that he is 
     committed to the one-China policy and to the three 
     communiques,'' he boasted to reporters. China had gotten what 
     it wanted on Taiwan. And it is seeking further concessions: 
     when Clinton asked the Chinese for talks about their sale of 
     M-11 missiles to Pakistan, the Chinese replied that they 
     would do so only if the United States agreed to discuss the 
     F-16 sale.
       So far, Clinton seems not to have grasped the significance 
     of the Taiwan issue. If he wants to register his unhappiness 
     with China's repressive policies--such as its jailing of Hong 
     Kong journalists--he could respond by sending a senior 
     Cabinet member to Taiwan or letting a senior Taiwan official 
     come to Washington. He could adjust American policy to take 
     account of the fact that Taiwan is no longer what it was in 
     1972. Most of all, he could stop paying homage to stale 
     formulas from which even the previous administration was 
     starting to retreat.
       James Mann covers national security issues for the Los 
     Angeles Times.

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