[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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