Biden must be clear with Beijing: It’s one China, one Taiwan

President Biden’s Summit for Democracy — especially its confirmation of Taiwan as a separate democratic polity from Communist China — lost some luster last week.

In an act of gratuitous self-censorship, Washington briefly interrupted Taiwan’s presentation because it included a color-coded map showing Taiwan as “open,” and China, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea as “closed.”

Reuters reported “the map generated an instant email flurry among U.S. officials and the White House National Security Council angrily contacted the State Department, concerned it appeared to show Taiwan as a distinct country.” 

Yet, it accurately reflected the regional governments included or excluded from the meeting by Washington itself. Had the panicky censoring been done by one of the closed regimes, it would have been dismissed as another ludicrous example of totalitarian triviality.

But the revived specter of Americans publicly suppressing our endangered democratic “security partner,” even briefly, revealed a disturbing reality. While Biden seems to endorse the implicit one China/one Taiwan policy conducted by serious national security officials in both his and the Trump administrations, there remain those who consider the policy evolution disruptive to an illusory “positive” relationship with Beijing.

Each time that Biden, like Trump or Bush II before him, expresses a commitment to Taiwan’s security, lower officials reflexively issue “clarifying” statements that U.S. policy has not changed and that the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) — which requires disparate treatment of China and Taiwan — is still the operating guide. But some go further back in history to remind us that the three U.S.-China communiques were the founding documents governing the relationship. These “keepers of the communiques” hold forth within and outside government.  

The first such document, the Shanghai Communique, is the original sin of U.S.-China relations, a product of (a) Richard Nixon’s ardent desire for a historic China visit before his 1972 reelection campaign; (b) relentless Chinese Communist negotiating pressure; and (c) Henry Kissinger’s quest to introduce European-style realpolitik into traditional American foreign policy idealism. 

The negotiation occurred while Taiwan was still under the dictatorship of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but the seeds of emergent democracy had been planted. Congressional and public opinion were decidedly “anti-Red China” and pro-Taiwan. The countervailing pressure was Beijing’s uncompromising insistence that the communique must clearly reflect its position that Taiwan belonged to China.

Kissinger’s team finessed the issue by proposing that the Chinese and American sides simply state their own positions, avoiding needlessly offensive language. (Still, Mao Zedong and Zhou En-lai didn’t shy away from aligning China with America’s enemies in North Korea, North Vietnam, and revolutionary forces in Laos, Cambodia and elsewhere fighting “foreign aggression” and “oppression.”) 

The parties settled on language that has haunted the three-party relationships to this day: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China … [and] … does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.” 

Of course, there was no way of knowing what “all Chinese” in China or in Taiwan, let alone indigenous Taiwanese, wanted, since they had no political voice or vote. A more accurate formulation would have cited “all dictators” on either side of the Strait.

Ever since Nixon signed the document, Beijing has falsely argued that “acknowledges” and “does not challenge” mean Washington agrees with China’s position.  

The 1979 communique formally establishing U.S.-China relations was negotiated by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who shared Kissinger’s affinity for foreign policy “realism.” It repeated the “acknowledgement” phrase but failed to call for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue, saying only that both sides “wish to reduce the danger of international military conflict.” For Beijing, a cross-Strait conflict is purely an “internal” matter, the last battle of the Chinese civil war.

Congress, outraged by President Carter’s action, passed the TRA by veto-proof margins, stating that U.S. recognition “rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.”

The pendulum swung back when Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a Kissinger protege, negotiated the third communique in August 1982. In addition to the customary acknowledgement, it newly “reiterated that … [Washington] has no intention of … pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan.’” 

When China attacked Taiwan’s role in the Democracy Summit, it succinctly summed up its position based on the Three Communiques: “There is only one China in the world. The government of the People’s Republic of China is the only legal government to represent China, and Taiwan is an inseparable part of Chinese territory.”  

Washington needs to tell Beijing that it gets two out of three of its demands, but only the people of Taiwan get to decide their future without Chinese force or coercion, and America and its allies will ensure that outcome. 

When China and the keepers of the communiques argue that this constitutes a “reneging” of the original understanding, that can be refuted on the face of the first two documents. The Third Communique contains the more problematic language, affirmed by President Clinton in 1998 when he stated the “three no’s” in Beijing: no independence for Taiwan, no two Chinas, no one China/one Taiwan.  

That unfortunate episode was revived in July when Kurt Campbell, Biden’s China policy “czar” who worked for Clinton, proclaimed that the U.S. “does not support Taiwan’s independence.”

But Biden can affirm the new one China/one Taiwan policy by taking a page from Beijing’s own playbook — invoking changed circumstances and the passage of time — but doing it more honestly and for a nobler purpose. China cited a new situation when it scrapped its far more sacrosanct and legally-binding commitments to the people and government of Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the United Nations.

At  the 20th anniversary of Chinese rule over Hong Kong in 2017, then-Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said: “Now Hong Kong has returned to the motherland’s embrace for 20 years, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, as a historical document, no longer has any practical significance, and it is not at all binding for the central government’s management over Hong Kong.”

Four decades of democratic evolution, effective self-government, and international integration put Taiwan on a different and better path than that envisioned by Chinese leaders, Kissinger, and others. Beijing must be told that the prohibition against one China/one Taiwan stated by Haig, Clinton and Campbell “no longer has any practical significance, and … is not at all binding for” U.S.-China-Taiwan relations. As Nixon wrote in 1994, China and Taiwan are “permanently separated politically.”

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.