Sino-US “co-management” of the Taiwan Strait in a broad sense began long ago. For anyone who has read the record of the 1971 meeting between then-Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) and then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and the three Sino-US joint communiques, there is no better word than “co-management” to describe the two powers’ wrestling over the Taiwan issue.
According to the Chinese translation of US academic Nancy Tucker’s book entitled Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China, former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) unexpected “four noes and one without” pledge in his inaugural speech on May 20, 2000, was actually drafted with the help of then-American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) director Raymond Burghardt.
In his New Year address on Dec. 31 that year, Chen further proposed that cross-strait integration of economies, trade and culture could “be the basis for a new framework of permanent peace and political integration.” What kind of pressure forced him to abolish the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) long-held stance?
When former US president George W. Bush took office, anti-terrorist concerns forced him to improve relations with an increasingly stronger China and he could not meet Taiwan’s need for greater international space. Later, Chen’s defensive referendum and other actions made Bush feel that Taipei had acted recklessly and embarrassed Washington. Therefore, Tucker said the lack of mutual trust was the biggest problem in Taiwan-US relations.
Former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) “special state-to-state” pronouncement in 1999 had also irritated US officials, who thought Lee was irresponsible.
Various opinions have surfaced as the DPP reviews its defeat in last month’s presidential election. I believe focusing on whether the party’s rejection of the so-called “1992 consensus” was the reason for the defeat might lead us astray. The term does not exist in historical documents, but after Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) invented it in 2000, Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Bush confirmed it in 2008.
Even worse, during the election, it was manipulated as a symbol of peaceful exchanges as well as trade exchanges. Thus, opposing the consensus was made out to be equal to opposing both peaceful and economic and trade exchanges. How, then, could DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) not have lost points over this issue?
Despite the unfavorable election situation, which included the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) moving election day forward, its use of its party assets for vote-buying purposes and possible misconduct at some voting stations, the DPP performed well in terms of legislative seats and ballots in the legislative elections. One could say that it was the KMT’s playing the threat card that stopped the public from turning their support for Tsai into votes.
The current polarized debate over direction is disturbing. If people want to criticize Tsai’s line of tolerating differences of opinion while insisting on Taiwanese sovereignty, they should first pay attention to international factors. The KMT won the presidential election thanks to Beijing’s and Washington’s support. If the DPP does not want to fight a war on three fronts, they should at least start with trying to win Washington’s trust.
Chen Yi-shen is an associate research fellow at the Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History.
Translated by Eddy Chang
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs