J. Stapleton Roy, US ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995, has condemned the Taiwan Travel Act as provocative and criticized its supporters as “so-called friends of Taiwan.”
That label presumably applies to every member of the US Congress as well, since both the House of Representatives and Senate passed the act unanimously, and to US President Donald Trump, who signed it into law without reservations.
Roy objects to the act’s call for “visits between officials from the United States and Taiwan at all levels.”
He says the law is inconsistent with the “one China” framework under which Washington recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the sole government of that part of the original Republic of China called “the Chinese mainland.”
When the administration of then-US president Jimmy Carter broke relations with the remaining Republic of China on Taiwan in 1979, Congress immediately passed the Taiwan Relations Act, mandating a healthy ongoing relationship between Taiwan and the US. Since then, successive US administrations have limited US-Taiwan contacts to lower-level officials.
However, circumstances have evolved significantly since then, and Roy provides the historical context when he describes the political situation on Taiwan after the change in diplomatic relations: “Taiwan’s far-sighted president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) boldly began opening up cross-strait relations with mainland China, liberalizing Taiwan’s political system and shifting political power to the people. Chiang’s successors continued the process.”
Taiwanese struggled and sacrificed to achieve that political power and they have exercised it by affirming their commitment to a democratic system. That new reality clearly does not envision replacing the old yoke of dictatorship with an even more oppressive one imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Roy concedes that Beijing’s mistreatment of Hong Kong under a “one country, two systems” formulation and its tightening control over the lives of Chinese citizens have “not increased its attractiveness to residents of Taiwan.”
Indeed, he also acknowledges that “a growing majority of Taiwan residents favor independence over unification with China” and would choose “an open quest for independence” were it not for Beijing’s threat to use military force in such a contingency.
However, Roy fails to mention that the PRC’s official threat of force against Taiwan — the 2005 “Anti-Secession” Law — goes well beyond a declaration of independence by Taiwan. It also claims a right to attack Taiwan if it simply takes too long to accept “peaceful” unification.
Roy cites CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s (習近平) affirmation of Chinese designs on Taiwan, yet his historical analysis does not recognize that the PRC’s ongoing threat of force undermines the very premise of Washington’s diplomatic switch. The Taiwan Relations Act explicitly states that US policy is “to make clear that the United States decision to establish diplomatic relations with the PRC rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.”
Moreover, the other predicate of the initial US policy has also eroded. The Shanghai Communique stated that Washington “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. The United States government does not challenge that position.”
If the statement ever reflected actual public opinion in the PRC and on Taiwan — rather than the view of all Chinese dictators — it certainly is not true today.
Roy concludes: “Putting the future at risk is not good policy.”
However, that is exactly what US policymakers have done by not making clear to Beijing that the US will defend Taiwan’s right to determine its own future. Now is the time.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense and taught a graduate seminar on US-China-Taiwan relations at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies. This article originally appeared in ChinaFile on April 26.
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
Reports about Elon Musk planning his own semiconductor fab have sparked anxiety, with some warning that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) could lose key customers to vertical integration. A closer reading suggests a more measured conclusion: Musk is advancing a strategic vision of in-house chip manufacturing, but remains far from replacing the existing foundry ecosystem. For TSMC, the short-term impact is limited; the medium-term challenge lies in supply diversification and pricing pressure, only in the long term could it evolve into a structural threat. The clearest signal is Musk’s announcement that Tesla and SpaceX plan to develop a fab project dubbed “Terafab”
Most schoolchildren learn that the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000km. They do not learn that the global economy depends on just 160 of those kilometers. Blocking two narrow waterways — the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait — could send the economy back in time, if not to the Stone Age that US President Donald Trump has been threatening to bomb Iran back to, then at least to the mid-20th century, before the Rolling Stones first hit the airwaves. Over the past month and a half, Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz, which is about 39km wide at
The ongoing Middle East crisis has reinforced an uncomfortable truth for Taiwan: In an increasingly interconnected and volatile world, distant wars rarely remain distant. What began as a regional confrontation between the US, Israel and Iran has evolved into a strategic shock wave reverberating far beyond the Persian Gulf. For Taiwan, the consequences are immediate, material and deeply unsettling. From Taipei’s perspective, the conflict has exposed two vulnerabilities — Taiwan’s dependence on imported energy and the risks created when Washington’s military attention is diverted. Together, they offer a preview of the pressures Taiwan might increasingly face in an era of overlapping geopolitical
RSS