How straightforward it used to be. For 22 years the US did not recognize communist China. Taiwan occupied the Chinese seat at the UN and that was that. Then from the right, quite unexpectedly, came Richard Nixon and turned everything on its head. China was not only recognized and Taiwan ejected from its seat, the American business and journalistic communities were encouraged to fall in love with all things Chinese. As the Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner bitingly wrote at the time, "The Americans found that the Chinese were courteous, industrious, family-orientated, modest to the point of being shy. They had the most wonderful and ancient cultural tradition; they were wizards at ping pong; they loved giant pandas. In less than a year public opinion completely turned around. Everyone loved the so-recently hated and feared China."
Innocence lost
Thus it continued, more or less, until Tiananmen Square when America's great strategic friend and pro-capitalist reformer Deng Xiaoping sent in the tanks and murdered two thousand or more protesting students, armed with nothing more than their bicycles. The Bush administration, determined to keep the relationship on an even keel whatever the cost, dispatched with unseemly haste the president's National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, to reassure Beijing of Washington's solid, enduring, relationship. But China had lost for all time what it could not win back -- the fawning attention of the American press and the warm feelings of the American people. Now Bill Clinton, when campaigning to unseat Bush, charged that Bush was soft on China and promised, if elected, that the age of conciliation would be over.
But once in office it did not take long for Clinton to fall into line with the Nixon legacy,even though the main geopolitical reason for it -- to balance the Soviet Union -- was no longer relevant. Today, however, the line of continuity is beginning to waiver. Part is business as usual in the Nixonian tradition -- as with Clinton's push for Congressional approval for China's admittance to the World Trade Organization. But part is, if still unclear and uncertain, a sea-change in Washington's long-time forbearance of Beijing's decision making. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has in effect admitted that engagement with China has not brought about the promised amelioration in human rights. The situation, says a recent State Department report, if anything has worsened, and now the US is going to vote to condemn China at the current meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission. The indications are, however, that it will not push too hard to line up sufficient European and Third World allies to secure a victory with this vote, but nonetheless it marks the end of a simpler era.
Meanwhile, since 1995, the US Congress has been enlisted in Taiwan's drive, led by outgoing president Lee Teng-hui, to overturn long-standing agreements between Beijing and Washington. While the Administration will continue to resist the move led by Senator Jesse Helms to pass the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act which would open the flood gates of arms sales to Taiwan, the administration itself has presided over a dramatic increase in sales (although one that has diminished sharply the last couple of years).
Military concerns
We are a long way from the 1982 Sino-US communique of 1982. The US government has agreed, it said, that it "does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, [and] that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in quantitative or qualitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the US, and that it intends to gradually reduce its sales of arms to Taiwan."
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