Restless Empire (55 page)

T
HROUGHOUT THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
, Taiwan remained the main irritant in Sino-American relations and the main reason for China’s unease in international affairs. In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping had tried to come to an arrangement with Taiwan’s new president, Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s Russian-educated son. But the talks came to nothing, mainly because the Guomindang leaders on Taiwan knew that they would continue to receive US support even after Jimmy Carter broke formal relations with the Taibei regime in 1979. Deng had to play the Taiwan issue very carefully. China’s
modernization was vastly more important than reunification with Taiwan. Deng’s personal attitude was that reunification would happen anyway, in its own good time, if China succeeded in its domestic and international transformation. He was also aware of how important the pro-GMD constituency still was in the United States, especially after Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, and he did not want a conflict over Taiwan to ruin the overall relationship with the Americans. What irritated Deng was that Taiwan’s separation from the mainland was a domestic Chinese issue that the Americans could work in whatever way and at whatever time suited them. He was also well aware that the new generation of Chinese leaders who were trying to reestablish the CCP’s legitimacy after 1989 were substantially more nationalist and substantially less fastidious in policy terms than he himself was.

On Taiwan itself politics were also in flux after Chiang Ching-kuo took over in 1975. The younger Chiang was a reflective man, who had lived under two authoritarian regimes, Stalin’s and his own father’s, and had not liked either of them very much. And so he set out to liberalize Taiwan politics. In spite of his formidable political pedigree, Chiang’s reforms were slow and spasmodic. He was hindered by opposition within his own GMD and fear of a rebellion on Taiwan against the rule of mainlanders like him who had come over after the civil war. But in 1986, ill with heart disease, Chiang sped the process up. He abolished martial law and de facto allowed opposition parties to function. He selected the Taiwan-born Li Denghui as his vice president and successor. It was Li who, as president in 1990, responding to massive student demonstrations, set a timetable for the introduction of full democracy. In 1996 Li became the first democratically elected president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, and the island became the first modern Chinese democracy, with a constitution that inscribed the people’s right to freedom of organization, speech, and political participation and a freely elected parliament that made sure the executive practiced what it preached.

For the leaders of the PRC the situation on Taiwan had gone from bad to worse. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, passed by the US Congress, seemed to cement US influence on the island. It was officially entitled “An act to help maintain peace, security, and stability in the Western Pacific and to promote the foreign policy of the United States by authorizing the continuation of commercial, cultural, and other relations between the people of the United States and the people on Taiwan”—which about says it all. The democratic reforms of Chiang and Li convinced some CCP leaders—including Jiang Zemin, who had taken over as party general secretary in 1989 and president in 1993—that Taiwan was heading for full independence from China. Jiang was especially suspicious of Li Denghui, since Li was Taiwan-born and had become a convinced democrat. Beijing saw democracy there, the dismantling of the fiction that the GMD government there represented all of China, and even Li’s declaration that his government would never use force to “retake” the mainland as steps on the road to full separation. The CCP preferred fighting with the GMD over who really represented one China to confronting the islanders on the issue of Taiwanese independence.

When Congress forced President Bill Clinton to admit Li Denghui into the United States in 1995 in order to give a speech at Cornell University, his alma mater, annoyance in Beijing boiled over into action. For the first time since 1958, the PLA fired missiles near Taiwan-held islands and carried out amphibious landing exercises nearby. It even mobilized its infantry divisions in Fujian province, across the strait from Taiwan. On Taiwan itself, people started fearing a PLA invasion. But from a PRC perspective, the saber rattling failed both politically and strategically. Mainland pressure strengthened Li’s candidature at the democratic elections in 1996, giving him a greater victory than what he otherwise would have got. It also set off a tough reaction from the United States. The Clinton Administration sent two aircraft carrier battle groups, headed by the USS
Nimitz
and the USS
Independence,
to
the Taiwan Strait. It was the largest US military deployment in East Asia since the Vietnam War. The PRC leaders protested US “interference,” but there was little they could do to stop the clear message that the United States was still the primary power in the Western Pacific, and it intended to remain in that position on all matters, including Taiwan. The result in Beijing was that military influence on foreign policy making was dramatically reduced. Jiang Zemin was criticized for being careless on foreign affairs by party elders who kept insisting that conflict with the United States was not in China’s interest.

Having elected in 1996 a GMD president sympathetic to the separatist agenda, Taiwan voters felt that in 2000 they might as well go the full distance. And so they elected a non-GMD president who had been an open supporter of Taiwanese independence. Chen Shuibian, who was in office to 2008, was the first non-GMD president of the Republic of China, and his party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), had separatism as part of its policy platform. Though Chen muted these views while in office, the leaders in Beijing were increasingly desperate. Having made opposition to any move toward “splitting” Taiwan from China a staple of party-sponsored nationalism in the 1990s, they had to devise a better strategy to counter Chen’s implicit challenge than the one that had failed so dismally against the more moderate Li Denghui in 1996. This time the PRC was rescued by a combination of the mainland’s phenomenal economic growth (which Taiwan companies wanted a part of, especially since Taiwan’s own growth figures were lagging), the corruption that emerged within Chen Shuibian’s administration, and the American need to have a stable relationship with China after President George W. Bush’s war on terror began. By emphasizing the need for prosperity for all Chinese and insisting that a safe economic future for Taiwan could only be found in cooperation with the mainland, the PRC was able to help pave the way for the thorough rejection of the DPP at the 2008 Taiwan elections. Today the relationship between the governments on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait is the best
it has ever been. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, and Taiwan companies are among the biggest investors on the mainland. Gone are the days when all flights between Taibei and the mainland had to stop over in Hong Kong. Now passengers can fly direct from the island to Beijing in three hours or less. Not surprising, perhaps, that the people of Taiwan in 2009 overwhelmingly preferred status quo against all other alternatives: sixty-four percent, against nineteen percent for independence, and five percent for unification.
¹⁷

T
HE
1990
S SET THE DIRECTION
of Sino-American relations up to our own day. Both countries had a new generation of leaders in office. In China, Jiang Zemin, a sixty-three-year-old Soviet-trained engineer, was made head of the CCP in 1989 and would keep that office for thirteen years. In the United States Bill Clinton, a domestic policy–oriented Southern governor, served from 1993 to 2001. Both countries were drawing up new priorities, less ideological than before, and centering on rapid market-oriented economic growth. Most important of all, the Cold War had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. No longer were the United States and China tied together in an alliance of convenience against what they had both deemed an ascending and expansionist great power. With the Soviet Union gone, the strategic picture in East Asia changed completely. Suddenly, China and the United States were the main poles of influence in the region. The United States was the dominant power, through its alliances and its military prowess, but China was rising because of its unprecedented economic growth. For both countries the issue was whether these trends would pull them apart or bring them together. Liberal intellectuals hoped for the latter, through increasing economic interdependence. Realists expected the former, through increasing great power rivalry.

What neither side had expected or prepared for was the massively negative fallout from the Tian’anmen crackdown. In the United States the effect was particularly strong. While more than two-thirds of
Americans had viewed China positively before Tian’anmen, less than a third did so in 1990.
¹⁸
The lasting change in views among liberal and neoconservative elites in the United States was very strong and influences policymaking even today. Congress decided, with veto-proof majorities in both houses, to impose sanctions on China, some of which are still in place and complicate relations between the two countries. But the United States was in no way unique in its reaction to the use of soldiers against the people of Beijing. Fifty-seven other governments, including the European Union and Japan, introduced sanctions, in most cases as a result of public opinion in their countries. The main issue for many was not just what happened in China in 1989, it was the timing of it. In the span of just a few years, as the Cold War came to an end, much of the world, from Eastern Europe and Russia to South Africa and South America, seemed to move from authoritarianism to forms of participatory democracy. Only the Chinese government had shot at its democrats and survived in power. It created an outcast image for Beijing that the country, in spite of its economic success, found hard to shake off.

Within China itself the new generation of elites who grew up in the 1990s had an almost schizophrenic view of the world’s relationship to their country. Even though most of them resented the government’s actions in 1989, they took immense pride in China’s economic progress and, bizarrely, bought into some of the regime’s propaganda about sanctions being imposed as a result of American pressure to keep China down. As Chinese nationalism grew, both officially and unofficially, through the 1990s, many young people began feeling that in spite of their own misgivings about their government, foreigners were condemning it for all the wrong reasons. The regime of Jiang Zemin may have appeared utterly uninspiring to most Chinese in political terms, but it ensured stability, growth, and increasing freedom for people in their daily lives. While 1989 was in no way forgotten, Jiang Zemin and the CCP benefited domestically from presiding over unprecedented prosperity while
being more liberal in terms of information and discussion than any Communists had been before.

The relationship between Jiang and Clinton got off to a rough start. The Chinese feared, rightly, that the new president’s emphasis on human rights might become linked to China’s trade access to US markets, and it took almost three years of Clinton’s first term before the two issues were delinked. The US administration also suspected, with some reason, that China was supplying other countries with components for their chemical and nuclear arms programs. For China, arms sales was an issue of sovereignty as much as profit, especially since the United States sold weapons globally (including to Taiwan) and had imposed an arms embargo on Beijing after 1989. Together with the 1995–1996 Taiwan crisis, these tensions stymied progress on the bilateral relationship and fed Chinese popular nationalism. In 1996 the best seller of the year in China was a hackneyed anti-American diatribe entitled
China Can Say No: Political and Emotional Choices in the Post Cold-War Era
.
¹⁹

Many Chinese, including Jiang Zemin, suspected that the weapons embargo and the increased concern over transfers of advanced US technology to China had to do more with the end of the Cold War than with human rights. With the Soviet Union gone, some Americans saw China as their main future rival, and these views were quickly picked up and elaborated in Beijing, especially after knowledge of the overwhelming military preponderance of the United States spread in the wake of the First Gulf War. “China must [now] pay close attention to those countries that are opposed to American interests,” one Chinese observer wrote. “China should do all it can to warn and help these countries, and prevent them from being destroyed by the United States as the Soviet Eastern European Bloc was.” While the new generation of Chinese leaders was ruing the unipolar world, many Americans of Bill Clinton’s generation believed that, in spite of Tian’anmen, China would conform to a US-led international system, while gradually becoming
more open and democratic at home. It was, Clinton said over and over again, simply in China’s own interest to do so. The US president scored more than one victory. At a remarkable press conference during Clinton’s visit to China in 1998, Jiang Zemin seemed even to explain 1989 in terms of expediency rather than principle: “Today the Chinese Government solemnly commits itself to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedom,” Jiang told Clinton and the international press corps. “With regard to the political disturbances in 1989, had the Chinese Government not taken the resolute measures, then we could not have enjoyed the stability that we are enjoying today.”
²⁰

B
Y THE BEGINNING OF THE
2000
s
China’s relationship to the United States was contradictory. On the one hand the two countries were growing ever more similar and contacts between them were more extensive than ever before. On the other Chinese nationalism was on the rise, with US policies as its particular target, while American concern about the nature of China’s political system was increasing. With the Soviet Union gone, Chinese leaders felt that the West’s suspicions about all forms of Communist rule had been automatically transferred to them, in spite of all they had done to conform to a Western-led international economy. On the American side the CCP regime’s human rights record and its policies in Tibet came to overshadow much of the epochal transformation that was happening in the Chinese economy. Within China the singular preoccupation with American technologies, style, music, and education continued to overwhelm all impulses that came from elsewhere, but on the international scene the two states increasingly saw each other as rivals.