Taiwan: What China Really Wants

National Review, Oct 11, 1999 by Ross H. Munro

Mr. Munro is co-author of The Coming Conflict with China and director of Asian studies at the Center for Security Studies in Washington. He worked for many years as a journalist in Asia.

The world in general, and the United States in particular, badly misunderstands China's Taiwan policy. We have an urgent need to see it for what it is.

Judged solely by official pronouncements from Beijing, that policy isn't a policy at all, but Chinese holy writ-an emotional, nationalistic position that is not open to compromise. "It remains the sacred mission and lofty goal of the entire Chinese people to achieve reunification of the motherland," declared President Jiang Zemin in 1995. This is his most important statement about Taiwan.

To listen to Jiang and many, many other Chinese officials, the Taiwan issue transcends logic and reason. China will pay any price-even sacrifice economic development-to achieve reunification or prevent the permanent division of the nation. China's stance on Taiwan, they say, doesn't reflect economic or military calculation. It is non-negotiable, or, as PRC deputy prime minister Qian Qichen recently put it, without "room for maneuver." The implicit but clear message for both Americans and Taiwanese? Don't bother resisting Beijing's efforts to conquer Taiwan, because it will never back down.

As for America's China hands, most have accepted Beijing's overheated rhetoric as an accurate reflection of Chinese policy-which shows how successful Beijing's propaganda campaign has been. In truth, China's Taiwan policy isn't anywhere near as emotional and sentimental, let alone irrational, as the Chinese themselves always try to suggest. Indeed, Beijing's dramatic statements on Taiwan, aimed primarily at the American audience, are designed in part to hide the fact that China's policy is actually quite rational and calculated. The reality is that Beijing's position on Taiwan is the product of a careful weighing of China's strategic interests.

In the eyes of PRC leaders, Taiwan is first and foremost a strategic target that must soon be subjugated if China is to realize its goal of becoming Asia's dominant and unchallenged power. But the Clinton administration, unfortunately, with its persistent obtuseness, has failed to recognize China's policy as a clear challenge to the vital strategic interests of the United States. By progressively distancing itself from Taipei, the administration has only encouraged Beijing to take an increasingly shrill and aggressive stance on the Taiwan issue.

'An Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier'

Even though this issue has been bathed in fervent sloganeering from the beginning, Beijing's Taiwan policy has always had a rational, strategic core. Until the 1970s, the Chinese leadership took seriously General MacArthur's famous description of Taiwan as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier" off the coast of China. With some justification: As long as Chiang Kai-shek was alive, or there was an American military presence on the island, Beijing could view Taiwan as at least a potential threat to China's security.

By the late 1970s, however, Beijing clearly no longer worried about Taiwan as a potential military threat. Nor did it view the isla nd as a military target. Despite the government's regular, pro forma statements that it reserved the right to use military force to reunify Taiwan and the mainland, it engaged in no preparations for large-scale military action. As Michael Swaine, an expert on the Chinese military, observes, "the Nanjing Military Region, which is the one facing Taiwan, was essentially demilitarized for most of the 1980s. The Chinese didn't place a lot of assets there. They didn't train much in that area either." The de facto Sino-American alliance against the Soviets was one reason. China's low-key stance on Taiwan during this period can also be attributed to the Reagan administration's quiet but firm insistence after 1982 that it wouldn't make any further concessions on the Taiwan issue.

Downplaying the military option, China's paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, marshaled widespread support in the 1980s for a patient, long-term policy of wooing Taiwan by offering special terms to the island's business community for trade and investment. His goal was to encourage economic interdependence and foster a pro-mainland faction in Taiwan-in effect a potential fifth column-with an eye toward eventual political integration. By 1990, that policy seemed to be working. Two-way trade between the island and the mainland had increased to $4 billion, up from $80 million in 1979. Taiwanese companies had invested in an estimated 2,000 enterprises in China, a figure that would continue to climb.

Taiwan faded not only as a military issue, but also as an emotionally charged, nationalist one. The old-fashioned and ideologically colored nationalism of the civil-war generation, for whom Taiwan's rulers had for decades been the enemy, was dying out, along with that generation.

While China's leaders insist that all Chinese fervently support reunification with Taiwan, there is abundant evidence that the Chinese public has long been apathetic about the issue. The results of an officially sanctioned 1998 poll indicate that Taiwan is a minor concern in the public consciousness. It found that 68 percent of urban dwellers identify Taiwan as the number-one issue hindering the improvement of U.S.-China relations. No surprise there, given that this assertion is regularly made by the Chinese leadership and repeated in the controlled media. What's noteworthy is the response to the follow-up question. Asked if they wanted Washington to end support for Taiwan, only 36 percent answered positively-which strongly suggests that most Chinese are quite comfortable with the status quo as it concerns Taiwan.