US Taiwan Policy: Constructing the Triangle (Asian Security Studies)

Citation preview

US Taiwan Policy

The relationship between the United States and China is one of the most important issues in the twenty-first century, and is, ultimately, hostage to conditions across the Taiwan Strait. This book is the first to attempt to trace the historical origin of what is known as the ‘Taiwan issue’ in US–China relations from a constructivist perspective, based on detailed archival research. The analysis used supplements the mainstream rationalist approach by developing a new theoretical perspective on US Taiwan policy that incorporates constructivism’s emphasis on identity, norms and discourse analysis. Whilst the potential utility of such an approach has been gestured towards in the past, scholars have never previously developed or elaborated upon it to any significant extent. Here, this approach is used to re-examine the Truman administration’s decision to protect Taiwan by military means following the outbreak of the Korean War, and to investigate how the ‘one China’ policy was established in relation to the process of rapprochement during President Nixon’s first term in office. The book also considers the contemporary challenges posed to the ‘one China’ policy by the increased importance of promoting human rights and democracy in US foreign policy, arguing that the current US China policy is guided by a new strategy based on ‘engagement plus hedging’. This book will appeal to students of US foreign policy, discourse analysis, Asian security, international security and IR theory in general. Øystein Tunsjø is a Senior Research Fellow, Norwegian Institute of Defence Studies, Oslo, Norway. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK.

Asian Security Studies

Series Editors: Sumit Ganguly, Indiana University, Bloomington and Andrew Scobell, US Army War College

Few regions of the world are fraught with as many security questions as Asia. Within this region it is possible to study great power rivalries, irredentist conflicts, nuclear and ballistic missile proliferation, secessionist movements, ethno-religious conflicts and inter-state wars. This book series publishes the best possible scholarship on the security issues affecting the region, and includes detailed empirical studies, theoretically oriented case studies and policy-relevant analyses as well as more general works. China and International Institutions Alternate paths to global power Marc Lanteigne China’s Rising Sea Power The PLA navy’s submarine challenge Peter Howarth If China Attacks Taiwan Military strategy, politics and economics Steve Tsang (ed.) Chinese Civil–Military Relations The transformation of the People’s Liberation Army Nan Li (ed.) The Chinese Army Today Tradition and transformation for the 21st century Dennis J. Blasko Taiwan’s Security History and prospects Bernard D. Cole

Religion and Conflict in South and Southeast Asia Disrupting violence Linell E. Cady and Sheldon W. Simon (eds) Political Islam and Violence in Indonesia Zachary Abuza US–Indian Strategic Cooperation into the 21st Century More than words Sumit Ganguly, Brian Shoup and Andrew Scobell (eds) India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad The covert war in Kashmir, 1947–2004 Praveen Swami China’s Strategic Culture and Foreign Policy Decision-Making Confucianism, leadership and war Huiyun Feng Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War The last Maoist war Edward C. O’Dowd

Asia Pacific Security US, Australia and Japan and the new security triangle William T. Tow, Satu Limaye, Mark Thomson and Yoshinobu Yamamoto China, the United States and South-East Asia Contending perspectives on politics, security and economics Evelyn Goh and Sheldon W. Simon Conflict and Cooperation in MultiEthnic States Institutional incentives, myths and counterbalancing Brian Dale Shoup

China’s War on Terrorism Counter-insurgency, politics and internal security Martin I. Wayne US Taiwan Policy Constructing the triangle Øystein Tunsjø

US Taiwan Policy Constructing the triangle

Øystein Tunsjø

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Øystein Tunsjø All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tunsjø, Øystein. US Taiwan policy : constructing the triangle / Øystein Tunsjø. p. cm. – (Asian security studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. United States–Foreign relations–Taiwan. 2. Taiwan–Foreign relations–United States. 3. United States–Foreign relations–China. 4. China–Foreign relations–United States. 5. Taiwan–Foreign relations– China. 6. China–Foreign relations–Taiwan. I. Title. JZ1480.A57T28 2008 327.7305124’9–dc22 2007036112 ISBN 0-203-93035-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–45202–3 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–93035–5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–45202–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–93035–9 (ebk)

For Hege and Axel

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1 Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

x xii 1

2 Discourses and the origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

20

3 Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

51

4 Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

76

5 Debating US strategy towards China

101

6 Understanding US Taiwan policy: the linkage between history and theory

120

Notes Bibliography Index

129 170 190

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks are owed to many people who either directly or indirectly have proved invaluable to the process of researching and writing this book. I began working on this project as a PhD student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my PhD supervisors, Patrick Finney and Ian Clark, whose support, advice and assistance have been invaluable to this study. To be a recipient of their knowledge, insight, encouragement and advice has been a privilege, and has pushed me far beyond what I could have achieved alone. I am also grateful to others who have generously given of their time and expertise. Colin Mackerras, who first introduced me to China’s fascinating history, has shared with me his exceptional knowledge and experience. Ulla Holm, Phil Cunliff, Patricia Bradshaw, Christopher Coker, Johannes Rø, Stein Tønnesson and Cian O’Driscol have read various drafts and provided valuable feedback. Will Bain and Jan Selby provided guidance and pushed me in the right direction while the project was in its initial stages. I would also like to thank the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth, Lise and Arnfin Hejes Fond and the Eckbo legat for their financial support. To all my friends and peers at Aberystwyth I am very grateful. In particular I would like to thank Wayne, Phil, Scott, Sara, Cian, Nick, Rens, Tom, Ching Chang, Jay, Adam, Carl, Darren, Seb, Columba, Dick and the Harriers and many others besides who all made my stay in Aberystwyth enjoyable and enriched my time as a PhD student. The book has been completed while working as a researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. I was extremely fortunate to be able to join this Institute and I would like to thank my colleagues there for creating such a hospitable climate for research and writing. Anna Therese Klingstedt, the Institute’s editor, has guided me through the most frustrating parts of preparing a manuscript for publication. It has also been a pleasure working with Routledge and I have been very impressed by their professionalism, feedback and speedy turnaround. I would especially like to acknowledge Andrew Humphrys, the military and strategic editor, for being so approachable and supportive. Thanks are also due to three anonymous reviewers who provided concise and constructive suggestions. While writing this thesis, I was grateful to have the support of Ragnhild Evjen Andersen who employed her English language editing skills. Moreover, it gives me

Acknowledgements xi great pleasure to acknowledge the support of those individuals who helped during my research at libraries and archives in the United States. I am indebted to Jan Cornelius for his hospitality while I was staying in Washington. The staffs at the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington were professional and always willing to give generously of their time. At the Truman Presidential Library I was received with a spirit of generosity and enthusiasm that still takes my breath away. The Harry House, in Independence, Missouri, not only provided me with excellent accommodation, it was also an inspiration to know that I was staying at the childhood home of President Truman. It seems almost customary to leave them until the end, but it goes without saying that my biggest debt is to my family who have lived this project with me. The Tunsjøs, the Smiths, the Smedstads and the Leinaas have supported me through seemingly endless years of education. Even if they have been far away, their affection never felt distant and while somewhat in wonder at the length of time the project has required, they have all continued to be supportive. I am especially indebted to my father for providing me with the opportunity to study for so many years. Without his relentless encouragement, patience, humour and enduring support this book might never have seen the light of day. Writing a monograph has its pleasures, but they pale before the other rewards that life has to offer. I have dedicated this book to my wife, Hege, and my son, Axel. Although Hege and Axel have not received the attention they deserve, Hege’s patience, love and companionship have been unwavering. Hege’s loving and caring personality has soothed the wounds inflicted by times of yearning and has made me able to go through the process of writing this book. I could not have done it without her.

Abbreviations

AIT APEC ARF ASEAN CCNAA CCP CIA CRS CTC DNSA DoD DPP EU FRUS GRC HAK HSTL IGO INGO IR JCS KMT MDT MFN NARA NK NPM NSA NSC NSSM QDR OECD PRC

American Institute in Taiwan Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum ASEAN Regional Forum Association of South East Asian Nations Coordination Council for North American Affairs Chinese Communist Party Central Intelligence Agency Congressional Research Service Congressional Taiwan Caucus Digital National Security Archive Department of Defense Democratic Progressive Party European Union Foreign Relations of the United States Government of the Republic of China Henry A. Kissinger Harry S. Truman Library Intergovernmental organisations International non-governmental organisations International Relations Joint Chiefs of Staff Kuomintang Mutual Defense Treaty Most Favoured Nation National Archives and Record Administration North Korea Nixon Presidential Material National Security Archive National Security Council National Security Study Memorandum Quadrennial Defense Review Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development People’s Republic of China

Abbreviations xiii RG 59 RN ROC ROK SCO Telecons TRA UN UNSC

Record Group 59 Richard Nixon Republic of China Republic of Korea Shanghai Cooperation Organization Telephone Conversations Transcripts Taiwan Relations Act United Nations United Nation Security Council

1

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

United States (US)–China relations today encompass a broad range of issues essential to the peace, prosperity and stability of East Asia and the world. Undoubtedly, the question of US–China relations is one of the most important issues that will shape international politics in the twenty-first century. As many writers have argued, US–China relations are, ultimately, hostage to the conditions across the Taiwan Strait and the ‘Taiwan issue’ remains one of the few potential areas of conflict where US preponderance could be challenged militarily by another major power. Taiwan’s successful transition to democracy and its pride in its achievements have deprived Taiwan and China of their common objective of a unified oneChina and increased Taiwanese impulses towards independence. Conversely, China views Taiwan as a renegade province and has, as evidenced by its most recent anti-secession law, threatened to use force if the island takes steps towards establishing formal independence. Although since 1972 US policy has recognised that Taiwan is part of China, Washington has indicated it would intervene if China tried to take Taiwan by force. It is therefore essential to broaden our understanding of this pivotal relationship and examine historically the shifting foundations for Taiwan’s independence and the adherence of the US to the one-China principle. My key research question asks to what extent the Taiwan issue in US China policy is a shifting discursive construct tied to US identity and American representations of China and Taiwan. To date there has been no attempt to trace from a constructivist perspective the historical origin of what is known in US– China relations as the ‘Taiwan issue’. Accordingly, this study’s main claim to originality is to offer the first rigorous and detailed critical constructivist analysis based on original and detailed archival research of the construction of the Taiwan issue in US China policy. In the official documents and records examined, I have identified four discursive representations of the Taiwan issue since 1949: Taiwan as representing all of China (the ‘red menace’ discourse), the status of Taiwan as ‘undetermined’, Taiwan as ‘independent’, and the status of Taiwan as ‘determined’ (meaning there is one-China and that Taiwan is part of China). Although labels such as ‘determined’ and ‘undetermined’ may seem awkward to a discourse analyst, they have been chosen because they have been articulated by state officials, elaborated

2

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

on in key documentary sources and identified through discursive practices. They are therefore not replaced by labels more easily grasped by discourse analysis. Similarly, because I work with different source material in Chapters 4 and 5, I do not keep to the labels identified in Chapters 2 and 3. However, this does not imply that there is no relation between the discursive representations of the Taiwan issue throughout this study. On the contrary, when juxtaposing these different periods, there is something similar about the discursive representations which highlights how the ongoing process of constituting an American identity constructs a particular US Taiwan policy and how the practices of US Taiwan policy produce and reproduce US identity. For instance, the underlying representations that guide the contemporary engagement discourse in US China policy, which acknowledges the one-China principle, resemble previous discursive practices of the ‘determined’ discourse which has its roots in the Truman and Nixon administrations’ position that Taiwan was part of China, and an emphasis on China’s vital and constructive role in world affairs. Equally, the current containment discourse shares similarities with the ‘red menace’ and the ‘independence’ discourses in its focusing on the threatening aspects of the Communist regime and the binary opposites that differentiate the political systems on either side of the Taiwan Strait. Finally, the nuances in contemporary US Taiwan policy can be traced back to the ambiguity embedded in the ‘undetermined’ discourse, a central aspect of US Taiwan policy since 1949. Thus, by problematising the origins of the Taiwan issue in US China policy and focusing on the discursive representations that produce meanings and possibilities within the situation statesmen face, this analysis draws attention to the way US Taiwan policy shapes and impinges on the status of Taiwan in international affairs. Building on the premises of constructivist international relations theory, which take the contingent and social construction of policy more seriously than do rationalist approaches, I aim to illuminate the processes through which the architects of US Taiwan policy produced and reproduced identities, constituted new knowledge and pursued new meanings to construct and sustain particular representations of China, the US, Taiwan and the relations between these countries.1 In other words, this study endeavours to investigate the discourses that enable US decision-makers to represent the world in specific ways. It also aims to discuss the emergence of different discourses of US Taiwan policy which have been pertinent in structuring the possibilities that facilitated certain courses of action and to rediscover what made a particular action more reasonable, imaginable and desirable. By representation I mean the ways in which the Taiwan issue has been represented discursively by policymakers, scholars and others in the US. Critical constructivists do not deny the existence of a material world outside their heads, but they oppose the notion that ‘phenomena can constitute themselves as objects of knowledge independent of discursive practices’.2 Thus, representations are always the result of an interpretive construction of the world out there, which cannot be known purely and directly, but only grasped through lenses which are based on language, categories and social practices. Representations sustain a

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 3 particular discursive understanding but they are inherently unstable and always in the process of being produced and reproduced. To scrutinise the prevailing discourses and representations within a particular decision-making environment and encourage greater reflexivity about how identities help to specify which objects are to be protected and which constitute threats, a critical constructivist approach aspires to explore how discursive representations, which are seen as a priori and constitutive for action, shape identities and interests. Such an analysis, then, opens up the possibility of new kinds of questions and answers, allowing us to deal with US Taiwan policy and the complexity of the Taiwan issue with fresh insight. To contextualise my research project, the introduction starts by looking at the literature on US–China relations to question the rationalist assumptions underpinning this scholarship and point out that, despite a number of excellent studies examining US–China relations since 1949, few analysts have focused on US Taiwan policy. Indeed, rarely does any study of US–China relations examine the effects US Taiwan policy has had on the status of Taiwan. In the second section of the chapter, the work of various constructivists is introduced and this study’s main theoretical and methodological assumptions are laid out. The final section provides some background on the main sources used, presents a chapter outline, and offers a brief preview of the overall argument of the book.

Challenging mainstream approaches For an overall picture of US–Chinese relations, Harry Harding’s A Fragile Relationship and Rosemary Foot’s The Practice of Power stand out as the major contributions to the field. Harding’s analysis emphasises the different cycles in US–China relations between 1972 and 1992, which he characterises as a pattern of ‘progress and stagnation, crisis and consolidation’.3 According to Harding, the most significant dynamics which push the relationship in different directions are found in geopolitical and strategic concerns, ideological differences and economic interests. While acknowledging the influence of all these three elements, Harding believes that ideology and economics remain subordinate to geopolitical concerns.4 Foot takes a broader perspective and examines the relationship from 1949 onwards in a predominantly thematic overview, which focuses on the diplomatic, economic, strategic and domestic political aspects of the relationship. Although she recognises the powerful influence of the realist perspective and the important strategic underpinnings of US–Chinese relations in this period, Foot dissociates herself from the central assumption of Harding’s assessment. As Foot argues, ‘American relations with China were embedded in a wider structure of relationships at the global and domestic levels; they also embraced areas other than bilateral concern about the global strategic balance’.5 Adopting a similar approach, David Shambaugh utilises international relations theory and the ‘level of analysis’ approach to US–Chinese relations.6 Recognising the lack of primary data, Shambaugh leaves out the so-called ‘idiosyncratic/

4

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

individual’ level and focuses instead on global systemic, societal and governmental levels of analysis.7 Noting the dramatic shift within the relationship from war and hostility on the Korean peninsula during the 1950s, to coming close to a de facto alliance after normalisation of relations in 1979 and then a sharp downturn after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Shambaugh acknowledges that it is difficult to find a ‘consistent equilibrium’. As he argues, ‘[i]t is a relationship fraught with high emotions, misperceptions, and considerable historical baggage. Even when the two nations’ objective national interests coincided, these subjective factors eventually tended to introduce tensions into the relationship’.8 Taking up the issue of ideology, Richard Madsen concurs that perceptions held within the broader American public indeed played a role in shaping US–China policy. Assumptions derived from Americans’ own moral values and expectations have been projected onto China, and intensified disputes over human rights issues, political liberalisation and independence movements.9 To search for the place of ideology in American foreign policy, Michael H. Hunt’s Ideology and US Foreign Policy provides the best introduction, and his book also contains several sections on the approach of the US to China.10 As an account of Chinese perceptions of Americans, David Shambaugh’s Beautiful Imperialist, China Perceives America, 1972–1990, stands out as a unique and substantial study of Chinese interpretations and images of the United States.11 Though various accounts emphasise ideological, cultural, societal and economic issues, the theme that has enjoyed most prominence within the literature on Sino-American relations throughout the Cold War, and especially since the rapprochement in 1971–2, has been strategic considerations and balance of power logic. The strategic aspects of US foreign policy which focused on containing Communist China prior to the process of rapprochement can be followed in the groundbreaking work of John L. Gaddis, while Harding provides a starting point for a realist account of US–China relations since rapprochement.12 Although these studies provide useful insights into US–China relations during the Cold War and the early 1990s and, when supplemented with more contemporary analyses, undoubtedly broaden and enrich our understanding, it should be noted that they do not draw extensively on archival material.13 More importantly, few studies have been written on US–China–Taiwan relations and most scholars have tended to focus on particular crises.14 Tucker’s contribution is still the major exception, although recently available accounts have supplemented Tucker’s analysis of what Bush has declared to be still ‘relatively unstudied issues’.15 Not previously examined, however, is the way in which discourses and representations work to construct a particular status for Taiwan. As members of the Allied coalition during the Second World War, the heads of state of China, the US and the United Kingdom (UK) jointly signed on 1 December 1943 the Cairo Declaration stipulating that ‘all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Formosa, Manchuria, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China’.16 In October 1949, after several years of civil war, the victorious Communist forces established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing while Chiang Kai-Shek and his defeated Kuomintang (KMT) withdrew

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 5 to Taiwan, and proclaimed Taipei the temporary capital of the Republic of China (ROC). The Truman administration was initially interested in some form of reconciliation with the newly established PRC regime. However, stalemate across the Taiwan Strait was solidified when the United States dispatched its Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait in June 1950 in the aftermath of the Korean War. Small-scale fighting in the Taiwan Strait continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s over a string of islands (Quemoy and Matsu), but the situation eventually settled into deadlock. Through a number of historic visits in 1971 and 1972, Nixon and Kissinger laid the foundations for rapprochement and later normalisation of US–China relations and shifted US Taiwan policy towards acknowledging the one-China principle, which saw Taiwan as part of China. The Republic of China was expelled by the United Nations National Assembly and simultaneously the PRC was admitted to the United Nations (UN) in 1971 as representing China. Despite a number of communiqués acknowledging the importance of improving US–Chinese relations and reaffirming the one-China principle, the ‘Taiwan issue’ has developed into one of the most enduring stand-offs originating in the Cold War. The reversals and shifts in US Taiwan policy have generally been explained in terms of strategic calculations and balance of power logic. On this view, with war on the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan became strategically important as an essential link in the offshore island chain of bases and key to the southern flank of US operations.17 The balance of power, however, had changed by the late 1960s and early 1970s with the animosity in Sino-Soviet relations escalating into border clashes and US military superiority waning in relation to the Soviet Union. The structural imperatives of the international system, therefore, prompted the rationale to overcome conflicting interests in US–China relations, and accordingly the US changed its Taiwan policy.18 Although the contemporary picture is more mixed, a number of studies emphasise the strategic value of Taiwan and the need to support Taiwan as an independent entity in any attempt to contain the ‘rise of China’.19 Unsatisfied with the kind of interest-based, balance of power explanations in mainstream literature that ‘treat interests and structures as if they were objective, hard, substantial realities of the kind that are uncovered and explained by natural science’, I would instead argue that the current theoretical understanding of the rationalist approach is insufficient and that we now have other theoretical tools with which to re-examine current literature on US–Chinese relations and the Taiwan issue.20 As Ninkovich has observed, ‘as objects of study, interests are slippery because they have no objective existence apart from the way people constitute and interpret them’.21 Noting that a concern with the way identities are constantly constituted and reconstituted in social interaction has not been central to dominant approaches examining US Taiwan policy, this study explores the central role of discourses and emphasises the effects of a contingent construction of US identity and the representations which constituted its ‘national interests’. There are significant analytical and methodological differences between an analysis inspired by constructivism and the rationalist assumptions underpinning

6

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

most traditional accounts of US Taiwan policy. This is reflected in the different kinds of questions such analyses seek to answer. Preoccupied with a form of causal explanation, traditional accounts emphasise ‘why’ questions. By moving from ‘why’ to ‘how-possible’ questions, we can illuminate the context of and facilitate an understanding of the ‘why’ questions, and ‘inquire into the practices that enable social actors to act, to frame policy as they do, and to wield the capabilities they do’.22 Consequently, in Chapter 2 I do not ask why it was necessary, but rather how it was possible for the US to decide to intervene in the Taiwan Strait in response to North Korea’s attack on South Korea in June 1950. In other words, the North Korean attack had to mean something before US decision-makers could decide on the appropriate response. Likewise, the central question asked in Chapter 3 is not why President Nixon and National Security Advisor Kissinger changed US Taiwan policy in the early 1970s, but how it was possible to consider alternatives which had previously been understood as unrealistic. Kissinger and Nixon might have been convinced that there was a strategic rationale behind US–China rapprochement; however, this says next to nothing about how the conflicting dynamics underpinning a new Taiwan policy would be reconciled. Indeed, moving from the view that Taiwan represented all of China, to seeing Taiwan’s status as undetermined and eventually to acknowledging that Taiwan was part of China, suggests that the ‘interest’ guiding the Nixon administration’s Taiwan policy was not in fact objective and unitary but rather split and contradictory. Instead of framing the Nixon administration’s Taiwan policy according to statecentric balance of power logic, we need a theoretical and methodological approach that scrutinises the discursive conditions of possibility that shape and constitute the parameters for action. Moreover, the analysis in Chapter 4 is primarily concerned with identifying how the re-writing and re-production of US identity in the post-Cold War era interrelates with increased attention on the binary opposites that differentiate the political systems on either side of the Taiwan Strait, which provide commonsensical arguments that undermine and challenge official US adherence to the one-China principle. Thus by tracing the changing representations of China and Taiwan within American policymaking circles, the analysis highlights how the debate about US Taiwan policy replicates the figurations of past discursive representations, which work to construct Taiwan and the PRC as two distinct kinds of subjects. Finally, I do not focus on Taiwan’s role in a strategy that contemplates engagement on the one hand, and on the other the containment of an emerging China in contemporary world affairs. Rather, by drawing on hedging and risk management I aim to develop a conceptual tool that encapsulates the complexities embedded in developing a US strategy for dealing with the rise of a major power. Shifting from ‘why’ to ‘how-possible’ questions, then, opens up the possibility of new kinds of questions and answers about US Taiwan policy, and the type of intersubjective political context in which changes to the status of Taiwan could be meaningfully introduced and, therefore, embraced. In other words, rather than framing the issue in zero-sum terms such as whether ‘why’ or ‘how-possible’

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 7 questions are more important or appropriate, we should treat these as different kinds of questions which have different methodological entailments and recognise that answers to them may have different implications for the way we understand the means by which the Taiwan issue was finessed. A central theme in this study is then that more scepticism is needed when assessing the claims to knowledge of rationalist approaches and that such a reservation provides an important starting point from which to investigate how one might look differently at the Taiwan issue. Rather than assuming that ‘the truth’ is out there and discoverable, a more modest conception of what knowledge is must acknowledge that ‘perfect objectivity, unmediated and therefore undistorted, is not part of the human condition’.23 The aim is not to jettison rationalist approaches entirely. Rather, it is to develop a new theoretical and analytical perspective on US Taiwan policy that supplements the rationalist approach by incorporating the emphasis on identity, norms and discourse analysis found in constructivism. While some scholars have gestured towards the potential utility of such an approach, it has been neither elaborated nor developed to any significant extent.24 Two exceptions might be Goh’s constructivist-inspired analysis of US–Chinese rapprochement during the 1960s and 1970s and Lynch’s hermeneutical and Habermasian approach which underlines the relatively greater significance of the logic of communicative engagement as opposed to strategic engagement in contemporary US–Chinese relations.25 So, there has been little work so far that theoretically explores the interactions within this triangular relationship while tracing historically using archival sources the origins of what is known today as the ‘Taiwan issue’. A central theme in my thesis, then, is to provide theoretical and analytical guidance to re-examine aspects of this triangular relationship which to date has been inadequately tackled. ‘Applying theory’, as Costigliola has noted, ‘need not mire written history in endless relativism. Rather, theory can enable fresh topics and new ways of thinking about the past.’26 Although a focus on discourse analysis and critical constructivism cannot encapsulate any ultimate reality, such an analysis is concerned with the way discourse(s) construct a particular reality which constitutes the Taiwan issue in US China policy. By the label critical I am referring to approaches that take more elements of the policymaking problematic and take less as given.27 Mainstream positivist approaches in international relations tend to take as the starting point of their analysis a certain reality as given, which limits what social construction can mean and the possibility of analysing identity formation as a discursive process.28 Theoretical guidance, then, is indispensable in order to grasp the underlying dynamics of US Taiwan policy.

Theoretical and methodological assumptions My core theoretical and methodological objective is to explore how critical constructivism can shed new light on US Taiwan policy during and after the

8

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

Cold War. The approach can be divided into four steps. The first step is to reflect critically on Alexander Wendt’s notion of a ‘via media’ or a ‘middle ground’ between rationalist and reflectivist approaches to world politics.29 The next step is to examine in more detail the tension between conventional and critical constructivism and acknowledge the danger of lumping constructivism into one homogenous school of thought. In response to repeated calls for constructivists to cease their discussion of ‘metatheory’, this study emphasises the comparative advantage of using a critical constructivist method to explain US Taiwan policy since 1949. This brings me to the third and fourth steps: my theoretical and methodological approach. Closely related to a critical constructivist approach, discourse theory provides the conceptual framework for this study. Finally, the concepts of predication, presupposition and subject positioning are important methodological tools that guide my analysis. In International Relations (IR), constructivism has emerged as ‘the officially accredited contender to the established core of the discipline’ and has been claimed to be ‘one of the most important theoretical developments of the last decades’.30 ‘Constructivism as a phenomenon has become inescapable’ within a ‘field that has been described as undergoing or having undergone a constructivist turn’.31 The ‘success story’ owes much of its current appeal to Wendt’s ambitious project to develop a ‘via media’ between rationalist and reflectivist approaches to world politics in what has been labelled the Third Debate in the historiography of the discipline of IR theory.32 Wendt himself terms this approach ‘structural idealism’, a philosophical position that represents both an ‘idealist’ and a ‘holist’ or ‘structuralist’ account.33 Scientific realism plays an important part in finding ‘a “via media” through the Third Debate by reconciling what many take to be incompatible ontological and epistemological positions’.34 Wendt sides with the post-positivist or the reflectivist camp when it comes to ontology, which he sees as more important than epistemology. However, on epistemological questions, Wendt sides with the positivists, and argues that ‘social science is an epistemologically privileged discourse that gives us knowledge, albeit always fallible, about the world out there’.35 Given Wendt’s commitments to a positivist social science, the central problem with the ‘middle ground’ or the ‘via media’ position is that Wendt has shifted the ‘constructivist turn’ in IR in the direction of rationalists in order to be acceptable to more mainstream approaches. In that process, something has been lost. As Smith, among others, has pointed out, by embracing the epistemological underpinnings of rationalism, conventional constructivism as understood in Wendt’s terms ‘fundamentally misconceives the nature of the social world, and limits the range of possibilities for a social theory of international relations based on it’.36 With epistemological differences checked for, in a conventional reading constructivist ontology is arguably compatible with the so-called ‘normal’ scientific criteria of rationalist approaches to international relations.37 However, this move has ‘normative overtones’ and brings us to what Persram criticises as

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 9 ‘a strategic use of constructivism’.38 Consequently, Maja Zehfuss cautions us that if conventional constructivism is seen as satisfying the need for a critical stance within the field of IR, ‘it may become a licence to ignore and exclude other critical approaches’.39 Thus Keohane praises Wendt for his commitment to more traditional and restricted modes of inquiry as Wendt convincingly shows ‘that one does not have to swallow the contaminated epistemological water of postmodernism in order to enjoy the heady ontological wine of constructivism’.40 Others seem grateful to Wendt for laying ‘to rest the notion that constructivism is necessarily postmodern, devoid of an objective referent … [And] his discussion of scientific realism ought to be required reading for any student of international relations …’.41 Indeed, Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner maintain that work they bracket together as post-modernism ‘falls clearly outside the social science enterprise’.42 To pull constructivism off its somewhat shaky middle ground, we need to acknowledge the impossibility of constructing a philosophically principled middle way that mixes ‘positivistic epistemology with post-positivist ontology’.43 Dispensing with notions of secure foundations often engenders the charge of relativism. With no Archimedean points to settle epistemological and ontological differences, the task is endless and it is perhaps necessary to recognise that the middle ground ‘has no particular virtues but many of the disadvantages of the positions it tries to mediate’.44 Such a position, however, does not necessarily portend a descent into nihilism. Rather, following Guzzini, this study argues that constructivism is in need of a reconstruction, thus, in a nutshell, acknowledging that constructivism is ‘epistemologically about the social construction of knowledge, and ontologically about the construction of social reality’.45 Before we look at how this philosophical position influences my theoretical and methodological propositions, it is necessary to propose a more nuanced view of the various approaches to what has been labelled constructivism. Constructivism is not a unified body of theory. Katzenstein et al. categorise three broad clusters: conventional, critical and postmodern.46 John G. Ruggie differentiates between three different variants: neo-classical constructivism, postmodernist constructivism and a third constructivist variant located on the continuum between these two.47 I shall concentrate on the distinction between conventional and critical constructivists.48 Such a distinction is similar to Wendt’s differentiation between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ constructivism.49 I recognise the fact that considerable differences exist within each of these branches and that some scholars would reject any categorisation. Furthermore, by drawing this distinction I am not arguing that there is no relationship between these different strands of constructivism. In some areas they overlap and complement each other, so they should not be regarded as mutually exclusive. When examining the usefulness of conventional approaches I limit my analysis to normative and systemic constructivists. I proceed in two ways. On the one hand, I aim to show that normative constructivism needs to take much greater account of how a particular norm could be given meaning and significance by decision-makers at

10

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

specific times and places.50 On the other hand, I seek to broaden the narrowly defined systemic constructivism associated with Wendt.51 As shown by a wide-ranging empirical work on the diffusion of Western norms to the Third World,52 global norms and apartheid,53 a chemical weapons ‘taboo’,54 the use of land mines55 and political change,56 norms do matter. Nevertheless, to encapsulate how norms define and reformulate an understanding of interest and limit a range of acceptable policy choices, a further push towards ‘reconstructing the social discursive context that made possible that particular understanding of that norm’ is needed.57 As Hopf argues, ‘normative constructivism’s focus on norms per se excessively narrows constructivism’s theoretical domain, depriving it of its own sociological ontology’.58 Once our empirical findings suggest that decision-makers adopt a particular norm, we need to go one step further and trace how that norm could be given meaning and significance by the decision-makers. Hence, to account for the rejection or adoption of any particular norm, the principal point must be to establish the ‘configurations of intersubjective meanings that made possible the very thinkability or imaginability of these choices’.59 Systemic approaches, usually associated with Wendt, hold that identities and interests are formed through processes of interstate interaction, and illuminate how states’ identities are shaped by interaction at the systemic level.60 However, systemic constructivism remains insufficient to account for the construction and variety of identities possessed by a state at the domestic level. An important aim is therefore to recognise that identity construction takes place at different levels. State identity is a product of both the domestic and the international realm and it is unlikely that either context will dominate in the construction of state identity.61 Wendt does not consider how states constitute themselves as subjects in the first place. Wendt succinctly states this view in explaining that Social Theory of International Politics ‘is a book about the international system, not about state identity formation’.62 Wendt’s commitment to develop a systemic theory follows Waltz in emphasising the necessity to ‘treat states as, at some level, given for purpose of systemic IR theory’.63 This is exactly where Wendt’s analysis becomes problematic. On the one hand, it is maintained that the world is socially constructed; on the other hand, conventional constructivists take a certain ‘reality’ as given as the starting point of inquiry. Wendt’s unitary actor, with its preconceived identity, places severe limits on what social construction can mean. What is at stake here, of course, is that ‘states are socially constructed, but they can only be socially constructed as unitary actors’.64 In short, Smith asks ‘how Wendt’s social constructions get constructed given that his world is composed of pre-social actors with stable identities’.65 The focus on ideas, norms, identities and cultures as ‘one more aspect of “the real” of international relations, or one more “cause” underlying foreign policy, that needs to be incorporated into our analysis’ threatens to absorb constructivism as a mere ‘facelift of the mainstream’.66 Accordingly, much of the success of conventional constructivism has been ‘paid for by a neglect of some basic ideas of

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 11 constructivism’.67 A common concern among critical scholars, then, is that Wendt has sacrificed the possibility of studying the ‘multidimensionality of identity formation’ and explicitly sided with more mainstream approaches.68 Wendt himself acknowledges that states are only unitary actors analytically, not in fact. Indeed, Wendt postulates that ‘[t]hose ideas were no doubt formed in social interaction with other actors prior to the Encounter, but they are exogenous here’.69 Thus Wendt concedes that it is ‘striking how little empirical research has been done investigating what kinds of interests state actors actually have’ and finds that ‘there are important dangers, both theoretical and political, to leaving the internal construction of state identity unexamined’.70 A rewarding but challenging task is therefore not to prejudice analysis by singling out one particular level of analysis. Indeed, critical constructivists recognise that there is no theoretical reason to assume that the process of the construction of state identity occurs only, or even most importantly, at the interstate level. Instead they hold that state identities are a product of both the domestic and the international level.71 By drawing on critical constructivism, this book focuses on the processes of social construction that have constituted US identity at a particular time. It is guided by three interrelated analytical principles: ‘(i) What is understood as reality is socially constructed (ii) Certain agents or groups of agents play a privileged role in the production and reproduction of these realities, which reflect, enact, and reify relations of power (iii) A critical constructivist approach problematises dominant constructions, offers guidelines for the transformation of common sense, and facilitates the imagining of alternative constructions of reality’.72 Such a critical constructivist position does not reject the existence of a world external to thought. However, there is a tendency to talk about things being either real or ‘merely constructed’. The constructed world thus construed is somehow less tangible, less trustworthy. Critics of constructivism appear here to be contesting the idea that the world is a figment of our imagination and has no materiality, which was never any constructivist’s claim.73 Referring to something as socially constructed is not at all the same as saying that it does not exist. Because this misunderstanding persists, it should be repeated that the ‘discursive character of an object does not, by any means, imply putting its existence into question’.74 Constructivists would not deny that nuclear weapons exist, that their use has an apocalyptic effect on human life or that a number of states possess nuclear capabilities. ‘On this a constructivist and the most empiricist of arms-control experts can agree.’75 However, as pointed out by Weldes et al., constructivism is interested in how we get from here to such widely shared propositions that the United States is threatened by Russian and Chinese, but not by British or Israeli, nuclear weapons, that Iran’s nuclear potential is more threatening than the US’s nuclear arsenal and that states are safer with nuclear weapons than without them.76 Rather than being self-evident, threats and corresponding national interests are fundamentally matters of interpretation. Thus, it is this discursive constitution of the threat represented by nuclear weapons that Weldes et al. refer to as ‘ “construction,” and it means not

12

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

that the weapons have been made up but that their meaning has been molded in discourse’.77 Recognising that reality is socially constructed does not, for example, mean that one has to deny that the US Seventh Fleet was interposed in the Taiwan Strait following North Korea’s attack on South Korea in June 1950. Indeed, any interpretation of these events, to be plausible, must recognise and account for these actions. The meanings articulated by those actions, however, are contingent and contested. As we shall see in the next chapter, Washington emphasised the ‘neutralising’ intentions behind the decision to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait, while the British saw it as an unnecessary provocation and the PRC denounced it as ‘armed aggression against the territory of China …’.78 As Weldes points out, then, ‘what is at issue in the claim that national interests are socially constructed is meaning and its social effects, not physical existence’.79 Meta-theory matters, but this study is more interested in showing concretely the way in which discourse operates and demonstrating how US Taiwan policy since 1949 has been driven by discursive representations, which are intersubjectively articulated and socially constructed. With this in mind, this book seeks to reconcile theory and empirical research by demonstrating the advantages of applying critical constructivist thinking to a specific area of investigation. The remedy to this problem brings me to a discussion of my method and source material. The concept of discourse has different meaning to various theoretical traditions in the social sciences.80 The work of these approaches has been taken up in different theories and disciplines, producing somewhat different and overlapping theorisations and analyses of ‘discourses’. The discourse theory utilised in this study differs from positivist, realist and Marxist accounts and is closer to the poststructuralist traditions of Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe than the work of Derrida and Kristeva or the critical discourse analysis developed by Fairclough and Wodak.81 My objective is to draw upon these traditions in order to examine the construction of various discourses of the Taiwan issue in US China policy.82 Borrowing selectively from a long tradition of discourse theory opens up new ways of interpreting and evaluating empirical material essential to our understanding of US Taiwan policy. Howarth identifies three basic categories central to discourse theory: the discursive, discourse and discourse analysis. By discursive Howarth argues that ‘all objects are objects of discourse, in that a condition of their meaning depends upon a socially constructed system of rules and significant differences’.83 The discursive realm is not equivalent to ‘ideas’, but incorporates material as well as ideational factors. Thus, against the prejudice of the ‘mental character of discourse’, Laclau and Mouffe state that ‘we will affirm the material character of every discursive structure’.84 For example, the ideas, policies and actions of the Nixon administration’s Taiwan policy can be seen as a discursive field. Not only did it consist of ideas (a ‘new era’ of American foreign policy and ‘Nixon doctrine’) it also included certain practices (‘strong leadership’, ‘official visits to the PRC’, ‘withdrawal of troops’, and ‘changing voting patterns in the UN’).

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 13 The category of discourse refers to ‘historically specific systems of meaning which form the identities of subjects and objects … discourses are contingent and historical constructions, which are always vulnerable to those political forces excluded in their production, as well as the dislocatory effects of events beyond their control’.85 A discourse is intrinsically open-ended and incomplete. Its exterior limits are constituted by other discourses that are themselves also open, inherently unstable and always in the process of being articulated.86 Discourses, then, are constantly modified and transformed by what we say, think and do. The final category proposed by Howarth is discourse analysis which ‘refers to the process of analysing signifying practices as discursive forms. This means that discourse analysis treats a wide range of linguistic and non-linguistic material – speeches, reports, manifestos, historical events, interviews, policies, ideas, even organisations and institutions – as “texts” or “writings” that enable subjects to experience the world of objects, words and practices’.87 Accordingly, social relations are not purely linguistic phenomena and there are no ontological differences between the linguistic and behavioural aspects of social practices.88 Discourse analysis, then, can be differentiated from the study of linguistics. Whereas linguistics examines the rules of language that underlie particular statements, ‘the description of the events of discourses poses a quite different question: how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?’89 In other words, there is a difference between what one could say linguistically under the rules of grammar and logic, and what is actually said. The question, as Edkins points out, focuses on ‘[w]hy do we, in fact, say some things and not others?’90 Particular aspects of the world may be represented differently by various discourses, so we are generally in the position of having to consider the relationship between different discourses. Discourses are identified through prominent representations and they articulate different constructions of identity. However, discourses do not define one particular policy, but structure the policy space within which concrete decisions are made. Establishing what form any discourse about US Taiwan policy took, as well as how the Taiwan issue in US China policy was constructed, requires careful empirical analysis. Different discourses structure the world differently and can be understood, according to Hansen, ‘as framings of meanings and lenses of interpretation, rather than objective, historical truth’.91 Finally, discourse theory does not endeavour to uncover the true and underlying meanings of texts and social practices that are somehow deliberately concealed by ideological practices and propaganda.92 Instead, comparing public rhetoric with private statements suggests that rhetoric reflects fundamental assumptions guiding policymaking. Nixon and Kissinger expressed different views on the Taiwan issue in their discussions with the Chinese leadership and in the Shanghai Communiqué. However, to be effective, the shift in US China policy was embedded in the language of the determined discourse because it ‘constituted the framework in which policymakers deal with specific issues and in which the attentive public understands those issues’.93

14

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

Public statements are often intended, perhaps even primarily, to persuade and to mobilise. Weldes points out, however, that ‘precisely the same language and arguments – in short, the same rhetoric – appears in documents not intended for public consumption’.94 NSC 68 gives a telling example. As Gaddis observed, ‘portions of it sounded as though they had been intended for the floor of Congress, or some other conspicuous public platform … This is not what one would expect in a top secret document destined not to be public for a quarter of a century.’95 In short, as Weldes persuasively argues, the criticism that the language of national interest is ‘mere rhetoric’ and so cannot help us to understand state action rests ‘upon an unsustainable distinction between rhetoric, on the one hand, and truth or objectivity on the other. Gaddis’ surprise at the language deployed by the authors of NSC 68 is a function precisely of this common but ultimately untenable distinction.’96 My understanding of discourse analysis is anchored in these theoretical commitments. The next step is then to explain the methodological tools that enable me to examine how discursive practices constitute subjects and objects, rendering some courses of action more reasonable than others based on a particular representation of subjects and the relations between them. As Adler has recognised, methodology is the major missing link in constructivist theory and research: ‘a coherent constructivist methodological approach also means approaching research less as a predictive enterprise than as an effort to explain how past and present events, practices and interests became possible and why they occurred in time and space the way they did’.97 Borrowing from Doty and Milliken, the concepts of predication, presupposition and subject positioning are important analytical categories that enable me to get at how discursive practices and representations shape policy options and choices.98 Predication is linked to the system of signification and is suitable for the study of language practices in texts (e.g. diplomatic documents, theory articles, transcripts of interviews), the main research materials for international relations discourse analysts. Laclau and Mouffe used the term nodal points to refer to privileged discursive points that fix meaning and establish positions that make predication possible.99 Thus, ‘[p]redication involves the linking of certain qualities to particular subjects … by extracting from the documents the descriptive characteristics, adjectives, adverbs, and capabilities attributed to the various subjects’.100 A predicate affirms a quality, attribute or property of a person or thing. For instance, to state that ‘[t]he United States will work for a just and secure peace: just, because it fulfils the aspirations of peoples and nations for freedom and progress; secure, because it removes the danger of foreign aggression’, establishes the United States as a particular kind of subject with these qualities.101 As Doty explains, ‘attributes attached to subjects are important for constructing identities for those subjects and for telling us what subjects can do’.102 Predication also occurs through practices of articulation. In the process of articulation, linguistic predicates are ‘combined and recombined to produce contingent and contextually specific representations of the world’.103 To paraphrase Weldes, in the construction of the Taiwan issue, for example, an articulation of

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 15 the PRC leaders as authoritarian establishes a particular set of meanings in US representations of the Taiwan issue which constitutes the ROC and the PRC as different entities.104 Weldes argues that ‘articulations are never simply produced once and for all’, but keep being continuously reproduced and rearticulated. In other words, ‘alternative representations are always possible’.105 This contingency of discourse is embedded in Laclau and Mouffe’s characterisation of the practice of articulation as ‘the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning … [T]he partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity’.106 Presupposition deals with other important textual mechanisms that create background knowledge and in doing so construct a particular kind of world in which certain things are recognised as true.107 One of the most important aspects of a discourse is its capacity to naturalise. Naturalisation occurs through presupposition, which creates background knowledge that is taken to be true, which entails an implicit theorisation of how the world works and also an elaboration of the nature of its inhabitants.108 Subject positioning constitutes the final part of this process of producing meaning. The rhetorical strategies found in discourses entail the positioning of subjects and objects vis-à-vis one another. What defines a particular kind of subject is, in large part, the relationship in which that subject is positioned relative to other kinds of subjects.109 According to Doty, some of the important kinds of relationships that position subjects are those of opposition, identity, similarity and complementarity.110 The process of subject position is also related to the notion of interpellation. Although the following analysis does not examine individuals’ self-understanding or how concrete individuals are interpellated by, or ‘hailed’ into those subject positions, the analysis notes that subject positions ‘are created when social relations are depicted’.111 A variety of subject positions are constructed within a state’s discursive understanding of ‘our state’ and ‘their state’, or ‘us’ and ‘them’. The central subject position is, of course, that of the relevant state itself. Moreover, the field of discursivity establishes the United States as ‘a particular kind of subject, with a specific identity and the specific interests attendant upon that identity’.112 ‘The United States’, rather than, say, individual American citizens becomes the primary object of security as a result of the interpellation of this subject position. As Weldes demonstrates, ‘since “we” Americans are freedom-loving democrats and civilised Westerners, it makes sense to claim that “our” U.S. actions abroad are designed to promote liberty and freedom, not self-interest or tyranny. Since “we” are concerned American patriots, the United States clearly has the right to do all that it deems necessary to protect the American way of life.’113 Thus each subject position is located within specific power relations, enabling particular ways of operating in the world and characterised by particular interests attendant upon that identity or subject position.

16

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

Situating the US with a particular identity makes a material difference, since identities help to specify among other things which objects are to be protected and which constitute threats. Certain practices might be similar but ascertaining how actions constitute threats, aggression, obligations and commitments, requires significant interpretive work. For instance, the actual behaviour and physical content of providing economic and military aid might be identical, but the meaning attached to these practices is constituted through discursive representations.114

Sources and chapter outline These theoretical and methodological underpinnings are then applied to my source material. The main material used is archival documentation. The representations focused on in this study are for the most part representations of US Taiwan policy since 1949. My selection, like all selections, is therefore somewhat arbitrary. This study excludes many PRC and ROC voices. Leaving out alternative representations that may be present in what I have excluded does not mean that the omissions are unimportant. Rather, this exclusion is a result of a mere pragmatic choice based on time constraints, my limited knowledge of Mandarin and the difficulties in accessing archival material in the PRC and the ROC. Developments on the ground in Beijing and Taipei, of course, remain the most important factors in determining future eventualities across the Taiwan Straits. However, it will be emphasised throughout this study that the US has played and continues to play a considerable role in shaping vital aspects of the Taiwan issue. Furthermore, I make no claim to have accounted for all the discourses, meanings and identities guiding US Taiwan policy since 1949. There are always additional texts present and unaccounted for. By focusing on decision-makers and foreign policy elites I have concentrated my analysis on archival material and official statements and reports. Other scholars may argue that these sources are incomplete: no novels, poetry, cinema, or radio and television shows have been included to probe the deeper and wider cultural roots of discursive understandings. But I believe that focusing on the logic, mechanics and political effects of the state discourse makes it possible to say something meaningful about the room for manoeuvre, the context and the ‘reality’ constructed when decision-makers implemented a particular US Taiwan policy. This being so, it follows that it would be hypocritical to claim an Archimedean objectivity for my own perspective that I seek to deny others. As Haraway has argued, all knowledge is situated knowledge. At the same time, however, Haraway has noted ‘that analyses that confess their own situated and partial nature are, paradoxically, more objective than those that, in claiming to be objective, deny it’.115 Even if I had wanted to unpack all the potential discourses, limitations of time and space would have prevented me from going much further. Besides, because facts can be collected ad infinitum without necessarily arriving at something called the truth, a critical constructivist analysis must recognise that additional discourses, texts and identities are always present and unaccounted for.

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 17 As Hopf points out, ‘[t]here is no place to stop, no place we can claim that we have accounted for all that we must account for’.116 In some respect this leads to ultimate openness. As Hans-Georg Gadamer observed about hermeneutics, its first principle ‘is to admit the endlessness of the task’.117 Thus I can make no claim regarding other possible discourses. It is possible, indeed, likely that other discourses existed that would have resisted the kind of constructions in the following chapters. The important point, however, which will be illustrated in the following chapters, is that a dominant discourse existed in United States policy circles which set the parameters for US Taiwan policy. For the chapter dealing with the Truman administration’s Taiwan policy, I have gone through the relevant papers of President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, together with the papers of other influential policymakers within the Truman administration. Further, I have examined each Foreign Relations of the United States volume dealing with US Far Eastern policy from 1948 to 1950. The main archival material used when analysing the Nixon administration’s Taiwan policy is located in the Nixon presidential materials at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Most of the National Security Council files were declassified in 2002 and give a remarkably comprehensive inside account of the governmental debates at the time. Some materials, however, such as Kissinger’s telephone conversations during his tenure as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (1969–74) and Secretary of State (1973–4) have just recently been released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on 26 May 2004. To my knowledge, no studies have applied this recently de-classified material to US Taiwan policy. Thus, I hope my analysis can provide a more comprehensive picture of policymaking during Nixon’s first term in office than is found in existing accounts. A collection of declassified China-related Nixon administration materials, China and the United States: From Hostility to Engagement, 1960–1998, is available at the National Security Archive, George Washington University.118 Material from the State Department Records, in particular Central Files (Record Group 59) – Lord’s files, has also been helpful in tracking down the Nixon administration’s China policy in the years 1969–72. Some documents relating to Kissinger and Nixon’s conversations with Chinese leaders in the period 1971–7 can be found in William Burr (ed.) The Kissinger Transcripts, The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow. Burr, however, acknowledges that a more comprehensive picture of the Nixon–Kissinger foreign policy requires access to Kissinger’s own papers and the NSC files in the Nixon papers at the National Archives.119 The chapter focusing on contemporary US Taiwan policy during George W. Bush’s presidency draws heavily on presidential and administration statements and congressional hearings. For instance, I have looked at all the hearings on US China policy in the House of Representatives and the US Senate since 2000. I have also scrutinised a number of reports by the White House (such as the National Security Strategy), and the US Department of Defense (such as the Quadrennial

18

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy

Defense Review), together with a massive amount of reports coming from the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission. When analysing these documents through the lenses of discourse analysis, I have looked for the predicates, presuppositions, categorisations and the articulatory practices that create meaning and identities, which in turn construct a particular reality. Taking discourse analysis seriously, then, means emphasising how meaningful action is intersubjectively constituted, contested and sustained. Discursive theorising must therefore explicate how discursive systems perform a constraining or enabling function with regard to state action and identify the discursive processes that make certain policy choices possible while excluding others as unintelligible or improper. In short, we have accounted for how rationalist approaches prevent us from developing an alternative framework for interpreting, debating and understanding US Taiwan policy and pointed out that traditional approaches seldom focus entirely on the Taiwan issue in US China policy. We then explored the incommensurable ontological and epistemological challenges involved in developing a stable middle ground and the danger of conventional constructivism facilitating the developments of a new orthodoxy in IR theory. Having differentiated between conventional and critical constructivism, and argued that conventional constructivist approaches too often abandon invigorating insights into the construction of social reality and knowledge, we examined the key concepts of discourse theory and a critical constructivist method in order to refocus constructivist research. It is now time to put the theoretical and methodological arguments to work and I will introduce the plan of the book. Chapters 2 to 4 provide a historical analysis of the emergence and development of different discourses that have been central in constituting US identity and have framed the possibilities of available action for US Taiwan policy. Chapter 2 asks: how do we get from North Korea’s attack on South Korea in June 1950 to US ‘neutralisation’ of the Taiwan Strait? In other words, this chapter examines how a policy of intervention in the Chinese Civil War, initially regarded by the Truman administration as counterproductive to American interests, came to be deemed necessary and non-intervention unthinkable. By focusing on the discursively constructed identity of the US, what it means to be America and how decision-makers see the role of the US in world affairs, I argue that the Korean War represented an understanding that US identity was under threat from a monolithic Communist bloc, which worked to objectify Taiwan as an object at stake in a worldwide struggle between good and evil, order and chaos. Hence, the scripting of a particular American identity undermined a diplomatic approach and reinforced Truman’s predilection to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait in June 1950. Chapter 3 seeks to scrutinise how the Nixon administration was able to open up space on the Taiwan issue to consider alternatives which had previously been understood as being unrealistic. Divided into two sections, the analysis begins by investigating the changing discursive representations of the Taiwan issue identified within official circles during the Nixon presidency. The second section

Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 19 shows how meanings and representations play an important part in the process of discursively constructing the status of Taiwan, by rendering some courses of action possible while excluding others as inappropriate or unthinkable. Accordingly, the discursive representations identified bore concrete policy consequences – notably in relation to the US position towards the PRC’s representation in the UN, in relation to American military presence on Taiwan and in acknowledging the oneChina principle. Chapter 4 demonstrates how the adherence of the US to the one-China principle, originating in Nixon and Kissinger’s visits to the PRC in 1971–2, is increasingly being challenged by the contemporary contradictions in US Taiwan policy. My intention is to show that the combined discursive representation of a threatening, expansive and authoritarian China, differentiated from the freedom, the flourishing democracy and the exemplary economic development model on Taiwan, creates persuasive, commonsensical arguments that increasingly contradict, constrain and undermine Washington’s official one-China policy. Paradoxically therefore, the US, the self-defined, indispensable promoter of democracy and human rights, finds itself in a precarious situation whereby the US has become constrained by the developments of democracy in Taiwan. Consequently, America’s increased attention on its image as the champion of freedom and democracy has a profound impact on whether the one-China policy is accepted, contested or allowed to remain ambiguous. In Chapter 5 I take a broader perspective and examine the overall debate relating to US China policy more generally. I argue that we need to transcend the politicised containment and engagement debate in favour of a hedging and risk management framework that allows one to explore the complexities peculiar to US China strategy in the twenty-first century. As part of a broader constructivist research agenda, my approach emphasises that policy choices are being made, and that not everything is pre-ordained and determined by systemic structure.120 In a brief concluding chapter, I return to the central research questions identified throughout the study and consider the future implications of the argument developed both for theoretical literature and for the ways in which we understand US Taiwan policy.

2

Discourses and the origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

The central aim of this chapter is to consider US Taiwan policy in the critical years of 1949 and 1950. The overall emphasis is on how and why US policy towards China and Taiwan changed so drastically following the outbreak of the Korean War and what implications this shift had for the status of Taiwan. North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in June 1950 brought about a dramatic reversal in US Taiwan policy. Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s ‘hands off’ and ‘let the dust settle’ approach towards the Chinese Civil War, aiming to achieve American objectives by exploiting Sino-Soviet antagonism and carefully avoiding any irredentist issues in US relations with the PRC over Taiwan, was suddenly abandoned. This observation raises some central questions: How do we get from North Korea’s attack on South Korea to US ‘neutralisation’ of the Taiwan Strait? Given the consensus within the State Department and the military establishment that Taiwan was not essential to US strategic interests, and that it was inadvisable to commit US forces to deny Communists control of Taiwan, how could Truman reverse this policy and declare on 27 June 1950 that ‘[i]n these circumstances the occupation of Formosa by Communist forces would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area’?1 In other words, why did the outbreak of fighting in Korea place the Taiwan situation in a dramatically different strategic context? In addressing these questions I emphasise how US interests came to be constructed through discursive representations. Taking issue with the mainstream rationalist proposition that US protection of Taiwan was embedded in strategic calculations, I instead advocate the importance of questioning how identities shape and constitute interests. I aim to show that an understanding of US interests towards Taiwan demands an understanding of the identity politics underlying US relations with China and the discourse of the ‘Communist conspiracy’, situated within a particular Cold War context. Put differently, the North Korean attack had to mean something before it was possible for US decision-makers to decide on the appropriate US response. Preoccupied with combating Communist aggression, Taiwan became a symbol of prestige which the Communists would enjoy if they succeeded in occupying

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 21 Taiwan. Once the North Korean attack had been defined as part of a wider Moscowdriven Communist aggression, the decision to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait became commonsensical and incontestable. As Doty points out, then, we need to ‘examine how meanings are produced and attached to various social subjects/objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions which create certain possibilities and preclude others’.2 Discursive representations establish a certain meaning and tell us who ‘we’ are, how ‘we’ act in relation to specific others and assign value (or not) to those identities and activities. These representations ‘can neither be wished away nor simply refused’.3 For instance, US interaction with the PRC when that state is construed as a threat and an aggressive member of the Communist bloc differs from interaction with it when it is construed as an emerging ‘Titoist’ China not tied to Moscow. Consequently, I examine a number of discourses about US Taiwan policy and emphasise the effects of a contingent construction of US identity and the national interests which emerge out of this representation. A central proposition of my work, then, is that interests derive from identity and discursive representations. Finally, the analysis can be differentiated from traditional accounts in its emphasis on ‘how-possible’ questions. In contrast to the focus on ‘why’ questions, concerned with explaining why particular decisions resulted in specific courses of action, I argue that the question being asked is not why a particular course of action was chosen but how it was possible, and indeed commonsensical, for an interventionist policy in the Taiwan Strait to be deemed necessary and nonintervention unthinkable. According to most scholars in the field, ‘[m]ilitary and strategic considerations were paramount in the decision for intervention’ in the Taiwan Strait.4 Although explanations that emphasise the strategic rationale are convincing, they are incomplete. ‘Why’ questions, as Doty explains, ‘generally take as unproblematic the possibility that a particular decision or course of action could happen’.5 So, this chapter asks not only why the Truman administration felt it necessary to intervene in the Taiwan Strait in the aftermath of the Korean War but also how the US responded to Communist aggression on the Korean Peninsula in late June 1950. Put differently, we must ask how ‘neutralisation’ of the Taiwan Strait became the appropriate US Taiwan policy following the North Korean attack on South Korea. In short, then, this chapter endeavours to complement traditional accounts in two ways: first, through an emphasis on the ‘red menace’ discourse it aims to provide a more nuanced view of the discursively constructed Cold War identity of the US; and second, it attempts to illustrate how US Taiwan policy was deeply embedded in the ‘determined’ and ‘undetermined’ discourses, often overlooked by existing accounts. I have divided the assessment into four sections. The first section elucidates the continuous reassessment of US Taiwan policy in 1949 and 1950. I demonstrate that before the outbreak of the Korean War, Taiwan was not considered essential to US national security and the military establishment was not willing to

22

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

intervene militarily to prevent Taiwan from falling into the hands of the Chinese Communists. As General Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), explained to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 1950, ‘[t]he Joint Chiefs have had five papers on this subject and all of them stated that Formosa did have strategic importance, but it was not of sufficient strategic importance to warrant sending troops to it’.6 Of course, the Truman administration favoured a situation whereby Taiwan was denied to the Chinese Communists, but the US government was only willing to commit diplomatic and economic means to obtain this goal. The second section engages with the historiographical debate concerning these vital years in US–China relations. The main emphasis, however, is not on whether there was a ‘lost opportunity’ for rapprochement between the US and China in 1949–50 or whether Acheson had the flexibility to contemplate accommodation with Beijing.7 Instead, the focus of my analysis is on Taiwan. I trace the debate, both within the Truman administration through documentary evidence and within the existing secondary literature, concerning a possible ‘change of heart’ among the leading policymakers within the administration regarding US China and Taiwan policy during 1949 and 1950. By the summer of 1950 there was undoubtedly pressure to reverse the administration’s policy and apply the necessary means to prevent the Chinese Communists from crossing the Taiwan Strait. Nevertheless, Acheson manoeuvred confidently through any challenges to his non-intervention policy. Sensing that the collapse of the KMT seemed imminent, the event Acheson passionately awaited, he refused to concede to pressure. In his vision, the US would finally be able to explore the possibility of accommodation with the PRC and take advantage of frictions between Beijing and Moscow. What, then, stimulated Acheson and Truman to change the administration’s policy and interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait so abruptly two days after Acheson declared in a press conference on 23 June 1950 that ‘[t]he policy on Formosa was stated by the President on January 5 and that remains the policy’?8 Why did the administration exhibit such a strong preference for the use of military force? In my view, the issue of US ‘neutralisation’ of the Taiwan Strait following the Korean War has been insufficiently dealt with in the existing literature. I suggest that in order to understand this departure in US Taiwan policy, it is essential to examine the particular political and cultural context in which US Taiwan policy was formulated. Thus, the third section illuminates three discursive representations of US Taiwan policy identified within policy circles during 1949 to 1950: the ‘determined’ discourse (meaning that Taiwan was part of China), the ‘undetermined’ discourse and the ‘red menace’ discourse.9 Each of these discourses carried particular representations of the perceived identity of the US, China and Taiwan and can be separated by comparing and contrasting the descriptive characteristics and capabilities attributed to the various subjects. These discourses presuppose and construct social realities that create the ‘conceptual lenses’ which confer meaning on social phenomena and political events.

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 23 A critical constructivist approach, then, permits a reflexive engagement with the ‘reality’ that policymakers are embedded in when interpreting and decoding information. In other words, each of these discourses constructs particular subject positions, positions these subjects vis-à-vis one another and thereby constitutes a particular reality which guided US Taiwan policy. Although I argue that the ‘determined’ discourse remained the dominant policy with regard to Taiwan prior to the Korean War, the ‘undetermined’ and the ‘red menace’ discourses shared some features with the dominant discourse, in particular with regard to US self-image. In the fourth section, I argue that the North Korean attack was interpreted through these discursive representations which provided the conceptual lenses and constructed the boundaries of which policy actions were deemed necessary and appropriate. From a plethora of threatening meanings attached to the North Korean attack and an understanding that the attack posed an intolerable danger to the US self-image, the Truman administration embarked upon a fundamental departure from the precept established in the ‘determined’ discourse, namely that Taiwan was part of China, and shifted its policy towards preventing any Communist takeover of Taiwan by ordering the Seventh Fleet to ‘neutralise’ the Taiwan Strait. Although I show how the ‘red menace’ discourse becomes the dominant discourse in interpreting events on the Korean peninsula, US Taiwan policy cannot solely be explained in terms of Taiwan’s strategic importance or ‘given’ as a result of balance of power calculations. Instead the complexity behind American intervention in the Taiwan Strait, an area where the nation’s strategic and economic stake was, by most conventional measures, insignificant, must be tied to policymakers’ representation of the particular identity constructed for the US and the ‘Communist conspiracy’ situated within a particular Cold War context. Moreover, decision-makers’ room for manoeuvre was also embedded in the ‘undetermined’ and ‘determined’ discourses. For instance, the particular decision to ‘neutralise’ the Taiwan Strait was profoundly shaped by the meanings articulated within these two discourses about US Taiwan policy.

Reassessment of US Taiwan policy 1949–50 On 24 February 1949 Acheson called prominent figures from Capitol Hill into his office and articulated his preferred China strategy to counter critics’ condemnation of the administration’s alleged passivity: the US would stand back and allow the ‘dust to settle’ in the Chinese Civil War before adopting a more positive policy towards Communist China.10 Despite the JCS November 1948 assessment that the implications of Taiwan and its immediate adjacent island falling under the domination of ‘Kremlin-directed Communist … could produce strategic consequences very seriously detrimental to our national security’, Acheson felt comfortable with his ‘dust to settle’ approach.11 Several factors inspired his confidence.

24

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

First, in its strategic appraisal of the Taiwan situation, the JCS recognised the peripheral importance of Taiwan, China and the Far East. In February 1949 the JCS concluded that despite ‘Formosa’s strategic importance, the current disparity between our military strength and our many global obligations makes it inadvisable to undertake the employment of armed force in Formosa … thus making it impossible then to meet more important emergencies elsewhere’.12 In several National Security Council (NSC) studies in early 1949 the JCS advocated only the ‘application of appropriate diplomatic and economic steps’ in order to deny Taiwan to the Chinese Communists, and the overriding consensus remained ‘that any overt military commitment in Formosa would be unwise at this time’.13 Acheson could therefore write to Edgar, the Consul in Taipei, assuring him that there was currently ‘no thought [that the] US Gov[ernmen]t would act unilaterally [to] separate Formosa from the mainland by milit[ary] means and in [the] event likelihood failure [to] prevent Comm[unist] domination [of] Formosa by pol[itical] and econ[omic] means [the] only recourse would be action through [the] UN’.14 Although the Truman administration took a more active role in China and its Far Eastern policy from 1948, Acheson remained an ‘Atlanticist and anglophile for whom Western Europe was the highest priority’.15 Second, Acheson was convinced that his own abilities and political skills would overcome any Congressional opposition, and if necessary, he would take the appropriate steps to mould, lead and educate public opinion. He therefore devised a China strategy which would await developments abroad. Once the discredited regime on Taiwan fell to the Chinese Communists, the China bloc in Congress and the China lobbyists would cease to have an issue and the administration could persuade the American people and Congressional members to acquiesce in actions the government deemed in their best interests.16 Simultaneously, Acheson quietly proceeded to formulate and gather support among the academic, business, religious and journalist communities to explain to a ‘confused and generally indifferent citizenry and Congress’ why dealing with the Chinese Communists would be conducive to American goals in the Far East.17 Third, the developments within the Communist bloc and the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aroused feelings within the Truman administration that the US could be able to promote something comparable to Titoism in China. Truman and Acheson were encouraged by the recent split between Beograd and Moscow. If the CCP would distance itself from Moscow and pursue a working relationship with Washington, US interests would undoubtedly be enhanced. Furthermore, the military accomplishment of Mao’s Red Army despite modest support by the Soviet Union during the Civil War, its willingness to safeguard Chinese territorial integrity and the Soviet record in Sinkiang, Outer Mongolia and Manchuria, were seen as assets to be exploited in US China policy.18 Thus the Truman administration believed that the strong nationalist sentiments among the Chinese Communists created favourable conditions for a rift in Sino-Soviet relations and would be advantageous to Acheson’s ‘let the dust settle’ approach. However, reports were soon coming in pointing to the possibility ‘that the application of diplomatic and economic measures suggested by the Joint Chiefs

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 25 Staff may not succeed in preventing Communist domination of Formosa’.19 As a result, by the summer of 1949, US commitments to Taiwan were being reconsidered. On 9 May 1949 Acheson called Edgar to Washington for consultations on the deteriorating situation on the Chinese mainland and the concern about chaos on Taiwan. In June, George Kennan of the Policy Planning Staff advocated a review of US policy towards Taiwan, and in early August the State Department requested the NSC to re-examine US policy with respect to Taiwan in the light of the developments of the past two to three months.20 As Acheson explained in a telegram to McConaughy, the American Consul in Shanghai, the government was currently ‘studying all aspects [of the] Taiwan problem’, and the administration was not prepared to make any public statements.21 Nevertheless, the JCS would not alter their previous considerations. In October the JCS reaffirmed ‘their earlier opinion that the strategic importance of Formosa does not justify overt military action, in the event that diplomatic and economic steps prove unsuccessful to prevent Communist domination’, and continued to regard Formosa and the Pescadores as not sufficiently important because of the potentially more pressing requirements elsewhere for the deployment of the US limited US military resources.22 By the end of the month Acheson telegrammed Strong, Chargé d’Affaires in China, and instructed him to inform the KMT leadership that ‘[t]he US Gov[ernmen]t does not intend to commit any of its armed forces to the defense of the island’.23 The drafting of the NSC 48 at the end of 1949 constituted the major policy showdown on US policy towards Taiwan and the KMT. The Pentagon and Johnson, the Secretary of Defense, had by the end of October 1949 started to have second thoughts about the importance of Taiwan. In particular, they drew attention to economic funds available to deny Taiwan to the Communists. Moreover, the JCS stressed the value of Taiwan in diverting the Communists from expansion into Southeast Asia, the importance of denying the island to the USSR in the event of war, and that the Taiwan Strait was strategically an advantageous area for the US to draw a line against Communist belligerence. However, as Robert M. Blum succinctly puts it, NSC 48 was merely ‘old wine in a new bottle’.24 Acheson had already secured Truman’s support for the preservation of his ‘hands off’ and ‘let the dust settle’ approach on 20 December. Thus, the NSC meeting on 29 December only presented Acheson with an opportunity to set the record straight with the military establishment.25 In reply to the opening statement of the Chairman of the JCS, General Omar Bradley, Acheson was particularly interested in ascertaining exactly what was the strategic importance of Taiwan. Responding to the course recommended by the Joint Chiefs that the existent funds under Section 303 of the Military Assistance Act could place Taiwan ‘in a position where it would hold out longer than otherwise’, Acheson emphasised that ‘we must ask what price do we pay for this delay’. Committing US prestige ‘in another failure for all to see’ would substitute the US with the ‘Soviets as the imperialistic menace to China’, and ‘excite and bring upon ourselves the united Chinese hatred of foreigners’ which were the credentials Acheson believed belonged to the Communists in Moscow.

26

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

Acheson continued, arguing that ‘throughout all Asia we would be represented as the supporter of this discredited, decayed KMT Government’ and the Soviet Union would be offered an opportunity to smear America’s reputation by bringing the US before the Security Council. He forcefully concluded that: ‘If at this price we acquire an island essential to the defenses of the United States then it might be worth the price but there does not appear to be demonstrated a claim that the loss of Formosa really breaches our defense.’26 The downtrodden JCS retained a passive role. Unable to identify clearly the scope or nature of the developments in the Far East, General Bradley and his associates were naturally somewhat ambivalent when it came to formulating policy recommendations and were put on the defensive. General Bradley was left to make some feasible defence of the JCS position, replying that the Joint Chiefs presented ‘a purely military point of view which reflected the fact that Congress had appropriated money to support these people who were resisting Communism’. However, the military establishment was not prepared to invest American forces in the defence of Taiwan. At last, Acheson was presented with a satisfactory statement when General Bradley eventually recognised ‘that political considerations often must override military considerations’.27 After Acheson’s vigorous presentation in the NSC, and with the JCS reluctantly affirming Acheson’s non-intervention policy, the State Department prepared a statement by the President which clarified the administration’s position with respect to Taiwan. On 5 January 1950, Truman announced that ‘the United States has no desire to obtain special rights or privileges or to establish military bases on Formosa at this time. Nor does it have any intention of utilizing its armed forces to interfere in the present situation. The United States Government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China. Similarly, the United States Government will not provide military aid or advice to Formosa.’28 As Blum has pointed out, the statement had been modified in deference to the military’s reservations, when Truman had accommodated Bradley’s request that the phrase ‘at this time’ should be added, to guard against the eventuality of a possible future war in the Far East.29 However, Acheson was keen on making the most out of the President’s statement. Seven days later he confirmed that administration policy countenanced the possibility that Taiwan might fall to the Chinese Communists, when he defined Taiwan as situated outside the American defence perimeter in the Pacific. Even though the outcome of the policy review did not pose any serious challenge to Acheson’s ‘hands off’ policy of disassociating the US from the Chinese Civil War and the KMT, Acheson would soon learn that his sanguinity was premature. As expected, the China bloc in Congress and the China lobby relentlessly continued their work to reverse the administration’s policy. As on previous occasions when the administration had publicly stated that it would distance itself from the discredited regime on Taiwan, such as the publication of the China White Paper in the summer of 1949, the current effort only provided fuel for the department’s critics. Although Tucker has convincingly argued that the China lobby remained a

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 27 fairly insignificant phenomenon, and that the Truman administration was still free from the fears of McCarthyism that the Korean War would engender, the China bloc posed a credible threat to the policies of the administration in alliance with fiscal conservatives and isolationist-minded legislators. Thus calls for aid to the Nationalists by the China bloc routinely surfaced when amendments to European assistance programmes came up, as they did in 1947 in conjunction with Interim Aid, in 1948 with the European Recovery Program, and again in 1949 as part of the Military Assistance Program.30 Furthermore, despite the defeat the military establishment experienced in the NSC 48 meeting and its pledge to honour the existing ‘hands off’ policy, it continued to devise emergency war plans ‘providing for the denial of Taiwan to the Russians in case of war’.31 Through several visits and in reports from prominent military figures in the Far East, the JCS was repeatedly reminded of the strategic importance of Taiwan in a potential conflict with the USSR and the disturbing consequences for the national security of the US if Taiwan were to fall into Communist hands. These assessments culminated, on 14 June 1950, in a memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur, the commander in chief of US Forces, Far East, which was brought to Truman’s attention in the crucial meeting at the Blair House following the outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June 1950. After briefly reminding the Government of Taiwan’s historical significance for waging war in the Pacific, General MacArthur famously argued that: ‘Formosa in the hands of Communists can be compared to an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender ideally located to accomplish Soviet offensive strategy and at the same time checkmate counteroffensive operations by the United States Forces based on Okinawa and the Philippines’. According to the General, ‘the domination of Formosa by an unfriendly power would be a disaster of utmost importance to the United States’.32 Even senior officials within the State Department had by the spring of 1950 begun to consider various proposals to rescue the Nationalists. To achieve this end, Dean Rusk, the Deputy Undersecretary and later Undersecretary of State, advocated that the US might go through the UN, making Taiwan a UN trusteeship by neutralising the island, an idea supported by John F. Dulles, who had been brought into the State Department as a consultant in an attempt to salvage bipartisan support for the administration’s Far Eastern policy.33 Kennan even contemplated reintroducing his plan from June 1949 for a US intervention in order to remove the present Nationalist government. Although he recognised that the US would ‘probably have to cut some legal corners to justify it’, he personally believed that if such a plan ‘were to be adopted and to be carried through with sufficient resolution, speed, ruthlessness and self-assurance, the way Theodore Roosevelt might have done it, it would be not only successful but would have an electrifying effect in this country and throughout the Far East’.34 The problem, however, was that it was precisely such an ‘electrifying effect’ that Acheson was trying to avoid in relations with Asian states, and particularly in Sino-American relations.

28

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

Lost chance? – change of heart? Taken together, the continuous reassessment among the leading decision-makers within the administration of the appropriate policy to follow in US relations with the newly established PRC and the Nationalists in refuge on Taiwan, has stimulated controversy among China scholars on two main issues. First, was there a ‘lost chance’ for US rapprochement with the Chinese Communists? Second, did the Truman administration have a change of heart regarding Taiwan in the spring of 1950? With the transcendence of the emotional atmosphere of the early Cold War years and the impact of the Vietnam War, the access to a growing range of primary sources in the late 1970s permitted scholars to re-examine the foundations of US– PRC relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s.35 In her excellent review of the literature on US–China relations since 1945, Nancy B. Tucker has warned us, however, about the pursuit of consensus. ‘Discovery and controversy are the norm rather than any fresh, satisfying, and widely accepted paradigm.’36 Preoccupied with the idea that the US and the PRC might have missed an opportunity for rapprochement in the late 1940s, the conference volume edited by Dorthy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs introduced the most authoritative collection of scholarly debate on the ‘lost chance’ thesis.37 Without reaching any definitive conclusion, the ensuing consensus tended to accept Cohen’s argument that Acheson had sought accommodation with Beijing and hoped to encourage a breach between Beijing and Moscow. According to the strongest proponents of flexibility in American China policy, ‘had Acheson prevailed, there was every likelihood of early diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic’.38 However, war came to Korea first and shattered any real prospect for accommodation. Without engaging to any significant extent with Cohen’s argument, Steven M. Goldstein presented an argument which later would be supported by two different propositions taking issue with the Cohen–Tucker thesis. First, Goldstein argued that the Truman administration’s options were limited by foreign policy commitments elsewhere. ‘It was difficult to maintain simultaneously an anticommunist posture in Europe and an accommodating position toward a major Communist movement in Asia.’39 This position has later been supported by scholars who have described Acheson as a determined ‘Cold Warrior’ in both Europe and Asia, and Christensen’s influential study which demonstrated the domestic need to maintain a degree of anti-Communism in China policy while Truman mobilised support for anticommunist measures in Europe.40 In order to sell its containment policy in Europe to Congress, bipartisanship was a cardinal point. If Arthur Vandenberg, the ‘father’ of bipartisanship, was going to drum up Republican support on Capitol Hill, consistency between policies towards Europe and Asia was indeed important.41 Second, Goldstein believed it was impossible, in 1949, for American decisionmakers to overcome sharply contrasting world views ‘with the emerging Chinese regime as it was – a pro-Soviet, anti-imperialist movement, humiliating one of

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 29 America’s wartime allies and driving uncompromisingly against United States interests in China’.42 In addition, though Goldstein lacked important source material, he argued that the Chinese Communists were at least as constrained by domestic and international factors as the Americans, and concluded that there was no ‘lost chance’ for the simple reason that neither side was in a position to take a chance.43 This reasoning has been persuasively sustained by works of China scholars using Chinese documentary sources. In a symposium in the journal Diplomatic History in 1997, Michael Sheng and Odd Arne Westad asserted that the Chinese leaders were in no position to contemplate accommodation with the US. Rejecting the idea of a ‘lost chance’ these scholars argued that China was never America’s to ‘lose’ in the first place.44 Another aspect of the debate was whether the Truman administration had a change of heart in its policy towards Taiwan in the first half of 1950. Gaddis has argued ‘that a revision of the administration’s “hands-off” policy was well under way at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War’.45 Although his assessment has been supported by Bruce Cumings and June Grasso, who have taken it a step further, hinting at plots and conspiracy within the administration in order to shift the direction of US China policy, Tucker and Christensen have convincingly demonstrated that Acheson seemed to have access to various opinions. In particular, Acheson could rely on the advice of Philip C. Jessup, Ambassador-atLarge, Livingston Merchant, former Counsellor at the US embassy in Nanking and foreign officers such as the American Consul-General in Beijing, Edmund Clubb, and Ambassador to China, John L. Stuart, in response to the mounting pressure to reverse China policy.46 Thus, according to Tucker, the advocates of a change of heart policy ‘have not been able to prove that Acheson did more than listen sympathetically, even occasionally with some interest, and then turn them down flat’.47 After the Chinese Communists had successfully invaded the Hainan Islands in April 1950, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimate that Taiwan would fall by the end of 1950 seemed about to be realised. Acheson’s long-anticipated ‘dust to settle’ approach that would reconcile US–PRC relations eventually appeared within sight, and he rebuffed any suggestions to save the downtrodden regime on Taiwan.48 On 23 June 1950, Acheson informed the press that the US had no intention of reversing its non-intervention policy towards Taiwan and the Chinese civil war.49 What then compelled Acheson and Truman to change course so drastically two days later? Why did they display an apparently automatic preference for a militant course of action? And how could the outbreak of fighting in Korea so radically change representations of the Communist bloc, unleash an open-ended struggle with an implacable Communist threat and blur the distinction between vital and peripheral areas to US national security? Those scholars who have emphasised Taiwan’s strategic value and a possible departure from Acheson’s ‘hands off’ policy in the first half of 1950, see the decision to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait as a pending precaution fulfilling the war plan envisaging denial of Taiwan to possible Soviet use in the

30

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

event of war. ‘In fact, the administration had not written off Taiwan in the event of war with the Soviet Union’, argued Gaddis in his account of the origins of the defence perimeter concept in US security strategy.50 During conversations with Attlee in Washington in December 1950, Truman elaborated on his view about the historical contingency of the Cairo and Potsdam declaration. Having established China as a friendly power to the US and the UK in the Far East ‘to offset the vicious power of Japan, that power had now collapsed, and in its place the Chinese Communists have emerged, having really been taken by Russia, since they really were Russian and nothing else’. Truman continued: ‘When we thought that Formosa was not strategically important to us, we never considered that the Chinese Government would be one which would be very hostile to the United States. There is no question now that it is very hostile to us.’51 As Gaddis has pointed out, ‘Truman’s observation reflects an underlying element of consistency in American policy on the Taiwan question: the fact that at no point during 1949 and 1950 was Washington prepared to acquiesce in control of the island by forces hostile to the United States and capable of taking military action against other links in the offshore island chain.’52 Moreover, Finkelstein has argued that while Acheson and Truman never accepted the reassessment of Taiwan’s strategic importance before the outbreak of war in Korea, they did so once war began.53 In my view, the notion of ‘the underlying element’ as emphasised by Gaddis is underdeveloped and does not sufficiently comprehend the complexity of the decision to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. The over-riding objectives when the Truman administration approached the summer of 1950 were to instigate a split in the Communist bloc, disentangle itself from Chiang and his followers and prevent the Chinese Communists from becoming an unequivocal enemy of the US. The Korean War dealt a blow to this strategy. But Truman’s decision to rescue an area of trivial strategic significance to American interests in Korea did not suddenly make Taiwan a prominent strategic asset to US national interests. What the Korean War did, as will be illustrated below, was to create a new representation of US identity under threat from a monolithic Communist bloc. More importantly, when interpreted through the lenses of a pivotal struggle between the Communist world and the free world led by the US, the Korean War instigated policies which contradicted the efforts to differentiate between what was vital and what was peripheral to US national security. Gaddis later wrote, in one of the most thorough studies on American foreign policy during the Cold War, that if it occurred to anyone ‘to wonder why the United States should be issuing blank checks to its adversaries in the first place, or how it proposed to keep its account balanced indefinitely in the face of such demands on it, they were too polite to ask’.54 Thus, as Nancy B. Tucker, one of the leading scholars on US–Chinese relations has noted, ‘[w]hen war broke out in Korea, protection of Taiwan appeared compulsory and Truman acted’.55

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 31 Later, in one of few extensive studies on US relations with Taiwan, Tucker summarised the analysis on the origins of American commitment to the protection of Taiwan by writing that ‘the United States found itself undertaking policies and commitments that were not always in its national interest’. However, ‘such obligations proved almost impossible to avoid’. She concludes, without providing any deeper assessment or theoretical framework for examining the underlying causes for her claims, that: ‘America’s anticommunist crusade, which dictated norms of behaviour and tried to impose standards on thought, provided an optimum environment within which an anticommunist, if autocratic, Chinese leader could flourish’.56 Neither do other China scholars seem puzzled by the immediate shift in the Truman administration’s policy following the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula. Robert Blum has maintained that, ‘[w]hen North Korea invaded South, administration officials who had championed the tattered Titoist policy for the previous eighteen months kicked it over in an evening, without much apparent regret and with full public support’.57

Three discourses on US Taiwan policy Inspired by Foot’s study of how US Cold War attitudes undermined a diplomatic approach and reinforced Truman’s predilections for a military solution to the North Korean crisis, the following analysis attempts to elucidate some of the ‘underlying elements’ and ‘hidden factors’ which ‘dictated norms of behaviour’ and ‘imposed standards on thought’, by exploring how interests are particular historical constructions that remain contingent and inextricably linked to discursive representations and identities.58 The aim, as Doty has pointed out, ‘is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine how certain representations underline the production of knowledge and identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible’.59 Thus, in providing a vision of the world, discursive representations help to specify, among other things, which objects are to be protected and which constitute threats. ‘Because identities are the basis of interests, the interests of the state are already entailed within the representations in which the identities of and relations among the relevant actors or objects are established.’60 As Doty shows in her excellent analysis of US counter-insurgency policy in the Philippines, there are two important aspects of a ‘discursive practices approach’. ‘One aspect is the detailed explication of the discourse itself. This consists of examining various textual mechanisms at work in the discourse that construct identities for subjects and position these subjects vis-à-vis one another. The second aspect entails an examination of how, from this construction and positioning, various possibilities of practice emerge.’61 The remaining part of this chapter, then, is divided into two sections. The first section identifies and examines three discourses about US Taiwan policy in 1949 and 1950: the ‘determined’, the ‘undetermined’ and the ‘red menace’ discourse. In

32

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

differentiating between these discourses I examine the predicates, presuppositions and categorisations attributed to the various subjects (the US, China and Taiwan) within each discourse. These discursive formations constitute the textual mechanisms that create background knowledge and construct particular kinds of meanings, identities and subject positions. The second section illustrates how discourse(s) work to construct a particular US Taiwan policy. Taking President Truman’s major statement on 27 June 1950 regarding US Taiwan policy as a starting point, I show how discursive representations, intersubjectively constructed and embedded in language, perform a constraining or enabling function with regard to state action, in the sense that discourses and identities situate policymakers when they strive to understand other states. As such, policymakers read other states through their understanding of their own state, and that understanding is itself related to the discourses and identities that constitute them.62 The ‘determined’ discourse The ‘determined’ discourse remained the official discourse of US Taiwan policy until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Although the attributes attached to the various subjects share some resemblance across the various discourses, in particular in the construction of the US self-image, the ‘determined’ discourse can be differentiated from the ‘undetermined’ and the ‘red menace’ discourses by the understanding of self and other(s) embedded within it. According to the determined discourse the ‘US Government stood for good faith in international relations’.63 In contrast to the imperialist and aggressive nature of the Soviet regime, the US had benign intentions and worked for selfdetermination of Asian states. Acheson elucidated these ideas in a speech before the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on 12 March 1950 when he claimed that ‘[w]e are for something positive, for the most fundamental urges of the human spirit … [t]he basic objective of American foreign policy is to make possible a world in which all peoples, including the peoples of Asia, can work, in their own way, toward a better life. That is why we are opposed to the spread of communism not only in Asia but elsewhere.’64 In times where the Soviet Union threatened ‘all people and governments who stand for freedom, the dignity of the individual and the rule of law’, Acheson explained that it ‘is clear that there is a particular important export which the United States can provide and which must go hand-in-hand with the physical assistance we are providing for the free world. This is an export of spirit, an export of the confidence and assurance which is so genuinely an attribute of our country.’65 Thus, as Acheson argued in his background press conference on 5 January 1950, the underlying factors in regard to the matter of Taiwan ‘have to do with the fundamental integrity of the United States and with maintaining in the world the belief that when the United States takes a position it sticks to that position and does not change it by reason of transitory expediency or advantage on its

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 33 part …’. Acheson then went on to amplify his statement: ‘the world must believe that we stand for principle and that we are honorable and decent people and that we do not put forward words, as propagandists do in other countries, to serve their advantage only to throw them overboard when some change in events makes the position difficult for us. We believe in integrity in our foreign relations. We believe also in respect of the integrity of other countries …’.66 Although the US was represented with a particular identity and corresponding responsibility, ‘inherent in these troubled times’, to ‘provide the strong and clear leadership which is needed’ to halt the spread of Communism around the world, Acheson worked assiduously within the determined discourse in order to differentiate between Soviet Communism and the Chinese Communists.67 As Acheson told Truman, there were broadly speaking two alternatives in US China policy: ‘One might be to oppose the Communist regime, harass it, needle it, and if the opportunity appeared to attempt to overthrow it. Another objective of policy would be to attempt to detach it from subservience to Moscow and over a period of time encourage those vigorous influences which might modify it.’ Acheson then pointed out that the ‘second alternative did not mean a policy of appeasement any more that it had in the case of Tito’. He then told the President ‘that the Consultants were unanimous in their judgment that the second course was preferable one’. Truman then argued that ‘in the broad sense … this was correct analysis and that he wished to have a thorough understanding of all of the facts in deciding the question’. According to Acheson, Truman believed that the meeting had greatly helped him.68 An important aspect of the position advocated by the ‘determined’ discourse, then, was to encourage a split between Beijing and Moscow. In the NSC 48 meeting, where Acheson established that political considerations must override strategic calculations, he also clarified his thinking on the broader perspective of his China policy. As he told his audience, ‘we must accept the fact that the Chinese Communists are Marxists who regard the Soviet Union as their great and only friend. In all this we must take the long view not of 6 or 12 months but of 6 or 12 years.’ Soviet efforts to separate territory from the Chinese in their northern provinces were the ‘seed of inevitable conflict between China and the Soviet Union. Mao is not a true satellite in that he came to power by his own efforts and was not installed in office by the Soviet Army.’ This situation, Acheson pointed out, ‘is our one important asset in China and it would have to be for a very important strategic purpose that we would take an action which would substitute ourselves for the Soviets as the imperialist menace to China’.69 The aim to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow was in Acheson’s view tied to US Taiwan policy.70 As Acheson explained in his National Press Club speech on 12 January 1950, ‘[w]e must not undertake to deflect from Russians to ourselves the righteous anger and the wrath and the hatred of the Chinese people which must develop. It would be folly to deflect it to ourselves. We must take the position we have always taken that anyone who violates the integrity of China is an enemy of China and is acting contrary to our own interest.’71

34

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

This statement reiterated what Acheson had told Senators Knowland and Smith on 5 January 1950: ‘Inasmuch as Formosa was not of vital importance from a strategic standpoint’, Acheson advocated that the US had much more to lose than gain from military action or adopting a policy of military assistance that would lead to military involvement designed at holding Taiwan. However distasteful the eventuality was ‘that the island might be occupied by the Communists at some stage in the near future’, Acheson emphasised that ‘we must concede that possibility and not compromise our entire position in the Near East by doing deeds that would give lie to our words’.72 Historically, the ‘determined’ discourse drew its authority from the Cairo declaration of 1 December 1943, in which the US, the UK and China announced that ‘Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores shall be restored to the Republic of China’. The three powers reaffirmed the Cairo Declaration in the Potsdam Proclamation of 26 July 1945, which the USSR subsequently endorsed. With the sanctions of the principal powers, Taiwan came under Chinese Nationalist administration in October 1945 and was administered as a province in May 1947.73 Thus, in Acheson’s view, there was a historical precedent for the administration’s policy as he eloquently explained to two of the most outspoken critics of the administration’s policy, Senators Knowland and Smith, on 5 January 1950. In reviewing the history of the Taiwan question Acheson pointed out that ‘Formosa was essentially a Chinese territory, the control of which was interrupted by the Japanese for a period of some 40 years and that in recognition of this inherent right of ownership of the island by China both the Cairo and Potsdam Declaration reaffirmed such rights’. Acheson forcefully continued by stating that ‘if we accept the thesis that to all practical purposes Formosa historically has been a part of China – that it is part of China today and must in all morality continue to be part of China – we are next confronted with the situation as to what, if anything, is to be done about the existing situation’.74 In essence, Acheson replied to his own question by arguing that he ‘did not believe it was in the interest of the American people to hazard a war over Formosa; and secondly, that the mere statement of our intention to so hold the island would be completely defeative of the general line we had been taking and the philosophy we had been preaching of self-determination of all countries and areas in Asia’. Acheson then reiterated that ‘we simply cannot afford, by overt moves on our part, to place ourselves in a position where we would have difficulty in answering the charge that we were moving in the same orbit of imperialistic design that Russia is following today’. Such a move by the US, Acheson remarked, ‘would be greeted by all of the other countries in that area with whom we are trying to work in instilling ideas of responsible government with a sense of revulsion and with an attitude that our deeds were belying our words’.75 From a legal standpoint, Acheson and Truman clearly took issue with those who argued that the final disposition of Taiwan was dependent upon the decision of the Japanese Peace Treaty. As Acheson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 35 on 12 January 1950, whatever the ambiguities of the legal situation ‘Taiwan has been severed from Japan’ and the ‘Government has been set up’. Acheson then continued: ‘[y]ou can say that is all tentative and it does not make any difference until you have a peace treaty’, but then you can say, ‘[a] peace treaty by whom?’ With his legally trained mind Acheson elaborated: ‘[w]ho has to agree about that before it becomes legal, and what do you mean by ‘legal’? Does it become legal if the United States and Japan have a peace treaty? Does it become legal if all those who fought Japan have a peace treaty? Or does it become legal only if all of the nations in the world have a peace treaty?’76 Reiterating his background press conference statement on 5 January 1950, Acheson explained to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee that the Chinese had administered Taiwan for four years. During this period, neither the US nor any other ally questioned that authority or that occupation. ‘When Formosa was made a province of China nobody raised any lawyers’ doubts about that.’ ‘Now, in the opinion of some’, Acheson argued, the mainland of China is unfriendly to us, ‘and therefore they want to say, [w]ell, we have to wait for a treaty’. Acheson vigorously continued, ‘[w]e did not wait for a treaty on Korea. We did not wait for a treaty on the Kuriles. We did not wait for a treaty on the island over which we have trusteeship.’ As he had explained in his press conference, ‘[w]hatever may be the legal situation, the United States of America, Mr. Truman said this morning, is not going to quibble on any lawyers’ words about the integrity of its position. That is where we stand.’77 In short, the ‘determined’ discourse acknowledged that Taiwan was an integral part of China, a view succinctly summarised by Acheson when he stated: ‘I said, the President said, the administration said, that so far as the attitude of the Government is concerned, this [Taiwan] is part of China.’78 Moreover, in order to preserve the integrity, principles and decency of American foreign policy the US would not intervene to save a corrupt and discredited regime on Taiwan. Acheson again forcefully maintained this view in his background press conference on 5 January 1950: ‘We are not going to use our forces in connection with the present situation in Formosa. We are not going to attempt to seize the Island. We are not going to get involved militarily in any way on the Island of Formosa. So far as I know, no responsible person in the Government, no military man has ever believed that we should involve our forces in the Island. I do not believe that is new policy. It would be new policy if we decided to do that.’79 According to Acheson and the military establishment, the fall of Taiwan was inevitable without the intervention of American military force.80 However, to assume such a commitment would undermine the core objectives of the Truman administration’s China policy. The US would ‘become militarily committed to continue a guerrilla warfare with the Chinese for the purpose of holding an island which as a military outpost is not one which we must hold’. As Acheson vigorously concluded his remarks to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 1950: ‘[w]hy should we reverse our entire objectives as regards China in order to fight the Chinese for an island which is not vital?’

36

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

The ‘undetermined’ discourse Two main factors underpinned the ‘undetermined’ discourse: first, the argument that Taiwan was ‘still strictly speaking a part of Japan’, and second, the assertion that the Chinese Communist government was not the one which was in power at the time of the Cairo and Potsdam declaration. These propositions laid the groundwork for a number of Congressional members, military officers and even members of the administration to question the official US Taiwan policy advocated by Truman and Acheson. In the view of those who emphasised the ambiguity presented in the ‘undetermined’ discourse, the US had legitimate interests and a special responsibility as a result of the close connection between the ultimate disposition of Taiwan and the conclusion of the Japanese Peace Treaty. According to a CIA report in March 1950 ‘[n]either the US nor any other power, however, has formally recognised the annexation of Taiwan by China’. Although the US had admitted and acquiesced in China’s de facto control, the report argued that ‘the island’s legal status – like that of other Japanese-occupied territories in which the US and other participants in the war with Japan have interest – remains to be determined in the negotiation of the Japanese peace treaty’.81 Another theme that was highlighted was the fact that the PRC Government on the mainland was not itself a signatory to the Cairo and Potsdam declarations which had stated that ‘all territories Japan had stolen from the Chinese, such as Formosa, Manchuria, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China’.82 Furthermore, one of the provisions of General Order No. 1, issued by General MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the allied powers, which directed the surrender of the Japanese forces, was the order that the surrender of the Japanese forces in China and Formosa should be made to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. That surrender was therefore made by the Japanese to the Chinese and not to anybody else.83 The ‘undetermined’ status of Taiwan, therefore, provided justification to explore a number of schemes to support either an indigenous Taiwanese independence movement, a trusteeship for Taiwan, the overthrow of Chiang or a possible US occupation of the island. In early 1949 Acheson dispatched a special mission, led by Livingston T. Merchant, Counsellor in the Nanking embassy, to investigate if there was a viable indigenous separatist movement or if there existed a reformist KMT government which the US could support. The mission ended in May 1949 and it was reported back to Washington ‘that a Chiang-less and reformist KMT government was not on the cards and that no viable indigenous force existed’.84 Shortly thereafter, the idea of having another Asian nation propose a trusteeship for Taiwan under UN auspices was considered within the State Department.85 Another alternative explored the possibility of a coup, featuring pro-American General Sun Li-jen as the head of a more effective and compassionate successor regime.86 However, none of these measures could be carried out given Chiang’s iron grip on local politics and firm control over the military.87

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 37 An additional idea, a military occupation of Taiwan by US forces, was also advocated by a number of people in and outside of the Government. Senator Smith told Acheson in late 1949 that ‘a military occupation [of Taiwan] would protect our strategic interests in that area’ which Smith regarded as ‘strictly speaking a part of Japan, even though by the Cairo Declaration we had permitted the Chinese to take over’. According to Acheson’s memorandum, the Senator stated that he felt ‘it would be better for Communists to try to dislodge us from the island first before we would have to come in later and try to do the same thing with them’.88 At this stage, Acheson informed Senator Smith that the subject was receiving constant consideration in the NSC and he hoped that a firm decision concerning the matter would be forthcoming on an early date.89 As pointed out earlier, NSC 48 strongly supported Acheson’s ‘hands off’ and ‘let the dust settle’ approach. However, neither Truman’s 5 January 1950 statement nor Acheson’s National Press Club speech placing Taiwan and Korea outside the US defensive perimeter ended speculation about the administration’s Taiwan policy. Truman had added three words to the original statement making it read that ‘the United States has no desire to obtain special rights or privileges or to establish military bases on Formosa at this time’. Sidney Souers later complained that ‘it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad, isn’t it’, referring to the fact that Truman had not checked the phrase with Acheson and that he did not know anything about it.90 Acheson defended the administration’s position in his background briefing a few hours later, arguing that the question ‘is not what does that phrase “at this time” mean … That phrase does not qualify or modify or weaken the fundamental policies stated in this declaration by the President in any respect. It is recognition of the fact that in the unlikely and unhappy event that our forces might be attacked in the Far East the United States must be completely free to take whatever action in whatever area is necessary for its own security.’91 However, this press briefing did not end speculation over US Taiwan policy, and Acheson was constantly defending the administration’s position on Capitol Hill. Even though the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, at Senator Vandenberg’s request, had consulted the General Order No. 1, issued by General MacArthur, under which surrender of Taiwan and other territories was made to the Chinese, and found that there was no reservation in any of these papers of a final right of review at the Japanese peace table, Vandenberg was still ‘unable to follow the chain of events’ and reach the same conclusion as the Secretary of State.92 Thus Vandenberg, one of the leading Republican Senators, pointed out that it would be interesting to have an advisory opinion from the World Court on the precise status of Formosa. Vandenberg was not interested in looking back and trying to assess responsibilities, but in looking forward to the problem we confront, whether or not there is not some sort of a case to be made for the effort to preserve at least a neutral status for Formosa pending an appropriate review by the institution set up for the world precisely for such purpose, to-wit the United Nations, and to the end that perhaps the Formosans might, in connection with such a procedure, find an opportunity to

38

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 say for themselves whether they wish to go back to the Chinese from which they have been separated for 50 years; whether they prefer a trusteeship, or whether they prefer independence, and whether or not in your opinion there is useful possibility to be explored in those directions.93

In his answer, Acheson emphasised the integrity of US foreign policy as ‘a basis for exploring any kind of proposition’ and stated that [o]ne of the fundamental principles of equity and of our position in the world is that we must do this exploring with absolute clean hands. It is one question that the US should be concerned about the future of the Formosans. However, the Formosans were not the subject of worry in the US or elsewhere in the world, although they had a tough time after the war. If our concern about the Formosans is a cloak for considering strategic interests in the US, you have a wholly different matter.94 Accordingly, what Acheson was ‘deeply concerned about in Asia’ was that the US should ‘not take legalistic attitudes which will be interpreted by everyone else in the world as hypocritical, merely to serve some other interests than the one that we profess. No one in Asia would believe that US has benign intentions if the US separates Taiwan from China. Not a soul in the world would believe that is true. Nobody would ever believe that.’95 Acheson, therefore, reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the administration had ‘explored all of those suggestions, of which there have been a great many, and we have rejected them all on the ground that the cost of doing something of that sort in terms of loss to the United States’ position in Asia is far greater than any benefit’.96 Thus, as the leading figure within the administration, Acheson relentlessly steered a course whereby the US would not intervene militarily in Chinese affairs. The ‘red menace’ discourse The ‘red menace’ discourse identified self and other(s) in terms of the evolving representation of Cold War international politics. As the champion of resisting Communist expansion in the late 1940s and with the nation’s unique historical traditions, the US, of course, bore a particular responsibility. As Truman noted in his Inaugural Address, ‘[t]he peoples of the earth face the future with great uncertainty, composed almost equally of great hopes and great fears. In this time of doubt, they look to the United States as never before for good will, strength, and wise leadership.’97 A year later in his State of the Union Address Truman argued that there were no changes ‘more important than the change in the position of the United States in world affairs … Our tremendous strength has brought with it tremendous responsibilities.’98 Acheson explained this succinctly to an audience at Harvard University on 22 June 1950: ‘[i]n accordance with our American traditions and the

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 39 responsibilities which our times have thrust upon us, we have exercised a position of leadership in strengthening the free world’. Two months earlier, Acheson had ‘in all sober truth’ told an audience of newspaper editors that ‘we are faced with a threat not only to our country but to the civilization in which we live and the whole physical environment in which that civilization can exist. This threat is the principal problem that confronts the whole United States in the world today.’99 Accordingly the United States was ‘opposed to the spread of Soviet Communism because it is the means, the tool, by which Soviet Russia is attempting to extend its absolute domination over the widest possible areas of the world’.100 Such ideas were not only articulated in the public sphere but also clearly manifested in a number of post-war strategy documents. In March 1948, NSC 7 on the position of the United States with respect to Soviet-directed world Communism, asserted that ‘the United States is the only source of power capable of mobilizing successful opposition to the communist goal of world conquest’. The report recognised that ‘in these circumstances the USSR has engaged the United States in a struggle for power, or ‘cold war,’ in which our national security is at stake and from which we cannot withdraw short of eventual national suicide’.101 The NSC 7 opinion that the ‘ultimate objective of Soviet-directed world Communism is the domination of the world’ and ‘the defeat of the forces of Soviet-directed world Communism is vital to the security of the United States’, was forcefully reasserted in the pivotal document on US post-war security strategy, NSC 68, presented to Truman on 7 April 1950. This document emphasised the fundamental and apocalyptic struggle against Soviet domination which ‘imposes on us [the US], in our own [US] interests, the responsibility of world leadership’.102 Emily Rosenberg has identified three principal discursive strategies important to the post-war US security imagery, and central to the assessments in the US national security documents: an implied narrative, warning that inaction in foreign policy could bring imminent destruction; a binary framework of symbolic representation; and an appeal to the authority of history.103 To begin with, the documents describe unrivalled danger demanding instantaneous action, as NSC 68 alerts us: ‘The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfilment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.’104 Second, the NSC documents of the early post-war period rely on binary opposites and notions of self and other to construct a particular worldview. In NSC 68 and other post-war security strategy documents the world was drafted in two colours – America and her allies wore the white hat and Communists the black. There was no alternative between ‘freedom under a government of laws, and the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin’ or an ‘alternative to the opposing categories “we” and “them”, “freedom” and “slavery”, “good” and “evil” ’.105 Finally, American leadership and the recommendations contained in the national security documents are located within America’s historical traditions. As Kuklick has argued, American state papers have ‘over three hundred years expressed a consistent vision of a certain kind of social order and the relation of

40

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

this order to other nations around the world’, entrenched in ‘the ideas of Reformed Protestantism and the Enlightenment’.106 Citations from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and The Federalist Papers appear repeatedly in NSC 68 but can also be found in other post-war documents such as NSC 20/1.107 By drawing on the authority of these pivotal texts in American history, US national identity and purpose fall within a cultural context of moral righteousness anchored in ‘conservative ends and unfathomably evil enemies’.108 Within a discourse which emphasised the pivotal struggle against Communist expansion, it became increasingly more difficult to differentiate between Moscow and Beijing. In other words, even though Acheson warned about the dangers in following a policy that would solidify the Chinese people behind the Communist regime and strengthen the ties between Beijing and Moscow, Acheson also argued that ‘[t]his Chinese Government is really a tool of Russian imperialism in China. That gives us our fundamental starting point in regard to our relations with China.’109 In addition, the Truman administration clearly viewed the Chinese Communists as hostile. The Chinese Communist regime had singled out American citizens and interests as special objects of hostility, it had made no pretence of accepting and carrying out the international obligations of China and it had violated diplomatic codes and modes of behaviour. Furthermore, the PRC had decided to ‘lean’ towards the Soviet Union, it concluded a military assistance pact with the Soviet Union, made no attempts to disguise its intentions of taking Taiwan through the use of force and continuously denounced the imperialist US in its official rhetoric.110 Thus the Chinese Communists had indicated by their own actions that they were part of a world-wide Communist conspiracy, organised and directed from Moscow.

US identity and the ‘impartial neutralisation’ of the Taiwan Strait In the last section, I draw upon the discursive representations identified above in order to illustrate some ways in which discourses affected the formulation of US Taiwan policy in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Korean War. By examining the discursive representations and their internal logic and conditions for possibility, we can ask what course of action would seem commonsensical and intelligible when statesmen viewed the bellicose events on the Korean Peninsula in late June 1950. Put differently, we can assess the limits, the scope and the power of discourses. One policy option, the continued adherence to the ‘determined’ discourse, seemed unthinkable in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Korean War. As Acheson saw it in July 1950, ‘[w]e do not believe Formosa can be limited to a facet of the Chinese problem; it involves our attitude toward present Communist determination to seize Asia, a determination which US feels we must oppose in the interest of our own national as well as world security’. Acheson further recognised that a ‘seizure of Formosa by [Chinese Communists] at [an] hour when UN

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 41 forces [are] resisting aggression in Korea [would] be [a] considerable stimulus to [the] morale of destructive forces in Asia and thus work to [the] detriment [of] US interests’. Preventing Taiwan from falling into the hands of the Chinese Communists was, under the circumstances, ‘an attempt which we had to make as matter of elementary precaution at time of grave uncertainty’.111 Looking back at the decision in June 1950 to intervene in Korea and to interpose the Seventh Fleet, Acheson maintained that ‘the attack on Korea makes exactly 180 percent difference’. As Acheson explained to the group of influential policymakers and historians during the Princeton seminar meetings in 1953 and 1954, ‘I don’t think that there was a question in anyone’s mind or that it entered into the discussion that took place – as to whether we would or would not stand up … to this issue that had been presented to us. I think it was just sort of clear to us without discussion, that we were going to … [C]ertainly there was nobody there who took the view that we should not regard this as a crisis to which we had to respond.’112 In the crucial dinner meeting at the Blair House, after Ambassador Muccio’s telegram 925 reporting the North Korean attack on 25 June 1950, the consensus was that the US could not simply sit idly by. North Korea, ‘completely under Kremlin control’, could not get away with its bellicose action and the US needed to ‘draw a line’ against Communist aggression.113 However, the US did not only embark upon prompt action in Korea. Truman’s decision, taken on 26 June 1950, to intervene in the Taiwan Strait appeared to contradict repeated judgements by the State Department and the military establishment that Taiwan was not essential to American security. But Truman simply could not countenance a Communist attack on Taiwan while considering sending American soldiers to defend South Korea from a Communist onslaught. Communism, it seemed, had proved its monolithic nature and splintering China from the Soviet sphere was no longer considered possible. The JCS assessed the situation no differently. General Vandenberg pointed out that in regard to Formosa ‘all places were interrelated’ and ‘Formosa was therefore important only in relation to other places’. Thus, the military establishment continually referred to the Soviet menace, China as Moscow’s lackey in Asia and articulated its world view in dichotomised terms.114 The diplomatic corps concurred with Washington’s interpretation. Walworth Barbour, Counsellor of the embassy in Moscow, and Chargé d’Affaires in the absence of Ambassador Kirk, advised Acheson on 25 June 1950 that if the estimates in Muccio’s report were correct, ‘this aggressive NK military move against ROK represents clearcut Soviet challenge which in our considered opinion US should answer firmly and swiftly as it constitutes [a] direct threat to our leadership of [the] free world against Soviet Communist imperialism’.115 Ambassador Kirk saw the events in no less stark terms than his Counsellor: ‘[T]he Embassy assesses the invasion in its broadest implications as a direct challenge to the free world and US leadership thereof …’.116 Confronted with the North Korean attack, the US Government believed that it was faced with an imperative for action. But surely this raises some questions.

42

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

Why was the decision to dispatch the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait ‘sort of clear to us without discussion’? How did the events on the Korean Peninsula become defined ‘as a crisis’ to which ‘we had to respond’? What was the source of this obvious representation of emergency, shared by US decision-makers, which made continued commitment to the ‘determined’ discourse unacceptable and embracement of a military course of action commonsensical? In the case of US Taiwan policy, to paraphrase Weldes, this means explaining how, that is, through which concrete discursive processes or textual mechanism, the North Korean attack came to mean an intolerable threat to the US so that there emerged an unquestioned national interest in preventing the Chinese Communists from occupying Taiwan.117 The justification for intervention in the Taiwan Strait was to prevent another war and was contained in the following statement from the announcement by the President on 27 June 1950: The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war. It has defied orders of the Security Council of the United Nations issued to preserve international peace and security. In these circumstances the occupation of Formosa by communist forces would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area. Accordingly, I have ordered the Seventh Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa. As a corollary to this action I am calling upon the Chinese Government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland. The Seventh Fleet will see this is done. The determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.118 In the above statement the predicates can be extracted from the text by the descriptive characters, adjectives and capabilities attributed to various subjects. Communism is endowed with the following attributes which share a certain resemblance: it had deployed tactics ‘of subversion’ and attempted to ‘conquer independent nations’ through the use of ‘armed invasion and war’, thereby ‘defying orders of the Security Council of the United Nations’ and endangering ‘international peace and security’. The predicates and attributes that defined the United States were not identical with the cluster that defined the Communists. The United States instead performed ‘lawful and necessary functions’ to protect the Pacific area and United States forces in response to a ‘direct threat’. Consequently, steps had to be taken to ‘reinforce areas exposed to Communist pressure’.119 According to the Truman administration, the US was merely fulfilling altruistic commitments in virtue of its leadership in response to Communist aggression for the sake of self-interest and domination. ‘What we are doing in other areas’, Acheson told the press on 28 June 1950, ‘is to take action which is made necessary

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 43 by the obvious determination of Communist Governments in the Far East to progress beyond subversion to direct military attack.’120 In a memorandum transmitted to senior officials in the State Department (Deputy Under Secretary Matthews, Assistant Secretaries Rusk and Hickerson and Counselor Kennan) in the summer of 1950, Dulles, Consultant to Acheson, explicitly summarised what Kennan thought was an excellent analysis, the distinction between the American and Soviet actions: ‘we are defending the independent nationalism of the new Asiatic states, whereas Russia is seeking to destroy that independence, using communism as the device’.121 Although the Truman administration remained concerned about the support for its Far Eastern policy from Asian countries, by defining its adversary as a totalitarian Communist regime, it was implied that the US was acting for the protection of self-determination and independence ‘from whatever quarter it is threatened’, while Soviet actions were ‘little more than a recrudescence in a new guise of the aggressive ambitions of the Czars’.122 Accordingly, what might otherwise be understood as US intervention was being described in terms of US commitments. In virtue of its leadership, the United States contracted commitments to defend freedom, to protect its allies and to counter Communist aggression. Weldes reminds us, however, that the implications of such distinctions are clear: ‘Commitments made by leaders such as the United States are legitimate; the power involvements of Communists are not.’123 In addition, American traditions of freedom and liberty meant that the US had a ‘sense of moral and political direction’, which conferred on it a leadership role of the free world.124 This was not a small obligation, as Truman stated in a luncheon with the Society of Newspaper Editors in April 1950: ‘We have no purpose of going to war except in defense of freedom.’125 Indeed, the necessity to protect freedom globally stemmed from the axiom that freedom is indivisible: a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. ‘We cannot hope to maintain our own freedom’, Truman told a national radio and television audience in September 1950, ‘if freedom elsewhere is wiped out’.126 Referring to US actions in response to Communist aggression, Acheson was convinced that ‘the overwhelming support from the free nations of the world is precisely due to their recognition that the whole future of the free world is at stake’.127 Averell Harriman, President Truman’s special assistant, thought it was ‘vitally important for everyone to realize that we were basically concerned with the morale of the free world. If we gave in to Communism, morale would slip badly.’128 By acting in the defence of freedom, the US was confronted with a perpetual struggle for survival between the ‘free world’ and the ‘international Communist conspiracy’. The North Korean attack represented the proof that Moscow-oriented Communists were on the march worldwide. As Truman stated ‘[t]he attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond any doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war’.129 Confronted with such a manifestation of Communist hostility, the

44

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

US, in defence of its identity, was not able to separate actions in Korea from commitments elsewhere.130 In an exchange with Thomas E. Dewey, Governor of New York and Republican Party leader, on 27 June 1950, Truman laid down the basic principles of US support for South Korea: ‘Our pledge of faith to that nation is a witness to all the world that we champion liberty wherever the tyranny of communism is the aggressor.’131 Acheson concurred, arguing that ‘we are profoundly convinced that we are acting for the protection of the entire free world’ when he wrote to Britain’s Prime Minister, Ernest Bevin, explaining ‘certain fundamental aspects of the US position’.132 Taken together, as Truman explained in his memoirs, all these actions were based on the premise of upholding the rule of law and US obligations.133 Thus, the various predicates construct social realities, inform social interaction and influence the meanings and representations that are indispensable for social action. Put another way, representations of the outbreak of the Korean War and US responses to the situation in the Far East in the summer of 1950 only become meaningful within a discursive realm in which meaning is constantly renegotiated. Predicates therefore, function as background capacities for producing meaning within discourse, but also serve as a frame (most often hierarchical) for defining subject identities.134 Communist identity was constructed around its aggressiveness, totalitarianism and untrustworthiness, while US identity was seen as encompassing the leadership of the free world which legitimated certain actions with attendant obligations and commitments. The presuppositions can be located in the statement by examining how meaning is dependent upon binary oppositions and notions of self and other which construct a particular worldview. Binary constructions of meaning were structured around opposites such as good/evil, order/chaos. These techniques of articulating the US foreign policy discourse served to construct a single point of vision as ‘reality’. Within the struggle between good and evil it served to construct two kinds of subjects. The Communist camp was seen as a monolithic bloc and the US as the leader of the free world. Accordingly, the United States had moral obligations and was fulfilling altruistic commitments in response to Communist aggression, while the Communist world was totalitarian and seeking domination. The Pacific area also encompassed the opposition of order/chaos. The situation was constructed as a place threatened by disorder, whose very definition as well as the strategy by which it should be managed was established by the US. The US would ‘prevent any attack on Formosa’ and ‘called upon’ the Kuomintang Government to ‘cease all air and sea operations against the [Chinese] mainland’. This opposition worked to objectify Taiwan as an object at stake in the worldwide struggle between good and evil, order and chaos. The parent–child analogy becomes prominent. The Taiwanese and the KMT were seen as childlike subjects and the parents in this relationship could not simply turn them loose in a dangerous world of competing forces of good/evil, order/ chaos. ‘Rather, they need to be nurtured, guided, and aided until they are capable of handling their own affairs and make their own decisions.’135 Taiwan, therefore, became an essential part of the Asian off-shore island chain of bases, a possible

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 45 key to Soviet control of the Far East and a testing ground for American leadership. This made re-intervention in the Civil War between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists thinkable and interposing the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait possible. US Taiwan policy, therefore, became located within the boundaries defined by the ‘undetermined’ and ‘red menace’ discourses. Moving away from the perception that the PRC was distinct from the Communist bloc, the dominant discourse in the aftermath of the North Korean attack saw the Chinese Communists instead as a relentless threat and a ‘red menace’. This is not to say that one discourse was universally agreed upon or that it went unchallenged, but it was the case that most policymakers within the Truman administration turned to these meanings and representations to order their understanding of US Taiwan policy. Although these discourses differed on policy options and predicates, most of the discourses agreed that the US had a certain identity which affected social practices and policymaking. As the leading Western power in the post-war period, the United States, of course, bore a particular responsibility to respond to Communist aggression. The ‘red menace’ discourse therefore shares many similarities with traditional accounts that have situated US Taiwan and China policy within a Cold War context. As the champion of resisting Communist expansion in the late 1940s and with its nation’s unique historical traditions, capacity, values and moral exceptionalism, the American leadership role constituted a warrant for action: a will, an expectation, a right and an obligation. A key characteristic associated with ‘red menace’ discourse, then, was the need for a leader to show firmness and determination. The US could not simply yield to pressure at the same time as the morale of the free world was in danger. US prestige and status as a superpower were clearly being tested in the face of world opinion. As Truman claimed, ‘we consider the Korean situation vital as a symbol of the strength and determination of the West. Firmness now would be the only way to deter new actions in other portions of the world.’136 George Kennan, acting as Counselor to Acheson, believed that ‘[o]ur own national prestige is at stake in the most obvious way and no one is going to help us initially with its defense in this area’.137 Moreover, the North Korean attack threatened the US with the appearance of a situation of appeasement in which, if a small step by the aggressor were permitted to pass without challenge, further aggression was sure to follow. With the entire world watching and anxiously awaiting the result, the US could not succumb to any pressure or exhibit any sign of weakness.138 Truman elaborated on this analogy in a conversation with George M. Elsey on 26 June 1950. ‘Korea’, Truman said, ‘is the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now, if we stand up to them like we did in Greece three years ago, they won’t take any next steps. But if we just stand by, they’ll move into Iran and they’ll take over the whole Middle East. There’s no telling what they’ll do, if we don’t put up a fight now.’139 Interpreted through the manifest lessons of appeasement, the US could not succumb to any pressure. Although Taiwan was considered a strategically

46

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

peripheral area and American forces were thought to be better utilised elsewhere, the US could not tolerate a Communist assault of Taiwan at a time of great uncertainty. Passivity was synonymous with appeasement and an acceptance of US declining power indicating that the US was not able to eradicate a threat to its position as the leader of the free world. Consequently, the Truman administration was eager to show its resoluteness, demonstrated through resounding military success and achieved by the display of overwhelming power.140 On a global stage, then, signalling acquiescence in the face of the North Korean attack would have unfavourable repercussions for US commitments to contain Communism and would undermine the credibility of the Truman administration by directly challenging explicit presidential promises. As Kennan pointed out, ‘[a] Communist conquest of Formosa, either by political or military means or both, coming in the wake of the President’s statement, would be gravely damaging to our political position not only in Asia but possibly throughout the world. I believe that it would be comparable in its effects to a complete military defeat in Korea.’141 In short, the rising preoccupation with Communist aggression created an understanding where American leaders made frequent reference to the Chinese Communists’ untrustworthiness and their role as lackeys of a Moscow-directed Communist conspiracy in Asia. Accordingly, the strong emotions evoked among American leaders by defining the North Korean attack as Communist aggression instigated an obligation to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Straits if the US was to preserve its identity. Although the Truman administration felt it necessary to respond to Communist aggression and protect ‘the left flank of the whole UN position’, a focus on the ‘red menace’ discourse alone cannot adequately explain US Taiwan policy.142 Arguably, no matter how deeply the White House wanted to take a firm position in Korea and prevent any Communist landing on Taiwan, the decision to ‘neutralise’ the Taiwan Strait was profoundly embedded in both the ‘undetermined’ and the ‘determined’ discourses. The US decision to dispatch the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Straits was seen as ‘an impartial neutralizing action addressed both to the forces on Formosa and to those on the mainland’.143 Thus, Truman’s authoritative statement on 27 June 1950 was directed at deterring the mainland as much as it was directed at constraining Taiwan, and Truman drew heavily on the assumptions entrenched in the ‘undetermined’ discourse when he argued that the ‘determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations’. The ultimate deposition of Taiwan, therefore, rested on two essential features of the ‘undetermined’ discourse: first, the legal ambiguity that the PRC Government was not a signatory to the Cairo and Potsdam declarations that restored the territory of Taiwan to the ROC, and second, that the US occupied a special responsibility to settle the legal status of Taiwan through the conclusion of the Japanese Peace Treaty. This rendered the decision to ‘neutralise’ the Taiwan Strait and US interests in the status of Taiwan sensible and legitimate.

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 47 Although Truman declared that ‘[o]ur desire is that Formosa not become embroiled in hostilities disturbing to the peace of the Pacific and that all questions affecting Formosa be settled by peaceful means as envisaged in the Charter of the United Nations’, he had in a private meeting with Congressional leaders on 27 June 1950 acknowledged that US actions with regard to Taiwan, the Philippines and Indochina were not taken under the UN.144 Thus, in order to justify US actions in the Taiwan Strait, the Truman administration emphasised that guarantees against military action were applied both ways, ‘that is to prevent attacks from Formosa as well as on Formosa’. Consequently, the US moved cautiously in ‘handling the Formosa question not to divert attention from Korea’.145 Later, in a keynote address before Congress in July 1950, Truman clarified US actions with regard to Taiwan. In reminiscence of the ideas articulated within the ‘determined’ discourse by Acheson in his background press conference on 5 January 1959, Truman told his audience that ‘[i]n order that there may be no doubt in any quarter about our intentions regarding Formosa’, the US had no ‘territorial ambitions’ nor did the US seek ‘any special position or privilege on Formosa’. He continued, insisting that ‘[t]he present military neutralization of Formosa is without prejudice to political questions affecting that island’.146 Truman also forcefully instructed General MacArthur to convey to the Chinese Nationalist Government that any attack on the Mainland ‘will be considered an unfriendly act’.147 However, any attempts to reassure the Chinese Communists that ‘we are taking no aggressive or provocative step which would lead the Chinese to believe that there is any hostile feeling against them on our part’ rested on flawed assumptions.148 To the Chinese Communists, the decision to interpose the Seventh Fleet confirmed the treacherous and imperialistic nature of America, a state that had repeatedly vowed to avoid involvement in Chinese affairs. Furthermore, by acting outside the mechanisms of the UN, the proclaimed intentions of the Truman administration did not satisfy the legitimate demands of its allies or Asiatic states which had recognised the PRC. The subject position of the US as a leader of the free world with attendant responsibilities and obligations was simply taken for granted. As Weldes has pointed out, ‘[s]pecific subject positions are created when social phenomena are depicted … Each subject position or identity carries with it particular ways of functioning in the world, is located within specific power relations, and is characterized by particular interests’.149 Situating the US as with a particular identity makes a material difference, since how we act in certain situations depends on how both self and other(s) are negotiated and what our definitions of the situation are. Certain practices might be similar, but ascertaining how actions constitute threats, aggression, obligations or commitments, is determined by the kind of subject engaging in it.150 For instance, when the US interposes the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait, this action is certainly ‘real’, though the interposition of marine vessels into a particular sea area is in itself uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of representations that produce meaning. To paraphrase Doty, it is only when ‘America’ is attached

48

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

to the troops and ‘Taiwan Strait’ to the geographical space that meaning is created. What the physical behaviour itself is, however, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an ‘invasion’, a ‘neutralisation’, a ‘show of forces’, a ‘training exercise’, a ‘protection of peace’, or a ‘rescue’, and so on.151 In other words, the actual behaviour and physical content of providing economic and military aid might be identical, but the meaning attached to these practices is constituted through discursive representations. Consequently, America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom, did not share the view that US action with regard to Taiwan was necessary or obligatory. As Bevin explained in a lengthy telegram to Acheson on 14 July 1950, the British government and in particular the Asiatic states in which India was a major representative, could not understand ‘why the US should intervene by stationing its fleet in a certain position to prevent a lawfully established and recognised government from performing its normal functions over the island of Formosa and its inhabitants’.152 Thus, the British Government repeatedly reminded the Truman administration that although the US was strongly supported for its ‘prompt’ and ‘determined’ action in Korea, which was the ‘binding and cementing influence’ for the support among free Asiatic nations, the action in regard to Taiwan ‘was disturbing and was viewed with grave alarm by the entire Oriental free world’. Bevin emphasised this view in a conversations with Douglas, the American ambassador to the UK, when he argued that, ‘[v]iewed through Asiatic eyes, Formosa belongs to China, quite irrespective of what sort of government China may or may not have. Under the pronouncement of Cairo, confirmed by the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, Formosa is legitimately part of the area over which the Chinese Government, howsoever composed and of whatsoever political complexion, should lawfully exercise jurisdiction.’153 The US Government, however, had not recognised the People’s Republic and would therefore not subscribe to the view that its own conduct was illegitimate or breaching the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the PRC.

Conclusion As I have sought to demonstrate in this chapter, foreign policy crises, and especially acute crises like the North Korean attack, present important opportunities for the (re)production of state identities.154 Despite the liability Chiang and his KMT Government posed to US China policy, once the bellicose actions in Korea became defined as a Communist conspiracy, any further Communist aggression had to be prevented as it threatened precisely what the US represented in the early 1950. Hence, the means chosen to combat the threat to US identity as the leader in a worldwide struggle with Communism undermined the ends the Truman administration was seeking in its China policy and it became increasingly more difficult to differentiate between vital and peripheral areas to US national security and to maintain a nuanced view of the Communist bloc. Such a starting point can throw new light onto the decision that it ‘appeared compulsory’ to protect Taiwan and some of the ‘underlying elements’ and ‘hidden

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50 49 factors’ that supposedly influenced US Taiwan policy according to traditional accounts. This analysis also suggests some reservations about the emphasis on strategic calculations as the guiding premise behind the decision to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. Because there are no objectively correct descriptions of the ‘national interest’ apart from the way decision-makers discursively constitute and interpret interests, it has been argued that a more nuanced understanding of US Taiwan policy would inquire into how identities fundamentally shape state interests. In accounting for the American response to the North Korean crisis in June 1950 we find a discursively constructed subject, the US, with a particular discursively constituted identity construed around US leadership of the free world, its strength, commitments and obligations, and its belief in binary oppositions. This evolving Cold War identity, which I identified as the ‘red menace’ discourse, was defined in opposition to aggressive totalitarian others and conferred onto the US the task of containing Communist aggression. In other words, the way in which US decision-makers understood events in East Asia after the outbreak of the Korean War, and the reasons why the US national interest in that crisis seemed so obvious, as Acheson argued, cannot be explained without understanding the identity of the US as a leader of the free world in a worldwide struggle against the Communist movement. The decision to ‘neutralise’ the Taiwan Strait, then, was produced in representations of the North Korean attack as a serious threat to the precarious Cold War identity of the US and as an opportunity to reassert that identity. Focusing on the ‘red menace’ discourse, therefore, provides additional insight to traditional accounts on the origins of the Taiwan issue in US–China relations and comprehends mainstream approaches by focusing analysis on how particular background meanings, subject positions and interpretive disposition were socially constructed so that certain practices were made possible. However, this chapter has illustrated that a more comprehensive understanding of US Taiwan policy also needs to explore the role of competing discourses. Discourses are always in the process of being articulated and their exterior limits are constituted by other discourses that create the conditions for meaning which is indispensable for policy action. The two most significant alternative representations to the ‘red menace’ discourse were the ‘determined’ and the ‘undetermined’ discourses and they both had a significant impact on US Taiwan policy in 1949–50. I have established that the ‘determined’ discourse had a predominate role in shaping US Taiwan policy prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, which supports the view that Acheson had no intentions of reversing his ‘hands off’ and ‘let the dust settle’ approach. Although we can trace aspects of the ‘determined’ discourse in policy documents and official statements in the aftermath of the Korean War, eventually it became marginalised and the intervention of PRC ‘volunteers’ in the Korean War in late October 1950 shattered any prospect of reconciliation in US–China relations. Thus, in order to fully understand how ‘neutralisation’ of the Taiwan Strait became the appropriate US Taiwan policy it is essential to explicate how

50

Origins of the ‘Taiwan issue’ 1949–50

the authoritative statement on 27 June 1950 was entrenched in the ‘undetermined’ discourse. The ‘undetermined’ discourse illuminates not only why Taiwan was construed as an important asset to US military operations in East Asia but also how the US was licensed to judge that ‘neutralisation’ of the Taiwan Strait was a reasonable, appropriate and intelligible response to the outbreak of the Korean War. In other words, an emphasis on the discourses that guided US decision-makers’ response to the North Korean attack shows how unthinkable it would be for any decisionmakers to say that America was engaging in aggression against the PRC. That is, the decision to ‘neutralise’ the Taiwan Strait made sense if one occupied the subject position of the US, albeit the UK, America’s closest ally, could not understand ‘why the US should intervene’. Regardless of the potential dangers that US action in the Taiwan Strait would envenom Anglo-American relations, alienate Asian states and jeopardise US aims to mobilise regional forces for the task of containment, the discursive representations embedded in the ‘undetermined’ and the ‘red menace’ discourses made it possible to intervene in order to save a discredited but anti-communist regime on Taiwan. As the Truman administration’s China policy eventually became entrenched in the overall struggle against worldwide Communism, the Chinese Communists, construed as a tool of Moscow-oriented Communist aggression in Asia, had to be denied control of Taiwan if the US was to secure its identity.

3

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

In the previous chapter, I scrutinised how, when judging the situation on the Korean Peninsula in June 1950, the Truman administration decided that interposing the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait was the only reasonable course of action in dealing with the Chinese Communists. In other words, I examined how a policy of intervention in the Chinese Civil War, first regarded by the Truman administration as counterproductive to American interests, came to be deemed necessary and non-intervention unthinkable. Now we turn to the period when President Nixon capitalised on many of the ideas first advanced by Dean Acheson in 1949 and 1950. The main objective, however, is not to provide a comprehensive analysis into the process of rapprochement in US–China relations.1 Instead, by using recently available documents from the Nixon Presidential Materials, this chapter seeks to examine how the Nixon administration was able to open up space on the Taiwan issue to consider alternatives which had previously been understood to be unrealistic. In preparing for and following Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972, the contested and unsettled Taiwan issue in US China policy again shifted. Although the United States did not publicly recognise the PRC’s sovereignty over Taiwan in the Shanghai Communiqué, Nixon and Kissinger had clearly indicated in their secret discussions with the Chinese leaders that the status of Taiwan was no longer considered ‘undetermined’.2 Indeed, the ‘five principles’ concerning Taiwan, advocated by Nixon and Kissinger in their talks with Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou, would later provide important leverage for President Carter when his administration moved toward a normalisation of relations between the US and China in December 1978.3 The analysis that follows illuminates this contested process by which the architects of a new US Taiwan policy constituted identities, produced new knowledge and pursued new meanings in order to construct and maintain new representations of the Taiwan issue. By scrutinising the competing discourses about the status of Taiwan within official circles during the Nixon administration, the principal aim is to show how US Taiwan policy is historically contingent, contested and unstable and tied to US identity and American representations of China and Taiwan. Paraphrasing Wendt’s argument about the end of the Cold War, it may be that ‘objective conditions’ were such that representations ‘had’ to

52

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

change in US Taiwan policy but that does not change the fact that in an important sense those representations constituted the Taiwan issue, and as such changing them by definition changed the reality.4 Thus, the argument developed is concerned with the ‘type of political context in which these changes could be meaningfully introduced and, therefore, embraced’.5 Actors are always already embedded in discursive conditions of possibility that shape and constitute the parameters for action. However, within these structures of historical meaning actors are capable of a degree of agency. ‘In a context of contestation, the room for manoeuvre may be enlarged’ and actors can make ‘their own history’.6 Questions about identity and a state’s vision about itself, ‘who we are and where we are going’, are central when actors struggle ‘to make their own world’.7 ‘Since all identity is relational’ a critical aspect in understanding the contingent construction of the status of Taiwan depends on how both self and other(s) were constructed within US China policy discourses.8 Thus, the pattern governing interaction with the PRC which was understood as a threat and an illegitimate aggressive power differs from that of interaction with a legitimate major power essential to peace and prosperity in Asia. In other words, US Taiwan policy becomes contested as certain practices were made possible, as the US rearticulated the identities of self and other(s) through discourses whereby these identities seemed reasonable, commonsensical and appropriate. An important aspect, then, is to identify the larger intersubjective context within which changes in US Taiwan policy would be seen to be sensible and therefore justifiable. As Fierke maintains, ‘possibilities and power are intersubjectively constituted and made meaningful through language’ and intentions and decisions have to be made ‘in a framework within which it could be justified to others’.9 Alteration in the Nixon administration’s Taiwan policy will therefore be examined by focusing on the changing discursive representation of the Taiwan issue and US China policy within bureaucratic forums, the public, alliances and bilateral relationships. The opening section illuminates the sequence of events leading to Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing in July 1971. I then briefly account for the conventional view on rapprochement in Sino-American relations. Counter to the traditional account, which has emphasised the position of the US in the international constellation of power and sought explanations for America’s opening to China through the concept of ‘national interest’, this study problematises the implicit assumptions of rationalist approaches that an independent reality is directly accessible to policymakers. As Weldes notes, the way in which the neorealists have conceptualised the ‘national interest’ remains inadequate. Neorealists assume that the distribution of material capabilities can be ‘objectively’ calculated and that threats to a nation’s national interests can be accurately recognised. This notion ignores the centrality of processes of interpretation. Accordingly, ‘dictates of power are never clearly manifested’.10 Instead, we need to rethink how all interests are particular historical constructions embedded in a shared language that remain contingent and inextricably linked to discursive representations and identities.

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 53 Before policymakers act, they engage in an interpretive process whereby shared meanings construct the situation faced by the state and how statesmen make sense of the world. This process ‘makes threats and opportunities, enemies and allies, intelligible, thinkable, and possible’.11 Moreover, it is commonplace for traditional approaches to focus on ‘why’ questions which, as Doty has pointed out, generally take ‘as unproblematic the possibility that particular policies and practices could happen’.12 My aim is not to jettison ‘why’ questions or argue against their utility. Neither is the objective to establish whether ‘how’ questions matter more than ‘why’ questions. But, as Wendt’s discussion about the central role of ideas versus material factors makes clear, ‘the ‘what matters more’ question is important at the ontological level, because of the a priori assumptions that are made’.13 ‘Why’ questions presuppose the identity of social actors and take core concepts such as anarchy, state, power, rational actor, national interest and sovereignty for granted. In contrast, as Doty emphasises, ‘how questions examine how meanings are produced and attached to various social subjects and objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions that create certain possibilities and preclude others’.14 Thus, such an approach opens the possibility for new kinds of questions and answers about US Taiwan policy and the process of rapprochement in US– China relations. Following this discussion I argue that few studies have focused on the Taiwan issue during the process of reconciliation in US–Chinese relations and hardly any work has been done exploring this issue from a discourse and language-based reading of recently declassified archival material from the Nixon administration.15 It is in this context that this chapter seeks to make a contribution. The remaining two-thirds of the chapter, therefore, endeavour to put this approach into practice. Divided into two sections, the analysis begins by investigating the changing discursive representations of the Taiwan issue through four discourses about the status of Taiwan within US China policy: Taiwan as representing all of China (the ‘red menace’ discourse), the status of Taiwan as ‘undetermined’, Taiwan as ‘independent’, and the status of Taiwan as ‘determined’ (meaning that there is one-China and that Taiwan is part of China). Related to this analysis, I explore the predicates, presuppositions and categorisations attributed to the various subjects within each discourse. The discussion, then, highlights the textual mechanisms that create background knowledge by examining how articulation and presupposition construct particular kind of meanings, identities and subject positions. The second section, in turn, shows how these meanings and representations play an important part in the process of discursively constructing the status of Taiwan, by rendering some courses of action possible while excluding others as inappropriate or unthinkable. Rather than framing the Taiwan issue according to a state-centric geopolitical ordering of world politics, it is argued that the question about the status of Taiwan is better understood through a theoretical framework that considers the political consequences of adopting one mode of representation over another. These discursive representations, therefore, carried concrete policy consequences – notably in relation to American military presence on Taiwan and

54

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

in the acknowledgment of the one-China principle, which has been the foundation for US–China–Taiwan relations until today.

Signalling rapprochement As we have seen, between 1945 and 1950 the US acted as though it considered Taiwan to be part of China. With Truman’s statement on 27 June 1950, however, the US ‘neutralised’ the Taiwan Strait and considered the status of Taiwan as ‘undetermined’, thereby maintaining that the question of sovereignty over Taiwan ‘remained to be determined by some form of appropriate international action’.16 The ‘undetermined’ status of Taiwan was reiterated in the Japanese Peace Treaty, signed at a conference in San Francisco on 8 September 1951. Without the representation of either the ROC or the PRC, Japan ‘renounced all right, title and claim to Formosa and the Pescadores’ but did not cede this area to any particular entity and intentionally omitted any mention of the future fate of these territories.17 In response to the September 1954 PRC attack against Quemoy and other Offshore Islands, Taiwan was brought formally into alliance with the US through the signing of the US–ROC Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) on 2 December 1954. Congress passed the Formosa Resolution on 29 January 1955, giving the President the authority to defend Quemoy and Matsu if he felt it necessary for the security of Taiwan and the Pescadores. During the second Taiwan Strait crisis in October 1958, President Eisenhower allowed the Seventh Fleet to escort ROC shipping engaged in re-supplying Quemoy and President Kennedy reaffirmed US commitments to defend the Offshore Islands following a new build-up of Chinese forces opposite Taiwan in June 1962.18 The Vietnam War further consolidated the close ties between Taipei and Washington and increased the level of US troops on the island considerably. Total US aid from 1949 exceeded $5.9 billion, with $1.7 billion in economic assistance and $4.2 billion in military assistance. The US terminated economic assistance in 1965 and military assistance ended in the mid-1970s. In sum, however, America’s economic, political and military assistance to the government of the ROC played a conspicuous centrality in Taiwan’s attainment of survival and prosperity throughout the 1950s and 1960s.19 The announcement on 15 July 1971 that Kissinger had been visiting Beijing preparing for a presidential trip to take place sometime before May 1972 was, therefore, sudden and dramatic. However, it was preceded and produced by a carefully developed series of steps. As Nixon argued, in fact, no other US foreign policy move during his first term in office had been approached more meticulously.20 Although Nixon had a reputation of being a hard core anti-communist within the right wing of the Republican party, his ideas about China during the 1950s and 1960s also reflected the view that China was too important to the United States to be ignored or isolated and that Washington simply had to engage with the issue of China in its Asian strategy.21 In his much-quoted article in Foreign Affairs in October 1967, Nixon still portrayed China as a threat and danger in Asia, however,

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 55 in the long run Nixon asserted that: ‘… we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations … There is no place in this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.’22 Only weeks after entering the White House in January 1969, Nixon revealed his intentions of seeking better relations with the PRC. In early February 1969, in response to a report indicating some East European concern about possible Sino-American contacts, Nixon emphasised in a memorandum to Kissinger that ‘I noted in your January 31 report the interesting comments from [the East European] source. I think we should give every encouragement to the attitude that this Administration is exploring possibilities of rapprochement [sic] with the Chinese.’ Nixon instructed Kissinger that ‘this, of course, should be done privately and should under no circumstances get into public prints from this direction’. Finally, Nixon recommended that Kissinger should continue to plant the idea that the administration was exploring a move toward China ‘in contacts with your friends, and particularly in any ways you might have to get to this … source’.23 Drawing on these instructions, Kissinger initiated a policy review by directing an interagency study of US policy toward China. The National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 14 asked for a broad policy review.24 Assuming that total withdrawal from involvement in Asia, where US and Chinese interests impinge on one another, ‘would be detrimental to US interests and objectives’, the NSSM 14 concluded: While it is agreed that a more active and moderate China participating in the World Community could present a more effective, long-range challenge to US interests, which would require close attention, there is on the other hand the concern that an isolated and excessively insecure China increases the probability of major miscalculation and irrational behaviour. Therefore, while a more moderate China is surely not necessarily less a threat per se, the threat does become more manageable and predictable under more normal conditions. Simultaneously, State Department officials were continuously compiling a variety of policy options designed to reduce bilateral tension and signal US willingness to initiate a new direction in US–PRC relations during Nixon’s first year in the White House. Drawing on Assistant Secretary of State Marshall Green’s report back in October, Secretary of State William Rogers recommended to Nixon in December 1969 that ‘we should take the opportunity presented by the advent of our adm, the subsidence of the Cultural Revolution, the intensity of the SinoSoviet antipathy, and the prospect of a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, to try and move our relationship with the Chinese Communists off dead center … We will have to face the problem some day, and we feel it is better to move when we can exercise some control over the manner of moving rather than waiting until we are forced to take action at a time and in a manner not of our own choosing’. 25 Throughout 1969 and 1970, therefore, the Nixon administration inaugurated a series of measures which underlined a growing willingness to develop a more

56

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

constructive relationship with the PRC. Upon completion of the review of China policy, trade and travel restrictions were progressively relaxed.26 On 16 November 1969 the Seventh Fleet’s Taiwan Strait Patrol was modified.27 The phased sequences of unilateral measures were of such a nature that they did not require a response from Beijing, nor did they place the Chinese Communists in an awkward position. At the same time, they were designed to signal to Beijing that the administration was ready for serious dialogue. These steps were accompanied by a series of public statements which delineated the changing attitude of the Nixon administration. On 20 January 1969, in his Inaugural Address, Nixon clarified the administration’s approach towards potential adversaries: ‘After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation … We seek an open world – open to ideas, open to the exchange of goods and people – a world in which no people, great or small, will live in angry isolation … We cannot expect to make everyone our friend, but we can try to make no one our enemy.’ In preparing for his visit to Beijing, President Nixon argued that ‘[w]hen I spoke those lines, I had the PRC very much in mind. It is this attitude that shaped our policy from the outset and led to the 15 July, 1971 announcement. It is in this spirit that I go to Peking.’28 Conversely, Kissinger characterised Nixon’s China policy in the early days in the White House as ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘full of contradictory tendencies’. According to Kissinger, Nixon ‘poured […] cold water on the prospect of Sino-American rapprochement with his statements on US China policy in press conferences on 27 January and 4 March 1969’.29 Knowing that his visit to Beijing would represent a breakthrough in Sino-American relations, Nixon might have been predisposed to look favourably on his statements during his first months in office. Unable to identify clearly the scope or nature of the developments in China and uncertain about China’s aims, Nixon was naturally somewhat ambivalent when it came to formulating proposed solutions to how the administration would end the estrangement of relations. As seen above, however, Nixon had for a long time been interested in establishing ways of bringing the Chinese Communists into a more constructive role in international affairs. With this in mind, he had instructed Kissinger to explore possible ways of contact with the Chinese and to initiate a policy review of China policy. After receiving some signals that the Chinese might be interested in reconciliation, Nixon went further. In his first foreign policy report in February 1970 he stated that ‘… it is certainly in our interests and in the interests of peace and stability in Asia and the world, that we take what steps we can toward improved practical relations with Peking … we will seek to promote understandings which can establish a new pattern of mutually beneficial actions’.30 By the time Nixon presented his second foreign policy report in February 1971, he cited the importance of China’s participation in world affairs, reiterated that the US was ready for a dialogue with Beijing and stated that the administration hoped to see the PRC assume a constructive role in the family of nations. Looking towards the immediate future, Nixon argued, ‘[i]n the coming year, I will carefully examine what further steps we might take to create broader opportunities for

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 57 contacts between the Chinese and American peoples, and how we might remove needless obstacles to the realization of these opportunities. We hope for, but will not be deterred by lack of, reciprocity.’31 The State Department was concurrently signalling Washington’s desire for advancing relations. After the Chinese had cancelled the Warsaw talks in February 1969, Rogers stated that the US regretted the decision. He further announced that the US government was ready to meet at any time. On his Asian trip in August 1969 he urged renewal of Warsaw talks. In a speech in Canberra, Australia, on 8 August 1969, Rogers noted the barriers between the two countries but added, ‘[w]e nonetheless look forward to a time when we can enter into a useful dialogue and to a reduction of tensions’.32 After planting the idea that the administration was willing to engage with the PRC for almost a year, diplomatic talks resumed in Warsaw in 1970. Walter J. Stoessel Jr., the American ambassador to Poland, finally managed to convey to Lei Yang, the PRC ambassador to Poland, Nixon’s desire to discuss improvement in relations.33 Five days later, on 8 January 1970, the Chinese ambassador invited Stoessel to the PRC embassy in Warsaw. Knowing that more than 134 meetings had taken place since 1955, and clearly annoyed about leaks from the State Department in preparation for the talks in Warsaw, Nixon and Kissinger agreed that communication with the Chinese needed to be handled on a confidential basis.34 As Nixon later explained, by using formal diplomatic channels the two sides’ representatives had minimum flexibility; they could do little more than read prepared statements and refer back to their capitals for instructions for the next meeting. Accordingly, this cumbersome exchange between wary adversaries reinforced the need for a new approach and Nixon and Kissinger instructed Stoessel to inform the Chinese that the President was interested in sending a US special representative to Beijing or receiving a representative from the PRC in Washington.35 Developments in Warsaw not only made it clear to Beijing that the Nixon administration was prepared for a serious dialogue, but also instigated the process whereby secret back channels became an important feature in communication between the White House and the Chinese Communist leaders.36 Nixon reiterated his preference for establishing direct secret communications, either in Beijing or another capital, through President Yahya Khan of Pakistan on 25 October 1970. The next day the Romanian President Ceausescu told Nixon that he believed the PRC wanted to improve relations, and Nixon reaffirmed US willingness in a meeting between high level special representatives. In December, the Chinese finally responded to US initiatives. After consultations with Chairman Mao and General Lin Biao, the Defence Minister, Premier Zhou’s mid-November reply reached the White House on 9 December 1970. Emphasising the importance of the Taiwan issue, Zhou stated that ‘in order to discuss this subject [US vacating Taiwan], a special envoy of President Nixon’s will be most welcome in Peking’. After an affirmative reply from Nixon on 16 December, Ambassador Corneliu Bogdan of Romania

58

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

delivered a message from Zhou on 11 January 1971 which restated the weight Beijing placed on the Taiwan issue. Zhou, however, added the comment that since President Nixon had visited Bucharest and Belgrade, he would also be welcomed in Peking.37 Throughout the next months, both sides reaffirmed their interest in talks, and in May 1971 Nixon proposed that a preliminary secret meeting be held between Kissinger and Zhou to exchange views and explore the possibility of a presidential visit to Beijing. In a formal response on 29 May 1971 (received on 2 June), Zhou wrote ‘with much pleasure’ of Chairman Mao’s acceptance of a presidential visit and welcomed an advance party to prepare and make necessary arrangements for President Nixon’s visit. It was this assiduous process which culminated in Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing in July 1971. The theme that has enjoyed prominence in memoir accounts and has been supported by a large quantity of secondary literature has emphasised that US rapprochement with China was stimulated by balance of power logic.38 According to Kissinger, the new administration had the general intention of making a fresh start in its relation with China, but during the first few months no precise idea of how to reconcile with the Chinese existed. Caution and ambivalence, however, were replaced by determination to improve US–Chinese relations when SinoSoviet antagonism developed into armed assaults along, at that time, the longest inland border in the world. Drawing on the insight of realist propositions, Kissinger maintained that the clashes on the Sino-Soviet border in March 1969 signalled that the structural imperatives of the international environment had changed, which further prompted the rationale to overcome conflicting interests and values in US–China relations.39 Once convinced about the seriousness of Sino-Soviet hostility, the White House saw an opportunity in opening up to China that would serve extensive strategic interests and could make a significant contribution in dealing with the Soviet Union. As Kissinger argued in White House Years, ‘[w]e moved toward China not to expiate liberal guilt over our China policy of the late 1940s but to shape a global equilibrium. It was not to collude against the Soviet Union but to give us a balancing position to use for constructive ends – to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us’.40 The primacy of realpolitik has remained the dominant explanation within the literature, even today. The strategic rationale behind rapprochement, whereby the US and the PRC developed cooperative relations in order to enhance their security against the threat to both from the Soviet Union, ‘was clearly the case’, argued Ross. Not only were the main architects in Washington behind a ‘marriage of convenience’ guided by strategic calculations but also the ‘Chinese leaders faced a similar strategic imperative’.41 Nevertheless, as Evelyn Goh has pointed out in her impressive account of Sino-American rapprochement, even if one accepts the primacy of the realist explanation, there remain two key shortcomings. First, the strategic implications of the Sino-Soviet split became public in 1962, so how can we account for the timing of the rapprochement and why did reconciliation not take place on an earlier

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 59 stage? Using a constructivist, discourse-based approach, Goh’s main interest lies in the rapprochement as a process of change. As Goh has observed, the reversal of US China policy ‘illuminates the indeterminacy of realist power-balancing logic as applied to this apparently clearcut-case. In response to the Sino-Soviet war of 1969, the Nixon administration had four policy options, all of which would have been consistent with realist reasoning. It could have (1) done nothing and allowed the two communist rivals to weaken each other; (2) supported the Soviet Union against China; (3) improved relations with both Beijing and Moscow; or (4) supported the Chinese against the Soviets.’42 In contrast to the existing literature and far from constituting a drastic departure, Goh situates the prevailing realpolitik account of US rapprochement within the context of other ideas about reconciliation with China covering the landscape from 1961 to 1974.43 Second, as Goh’s thoughtful analysis shows, traditional accounts have paid insufficient attention to how discursive representations affect the policymaking process and how the rapprochement could have happened. Put differently, traditional approaches have characteristically been occupied with explaining why but not how reconciliation was achieved. Thus, Goh asks, ‘[h]ow was it possible that under Nixon, China shifted from being the United States’ worst enemy to being its friend and even tacit ally?’ According to Goh, this is a process with which available accounts do not engage in a sustained manner and she directs our attention to a serious alteration in representations of China in US China policy.44

The Taiwan question A topic that has rarely been researched concerns the avenues of the impact of the rapprochement on the Taiwan issue. As pointed out previously, Tucker provides the best overall picture of US–Taiwan relations, but it should be noted that her work does not rely upon any extensive access to archival material from the Nixon administration.45 Robert Ross’ Negotiating Cooperation is a useful starting point on the process of rapprochement in US–China relations, and also contains an emphasis on how, through ‘continuous negotiations and mutual adjustments’, the two sides finessed the divergent Taiwan issue ‘in the interest of developing cooperation against the Soviet threat’.46 More recently, detailed accounts based on recently available documents have supplemented Tucker and Ross’s analysis into what Bush has identified as ‘relatively unstudied issues’.47 What has not been previously examined, however, is the way in which discourses work to construct a particular US Taiwan policy.48 Inspired by Goh’s new insights and a growing acceptance of studies that focus ‘direction away from the steady-state conceptual universe of power and interests’, the analytical question addressed below is concerned with how discourse(s) construct a particular reality.49 Drawing on the work of Michael Shapiro, Doty has argued that policymakers ‘function within a discursive space that imposes meanings on their world and thus creates reality’.50 Accordingly, rather than seeing the changes in US Taiwan policy as the effects of unitary, rational and

60

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

intentional agents wielding a strictly bounded geopolitical logic to determine US China policy, we need to problematise ‘how this “reality” is produced and maintained and how it makes various practices possible’.51 In developing this approach, I have divided the remaining part of this chapter into two sections. The first step is to explicate the various discourses about US Taiwan policy. As argued in Chapter 2, discourses are fundamentally social and intersubjective. Thus, discourses should not be seen as individual possessions or simply ideas, but instead understood as shared representations whereby certain kinds of moves are possible. At the same time, though, discourses constrain. Making some kind of meaning and action possible may preclude other types of meaning and action.52 Thus, the following analysis emphasises both continuity and change, where one discursive formation is dislocated and new discursive formations are constructed.53 The various discourses about the status of Taiwan – i.e. Taiwan as representing all of China, the status of Taiwan as ‘undetermined’, Taiwan as ‘independent’, and the status of Taiwan as ‘determined’ – identified within official circles during the Nixon administration during the years 1969 and 1972, can be compared and contrasted by examining the descriptive characteristics, adjectives, adverbs and capabilities attributed to the various subjects. Each of the competing discourses, then, carried particular predicates and representations of the identity of the US, China and Taiwan. These structures of significations – intersubjectively constructed and constituted in language – presuppose and construct social realities that create background knowledge and confer meaning on social phenomena and political events.54 Moreover, predicates and presuppositions attributed to the various subjects within the discourses about the status of Taiwan were reinforced by the articulation of new identities and the distinct subject positions developed. An articulatory practice is defined by Laclau and Mouffe as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified’. However, discursive positions cannot be totally fixed or ‘implement a final suture … The practice of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning …’.55 The partial fixation of meaning, then, suggests that appeal to other discourses is always possible. The second section is concerned with how discursive productivity produces the categories and boundaries of knowledge and possibility, which regulate what can be said, how it can be said and what kind of strategies can be realised at the level of discourse.56 Discourses, then, differentiate and orientate, and perform a constraining and enabling function with regard to state action. As such, I want to pursue what these discourses that were identified about US Taiwan policy entail for the US stance regarding the PRC representation at the UN, the potential withdrawal of US troops from Taiwan and US acceptance of the one-China principle.

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 61

Competing discourses In the aftermath of the Korean War, the United States came to recognise the ROC as the sole legitimate government of China, a policy reinforced by the nonrecognition, containment and isolation of the PRC. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this policy can be identified in terms of the prevailing representations of China within what Goh has called the ‘red menace’ discourse.57 With its ‘fundamentalist, violent, and revolutionary power’, demonstrated by its behaviour on the Korean Peninsula between 1950 and 1953, there were even voices in the US that wanted to distinguish between a more cautious Soviet Union as its ‘reasonable adversary’ and China as its ‘irrational foe’.58 Despite these sentiments, the ‘red menace’ discourse identified the PRC in ‘terms of the prevailing American representation of Cold War international politics’. As Goh explains, ‘China’s identity was now attached to that of the Soviet Union: it was an active member of the Soviet bloc, propagating a renegade ideology, exercising domestic tyranny, and launching external military aggression – all of which threatened the established postwar international order.’59 Although the Chinese menace was an evolving entity and American China policy thinking during the 1960s was not a simple continuation of that of the 1950s, the image of China as a ‘red menace’ was prominent among American policymakers. This discourse, then, portrayed Communist China as both a domestic and an international threat. As Goh notes, ‘[i]nternally, the communist regime was illegitimate and despotic; while externally, it was a proven expansionist aggressor developing ever more lethal offensive military capabilities’.60 Saturated in a particular set of meanings about the Cold War, Taiwan represented an object at stake in the worldwide struggle between the US-led free world and the Communist conspiracy. Among key decision-makers in Washington, it was believed that the US was engaged in a global battle with an international Communist movement pursuing world domination. As the defender of the free world, Taiwan was seen as a notable source of prestige for the US and represented an important symbol of credibility to US leadership with its attendant obligations and responsibility towards its allies. The opposites of order and chaos, good and evil, meant that Taiwan was an essential part of the Asian off-shore island chain of bases and a testing ground for American leadership. Almost by its mere geographical location, Taiwan was represented as an absolute strategic ‘other’, a discursive construct from which it could not escape. Simultaneously, however, the representation originating in Truman’s statement on 27 June 1950 that the status of Taiwan remained ‘undetermined’, developed and became more prominent among decision-makers in Washington. When pressed, US officials drew more and more upon the ambiguity presented in the ‘undetermined’ discourse about the status of Taiwan, refusing to take any position on whether Taiwan was part of China or an entity of some other kind, stressing instead that the US regarded the Government of the Republic of China (GRC) as legitimately exercising jurisdiction over Taiwan since the US government ordered Japanese forces to surrender to the GRC. On practical matters, therefore, various

62

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

US administrations had ‘recognised that each government exercise effective control over a defined territory and that we are prepared to deal with each on such matters affecting our interests as fall within their respective competence’.61 Such a pragmatic position was reiterated under the Nixon administration and clearly summarised in a key policy paper assessing US China policy in 1971. Discussing the ‘Taiwan issue’ the NSSM 106 stated, ‘[f]or our part, we have taken the position since the Korean War that sovereignty over Taiwan is an unsettled question subject to future international solution. We have therefore avoided stating that we regard Taiwan as a part of China, while similarly avoiding statements implying separate sovereignty for the island. We recognize the GRC as legitimately occupying and exercising jurisdiction over Taiwan, with a provisional capital at Taipei.’62 This alternative formulation, which avoided any reference to the GRC’s claim to be the sole legitimate government of all of China, also presented a more sanguine view of the PRC and the Communist bloc. No longer seen as an implacable enemy, the PRC was intended to play a vital role in securing peace and stability in Asia, and the PRC only represented a ‘limited military threat’.63 One of the major secret national security papers on US China policy even argued that a ‘[r]eturn to a strategy of attempted isolation does not seem to be appropriate, or perhaps even feasible … [and] is not treated as a policy alternative in this paper’.64 Most working papers, within the NSC or the State Department, therefore ‘assumed that the US strategy of the past few years toward a reduction of the PRC’s isolation and of points of US–PRC conflict will be followed and refined’.65 Accordingly, Rogers wrote to the President that ‘the seemingly monolithic Asian Communist bloc of ten years ago has split …’.66 At the same time, though, Communism and the PRC remained untrustworthy. The interdepartmental NSSM 106 noted that ‘[o]ur experience in negotiating with the Asian communists affords ample proof of the necessity for strict and enforceable quid pro quos’. Both the State Department and the White House feared that ‘it may be that the PRC only wants the image of negotiating with the US, not the substance …’. It was therefore recognised that ‘Peking might wish to give the appearance of movement in its discussions with us in order to serve its own purpose vis-à-vis the Soviets, to damage our relations with the GRC and others, and to weaken support for the GRC in the UN without giving us anything in return’.67 More importantly, the essential objective of US policy was to create a modus vivendi with the PRC, without (a) abandoning commitment to defend Taiwan, (b) foregoing the possibility of maintaining diplomatic relations with a government in Taiwan and enabling Taiwan to develop a viable international status not dependent upon the GRC’s claim to be the only legitimate government of all China, or (c) destroying the confidence of other allies in the dependability of explicit defence commitments from the US.68 Consequently, the US would not waver in its support for a long-term ally. As the NSSM 106 argued, ‘[i]t is one thing for Canada, France, the UK or a host of other nations to recognize the PRC and support it in the UN; it is quite another

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 63 thing for the US to do so. We are largely responsible for the very existence of the GRC; we have defense treaty commitments to it (though we would not stand in the way of a peaceful resolution of the “Taiwan problem”); and we have a degree of responsibility for the people of Taiwan. We therefore have a moral obligation as well as political, economic and military interest arising from our long association with the GRC.’69 By invoking the uniqueness of the United States’ position in the world, US identity was distinguished from others. To be sure, there was still a need for a strong American presence in the world and as a Pacific power the US had a legitimate role to play in Asian affairs. As Nixon argued in a memorandum to Kissinger, ‘the United States recognizes that because of our economic and military position the fate of freedom and peace in the last third of this century will depend upon how we meet our responsibilities in the world. We did not ask for this role but now because the force of circumstances has imposed it upon us we shall meet our responsibilities.’70 With a firmly established identity, a ‘sell-out’ on the Taiwan issue would have unfavourable repercussions for the US pledge to defend allies and its leadership of the free world. Accordingly, the Chinese Communists would have to ‘recognise American necessities’ and Kissinger would take a ‘principled’ approach to the problem of Taiwan in his discussions with Zhou.71 As Kissinger pointed out, ‘I will make it plain to the Chinese that the US ties with the ROC on Taiwan have been established over a long period of time, involve deep emotions as well as political considerations, and cannot be lightly set aside. Regardless of what the PRC attitude is toward Taiwan, the US as a great nation simply will not sell out its friends.’72 The discourse about the ‘undetermined’ status of Taiwan not only formed an important basis for US defence commitments to the GRC, but also constituted a potential for Taiwan’s independence ‘if that should ever become a realistic possibility’.73 Thus, US ambiguity on the Taiwan issue had been related in part to ‘a desire to hold open the eventual option of some formal separation of Taiwan’.74 The US government had considered several options with regard to Taiwan’s independence in the years 1949–50. However, it concluded that the Taiwanese remained politically impotent and unable to challenge the Chiang government. Taiwan’s prosperity, combined with its successful protection of its de facto independence in collaboration with US forces during periods of tension in the Taiwan Strait in the 1950s and 1960s, had advanced the prospects of a two-China solution or an independent status for Taiwan. Discussing the future status of Taiwan, the NSSM 106 recognised that ‘[a]lthough it has not been US policy to encourage this trend, the practical effect of many of our major programs and policies during the past twenty years, in combination with Taiwan’s economic success, has been to create the potential for Taiwan’s continued viability separate from the mainland …’.75 On the other hand, the Nixon administration clearly recognised that a policy that advocated the position that Taiwan was an independent entity with the GRC as the de facto government ‘would be regarded by the GRC and the PRC as an

64

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

unfriendly act, seriously damage our relations with the former and preclude improvement in our relations with the latter …’.76 Nevertheless, the emphasis on the possibility of Taiwan’s independence demonstrated that Taiwan represented something more than an object in America’s battle to contain Communism. As Secretary of State Rogers told the UN in a speech on 2 August 1971, ‘[t]he Republic of China has played a loyal and conscientious role in the UN since the organization was founded. It has lived up to all of its charter obligations. Having made remarkable progress in developing its own economy, it has cooperated internationally by providing valuable technical assistance to a number of less developed countries, particularly in Africa …’.77 Kissinger saw Taiwan’s development and modernisation no differently than Rogers, maintaining that ‘Taiwan’s economic growth is a model for much of the world. We are proud of the role we played in it, but the real credit goes to the GRC’s leadership and the industry of the people.’78 Underlying such arguments was a series of binaries that helped to accentuate differences. When a number of US officials emphasised Taiwan’s model of economic development and adherence to the norms of international behaviour, they often invoked commonsensical arguments about Taiwan’s role as a ‘normal’ state within the international community with its attendant rights to selfdetermination. The PRC, on the other hand, was constructed as a threatening other. With its unwarranted transgression of norms of behaviour, the PRC diverged fundamentally from Taiwan in its Communist, totalitarian and revolutionary ways. The binary oppositions between good and evil, normal and abnormal, therefore, structured the discourse about the potential for Taiwan’s independence and served as an important element to construct the ROC and the PRC as two distinct kinds of subjects. The interpretation of the PRC, then, was predicated on the assumption that the PRC was different. As several policy papers noted, the Taiwanese seemed almost unanimous in their desire to remain free of Communist China and the studies emphasise that for almost three-quarters of a century (i.e. since annexation by Japan) Taiwan has had a political experience distinct from that of mainland China.79 As such, the State Department believed ‘the world is changing insofar as it relates to Taiwan’ and that ‘Taiwan is already well launched on a course of economic, sociological and demographic evolution that makes it less China with every passing year’.80 Given these ‘facts’; the trend of economic, social and cultural change on Taiwan, America’s historic relations with the GRC on Taiwan and the US’s firm belief in the right of self-determination, US security commitments toward Taiwan were ‘based on reality – the moral and legal obligation to defend 14 million people against any external effort to change their way of life by force’.81 Accordingly, Taiwan had every right to self-determination and the ‘drift of events, notably Taiwan’s progressively greater viability, increases the possibility of a one China/ one Taiwan solution’.82 Advocating the position that Taiwan was part of the PRC, or that its status was no longer ‘undetermined’ as Nixon told the Chinese leaders, was the main revisionist discourse during Nixon’s presidency. While some of the elements of

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 65 this position were akin to the policy advocated by Acheson and Truman prior to the Korean War, different clusters of attributes were now linked to the various subjects. Not unlike the previous findings, the predicates attached to the US were relatively fixed and also exhibited the strongest coherence across the various discourses about US Taiwan policy. Consequently, America was still represented with an indispensable and legitimate role in world affairs. It had moral obligations, benign intentions and commitments attached to its role as a Pacific power. In his statement about American foreign policy for the 1970s, Nixon declared that ‘all Americans must understand that because of its strength, its history and its concern for human dignity, this nation occupies a special place in the world. Peace and progress are impossible without a major American role.’83 The manifest destiny was obviously still present; the ‘mantle of leadership’ and ‘the world role in which history had cast us’ had fallen on American shoulders.84 Put differently, the United States intended ‘to play the responsible international role that is incumbent upon a great world power that is dedicated to peace and to freedom of choice for the peoples of the world’.85 This identity permitted the US to engage in certain practices, such as the pursuit of world peace and the building of a new world order. Although the US was dropping tons of bombs over South East Asia and was deeply involved in atrocities against the Vietnamese people, the US had benign intentions and its practices were often represented as ‘noble causes’ or as ‘protection’. Conversely, Communist behaviour was often represented as ‘aggressive’, ‘oppressive’ and as a ‘conspiracy’ to enslave the ‘free world’. As Doty points out, then, the ‘physical content of these practices, e.g. providing economic or military aid and training troops, might be identical, but what the practice was was determined by the kind of subject engaging in it’.86 How meaning and social practices become intelligible is through discursive representations. At the same time, the Nixon administration portrayed a new image of the US as an attempt to redefine America’s role in the world. The first annual review of American foreign policy drafted in accordance with the NSSM 80 in December 1969 declared that ‘[i]t has fallen to this Administration to accept the challenge and opportunity of defining a new American role (but not a single new organizing concept of policy) that is compatible with changed conditions and changed American outlook. It has begun this process in words and acts …’87 In a ‘new era’ of world politics, the revised representation of American foreign policy found its popular expression in the Nixon Doctrine and was highlighted in the numerous foreign policy reports published by the administration. As Nixon explained, ‘we could see that the whole pattern of international politics was changing. Our challenge was to understand that change, to define America’s goals for the next period, and to set in motion policies to achieve them’.88 The central principles of the new American foreign policy for the 1970s were identified as ‘partnership, strength, and the willingness to negotiate’.89 Nixon argued that the United States found itself in a period of transition. ‘The postwar order of international relations’, characterised by American leadership

66

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

and relative superiority, ‘is gone’ and a new era of partnership and relative equality required that ‘the responsibilities once borne by the United States at such great costs can now be shared’. The assertion was that the changes taking place in the world enabled the US to change the character of its involvement to a more sustainable level.90 As Kissinger recognised, ‘if we had continued to act on the same presuppositions, we would have reached the point of exhaustion – exhaustion of our physical resources perhaps, but more certainly of our psychological resources’.91 This ‘new sharing of responsibilities’ required not less American leadership than in the past, but rather a new, more subtle, form of leadership.92 ‘The United States can and will participate, where our interests dictate, but as a weight – not the weight – in the scale’, Nixon insisted.93 Maintaining that other nations should take up some of the burden of leadership of the free world, was not a retreat from responsibility but ‘a sharing of responsibility’.94 As Kissinger succinctly summarised the new initiatives to Nixon: ‘the Nixon Doctrine is your way of staying in the world – not getting out’.95 Although the US encouraged its allies to assume ‘their own burdens commensurate with their ability to shoulder these burdens’, the US would ‘respect the commitments we inherited’ and ‘maintain sufficient strength to deny other countries the ability to impose their will on the United States and its allies’.96 As Nixon explained in a telephone conversation with Kissinger: ‘we can’t be here in the position of appearing to be backing off the world … We must be sure to state that we are keeping our commitments. The Nixon Doctrine is not withdrawing from commitments. If our interests are involved we will fight any place.’97 ‘Indiscriminate and precipitous’ abdication of US responsibilities would ‘unleash unpredictable and dangerous current in the world’.98 Moreover, any suggestions that the defences of America were weak ‘could lead others to make dangerous miscalculations’.99 Thus the United States would maintain its ‘peacetime land, sea and air deployments in Asia at a level which provides assurances to our allies of continuing US support and demonstrates our ability and determination to meet our commitments’.100 The final pillar of Nixon’s redefined American foreign policy in the 1970s was a vision to ‘work with other nations to build an enduring structure of peace’. America’s commitment to peace was, according to Nixon, ‘most convincingly demonstrated by its willingness to negotiate points of difference with adversaries as well as with friends …’. Accordingly, Nixon declared that ‘no nation needs to be our permanent enemy’.101 In Nixon and Kissinger’s view ‘Asian and global peace requires Chinese cooperation’ and it became a ‘truism that an international order cannot be secure if one of the major powers remains largely outside it and hostile toward it’.102 In this decade, Nixon argued, ‘there will be no more important challenge than that of drawing the People’s Republic of China into a constructive relationship with the world community, and particularly with the rest of Asia’.103 Re-representing China as a legitimate major power with which the US would deal on a basis of ‘equality and mutual respect’ in ‘all matters affecting the peace

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 67 of Asia’, indicated that the attributes and qualities linked to the PRC were being differentiated from the particular discursive understanding of the PRC in 1950.104 The most obvious differences can be seen in the practices of referring to the Chinese mainland by its official title, the PRC.105 Although far from any formal recognition, this initiative signalled the administration’s willingness to deal with Beijing on equal terms. More importantly, the predicates attached to the PRC within the ‘determined’ discourse were indicative of a very distinct subject from that previously seen. In distinguishing between the post-war era and a new era of international relations, America was no longer confronted by a monolithic Communist world. Once a unified bloc, Nixon argued, Communist ‘solidarity has been broken’ and its ‘unity has been shattered’.106 ‘In the last twenty years, the nature of the Communist challenge has been transformed. The Stalinist bloc has fragmented into competing centers of doctrine and power … the emerging polycentrism of the Communist world presents different challenges and new opportunities.’107 Hence, the Nixon administration would ‘not accept the proposition that one country can speak for all socialist countries’.108 According to Kissinger, the inaptness of the view that ‘the Communist world was inherently aggressive in a manner comparable to Nazi Germany, and as responding to unified direction from central authority’, required a new ‘subtlety and sophistication in our own foreign policy’.109 Kissinger elaborated on the Nixon administration’s more nuanced and sophisticated view of Communism in his first meeting with Zhou in July 1971. During the 1950s, Kissinger argued, the United States ‘believed it was America’s mission to fight communists all around the world and for the US to be the principal force, to engage itself in every struggle at every point of the world at any point of time’. Nixon, Kissinger continued, ‘operates in a different philosophy. We do not deal with communism in the abstract, but with specific communist states on the basis of their specific actions towards us, and not as an abstract crusade …’.110 Moreover, the Chinese Communists were ‘sharply different from other communists’ as well as from the US.111 Most important, was the ‘exceptional character of the Chinese leaders themselves’. In Kissinger’s view, Mao was ‘clearly a figure for the ages’, and Zhou did not rank far behind.112 Emphasising the fact that the US was dealing with the people who participated in the Long March and made the revolution meant that the PRC was a ‘different phenomenon from the Communist Parties and countries in Eastern Europe’.113 The first generation of PRC leaders were ‘men of great philosophical, almost religious motivation’ and Kissinger understood, as he told Zhou in October 1971, that ‘Chairman Mao did not fight for 50 years to change his opinion because an American President is visiting China for six or seven days’.114 Acknowledging that China played a vital role in international affairs and with a legitimate claim to Taiwan’s sovereignty also necessitated a refusal to come to terms with the disturbing effects of the Communist dictatorship. As Kissinger argued, ‘[w]e are not concerned with internal systems but rather with the state of our interrelationships on the international scene’. Instead, Kissinger would recall

68

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

the uniqueness of the Chinese civilisation in order ‘to establish the right climate’ when attempting ‘to define a new relationship for the future’.115

US Taiwan policy discourses and the status of Taiwan A focus on discursive representations and their articulatory practices alerts us to how, through four sets of high-level meetings in 1971 and 1972, the Nixon administration re-represented the identities of self and other(s). In differentiating between discourses one asks how representations are produced and how texts argue. Representations are made by social actors through such practices as the drafting of briefing papers, memoranda of conversations, speeches, cables in foreign policy bureaucracies and foreign policy actions. In examining texts, one strategy is to search for the powerful categories on which the argument rests – not who takes what position or what it says – but how they argue their case. If some subject positions are presented as, by necessity, similar and complimentary (for example, ‘we’ – the US, peaceful, indispensable and having obligations), others are presented as self-evident opposites (for example, the PRC and peace, the ROC as a model for development and the PRC as a dangerous totalitarian state).116 An assessment of the specificity of discursive texts must relate to the limits, the scope and the possibilities of discourses.117 The analysis, however, is not purely textual. Instead, it also focuses on a number of non-linguistic practices. A seen above, social practices, such as ambassador talks in Warsaw, back-channel diplomatic manoeuvring, secret visits to Beijing, and the lifting of travel and trade restrictions with the PRC, facilitated the dislocation of the ‘red menace’ discourse. Moreover, changing voting practices at the UN, withdrawal of troops from Taiwan, official visits to Beijing, referring to mainland China by its official title and publicly announcing the acknowledgement of the one-China principle, produced new identities and representations of self and other(s). The next step is to analyse more closely the representations themselves, their internal logic and conditions of possibility and effects. What then became possible within these discourses? As Doty asks, ‘given these configurations of subject positions and the resultant “reality”, we can ask what courses of actions would seem natural’.118 One alternative, the isolation and continued containment of the PRC, would hardly be a reasonable option. Back in his Inaugural Address in January 1969 Nixon had said, ‘let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communications will be open’ and in describing relations with the Communist world, Nixon argued in his first Foreign Policy Report that ‘we have made it clear that we are prepared to negotiate intensively, concretely and unemotionally on a wide range of issues’. He then continued, ‘this is also the spirit in which we have resumed formal talks in Warsaw with Communist China’.119 Briefing Nixon on his secret visit to Beijing in July 1971, Kissinger argued that the groundwork had been laid for ‘you and Mao to turn a page in history’. Isolation of the PRC was therefore seen as ‘unacceptable’.120 In short, continuing

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 69 with a policy coherent with the ‘red menace’ discourse was not a possibility and did ‘not seem to be appropriate, or perhaps even feasible …’.121 Notwithstanding the administration’s praises for Taiwan’s progress, it seemed doubtful that any support for Taiwan’s independence was possible. This would undermine Washington’s relations with Taipei and Beijing, as both governments insisted on the one-China principle. Moreover, Taiwan continued to be controlled by the Chiang government through an ‘effective security apparatus’, with the Taiwanese independence movement lacking organisation and leadership.122 In addition, the issue over Chinese representation at the UN shows how the White House adjusted its China policy in accordance with the predominant determined or revisionist discourse in order to construct a new relationship between Beijing and Washington. This issue also demonstrates that Nixon and Kissinger undermined the administration’s policy at the UN. Kissinger’s policy memorandum in preparation for Vice President Agnew’s trip to Taipei in December 1969 elaborated on how the new administration would balance between the competing discourses. As to the UN representation issue, Kissinger noted that ‘you will avoid commitments as to specific US tactics in the future … we do not assert that the GRC has the right to the only seat for China. Our policy now is concentrated on keeping the GRC in, not keeping the PRC out’. Emphasising the ‘necessity of greater flexibility because of our policy of seeking better relations with mainland China’, Kissinger wrote that ‘we will not adopt the GRC line concerning Communist China’ and ‘you will avoid any endorsement of the GRC as the only legitimate government of China’. ‘While avoiding these pitfalls’, Kissinger also pointed out that ‘you will need to avoid the contrary impression, that our search for an accommodation with Communist China exceeds our will to honor our commitments to the GRC.’123 During the UN General Assembly votes on Chinese representation in December 1970, the US formalised Kissinger’s position, which continued to oppose the expulsion of the ROC but no longer objected to the right of the PRC to be represented.124 When the vote came up the year after, it coincided with Kissinger’s second visit to Beijing in October 1971.125 Both Ambassador George H. Bush, who led the US delegation to the UN, and Secretary Rogers worked assiduously to preserve Taiwan’s seat, believing that the timing of Kissinger’s planned second visit to China would undermine the US vote to preserve Taiwan’s seat in the UN. In his memoirs, Kissinger misleadingly wrote that neither he nor Bush thought that ‘the UN vote would be decisively affected’ by the timing of Kissinger’s trip, when Bush in fact considered ‘this thing [Kissinger’s trip] not helpful at all’.126 Bush and Rogers argued that if Kissinger was in Beijing during the UN vote on the seating of the PRC and the expulsion of Taiwan, ‘everybody would think we were deliberately undercutting our own effort’.127 But for Nixon and Kissinger reconciliation with China was now seen as more important than sustaining support for Taiwan’s UN status. Of course, the White House had recognised that the voting patterns at the UN had begun to shift in the PRC’s favour. Kissinger believed that the vote was ‘probably not as close as the State thinks’ and he told Nixon that ‘I have

70

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

always though it was a loser …’.128 Nevertheless, it is important to note that these interpretive possibilities would not have gained the power and acceptance they did had they not been embedded in the identities and representations articulated within the revisionist discourse that emphasised the determined status of Taiwan. Advocating a position that denied the reality of the PRC existence, by preventing its representation in the UN, became unthinkable within a discourse that reflected a ‘new reality’ whereby the PRC was seen to play a constructive role in the international community. As Sharon Chamberlain commented on the documents describing the meetings surrounding the administration’s strategy at the UN, Nixon’s statement ‘[d]on’t tell Bill the truth quite so soon’, was presumably ‘a reference to their earlier discussion on keeping from Rogers their reluctance to ask the Chinese to change the date of Kissinger’s second trip’.129 What became possible in US Taiwan policy, then, was located within the parameters of action defined by the ‘determined’ and the ‘undetermined’ discourses. Moving away from the representation of the PRC as a relentless threat and Communist menace, the Chinese Communists were instead represented as honourable people distinct from the Communist bloc and Nixon and Kissinger argued that the contribution of the PRC to international affairs was ‘vital to the attainment of world peace’.130 These qualities marked China out as a potentially friendly nation with whom America, construed according to the principles of partnership, strength and willingness to negotiate, could take up practices it had never engaged in before. In preparing for Nixon’s China visit, Kissinger elaborated on the attributes of the style and the character of the Chinese themselves. The President would be ‘superbly treated’ by a combination of ‘hospitality, graciousness, delicacy, efficiency, and sense of humor’ whereby Nixon would have to resist ‘being seduced by the charm of the host’.131 The Chinese Communists could be expected to be principled and reliable and ‘meticulous in their diplomacy and in keeping agreements’. These were in the words of Kissinger ‘men of honor’, worthy of respect and admiration, with whom one could make a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. As Kissinger summarised his report, ‘[t]hey are, in short, Chinese as well as (or despite) being communists …’.132 Unlike Kissinger’s experience in negotiating with the Soviet leaders or the North Vietnamese, the Chinese were not constantly pressing ‘for petty gains’ and Nixon did not have to prepare ‘for tactical elbowing, for haggling over details, for grudging implementation’. As Kissinger put it, ‘[t]he difference between them [the Chinese Communists] and the Russians is that if you drop some loose change, when you go to pick it up the Russians will step on your fingers and the Chinese won’t …’. Consequently, ‘once the Chinese agree on the basic question … the details fall into place gracefully’.133 Thus, as a corollary to the recognition of the PRC as ‘a great power with a legitimate role to play in international affairs and particularly Asian affairs’, the two sides could agree ‘that countries, regardless of their social systems, should conduct their relations on the principles of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states …’.134 As such, it became thinkable to treat seriously

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 71 Beijing’s claim to sovereignty regarding Taiwan. Kissinger assured Zhou in their first meeting on 9 July 1971 that ‘we are not advocating a “two Chinas” solution or a “one China, one Taiwan” solution’.135 In his handwritten notes on the various ‘briefing books’ prepared by the NSC staff and the State Department before Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972, Nixon noted that ‘coming to Peking has itself created a new reality’.136 He further wrote that ‘Taiwan will be settled’ and that Taiwan’s ‘status is determined – one China, Taiwan is part of China’.137 In his meeting with Zhou, Nixon declared his commitment to the ‘five principles’ and these assurances, together with the statements in the Shanghai Communiqué, laid the foundation for US adherence to the one-China principle. In addition, Nixon told Zhou that ‘with regard to Taiwan I do not believe a permanent American presence – whatever happens in our meetings – is necessary to American security’.138 Elaborating further, Nixon accounted for US military presence on Taiwan by arguing: ‘And for that reason … my goal is the withdrawal of our remaining forces, not just two-thirds, but all forces, including the remaining one third. Two-thirds will go, hopefully as soon as we can finish our Vietnam involvement.’139 Despite the private assurances that the status of Taiwan was determined and that military troops would be withdrawn from Taiwan, a certain reality had been established which necessitated that Kissinger and Nixon would take a ‘principled approach’ regarding the Taiwan issue. ‘We must be sure to state that we are keeping our commitments’, Nixon told Kissinger a month before his trip to Beijing.140 Reconciliation with the PRC could not ‘cast serious doubt of our commitments’ and the US needed to disengage ‘gracefully from commitments which are largely a Korean War legacy’.141 As Nixon acknowledged in his handwritten notes prior to meeting the Chinese leaders in February 1972, the Taiwan issue cannot be handled ‘in a way that destroys or weakens our position of leadership in Asia and in the world’.142 The US needed to ‘retain ready and quick access to bases and facilities on Taiwan regardless of the level of our military presence’. Accordingly, the White House would reduce US troops on Taiwan, but could only do this as ‘tensions in the area diminish’.143 This was, of course, premised on the war in Vietnam and it gave an incentive to China to expedite an end to the war. Nevertheless, no matter how deeply the White House wanted to broaden security cooperation between Washington and Beijing, normative constraints could not be ignored.144 The close ties with Taipei would be ‘painful’ to readjust and could not easily be set aside. As an indispensable force to its allies of the free world, the US could simply not ‘sell Taiwan down the river’. US commitments, then, rested primarily on the prior commitment to Taiwan and more generally on the credibility generated by the discursively constructed identity of the US. Nixon’s goal was normalisation of relations with the PRC and he realised that solving the Taiwan problem was indispensable to achieving that goal.145 However, he needed ‘running room’ on the Taiwan issue. Unless carefully constructed, any change in US position with regard to the status of Taiwan would undermine

72

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

the legal basis for the MDT. As the Department of State’s legal experts pointed out, ‘it would be anomalous, for example, for the United States to have a treaty commitment to defend one part of a country (Taiwan) against another (the Mainland) if we recognize the government on the mainland as the legitimate government of the whole of China’.146 The manner in which the US potentially extended recognition to the PRC was also a delicate matter. ‘If the United States recognizes Taiwan as part of China, then any action by the United States to help defend Taiwan from attack from China would be intervention in a civil war and could not be justified as collective selfdefence as recognized in Article 51 of the UN Charter.’147 Nixon and Kissinger could therefore ‘do more than we can say’ and they were striving to find a language which met the PRC needs and yet ‘does not stir up the animals so much that they gang up on Taiwan and thereby torpedo our initiative’.148 As Kissinger told Zhou, ‘it is odd that we should spend so little time on substance, and so much on words. We do not differ in substance’, but rather on what can be said: ‘the Prime Minister seeks clarity, and I am trying to achieve ambiguity’.149 Domestic considerations were arguably on Nixon and Kissinger’s minds. The administration was continuously assuring the conservative right wing of the Republican Party that they would not compromise US commitments to the ROC. At the same time, however, fighting off charges from the Democrats that the opening to China was playing with US national interests to advance Nixon’s political gain were also a preoccupation.150 Kissinger argued that ‘if we had rejected the Chinese overtures, the Chinese would have applied the same methods that the North V [North Vietnamese] do, that is a succession of opposition politicians, peace groups, and newsmen would have been invited to Peking’. Expanding on this theme, Kissinger maintained that Taiwan would then have become a public issue and an obstacle to normalisation and ‘our commitment to Formosa would have become that same sort of problem as our commitment to Vietnam has become. The two issues, in fact, would have merged, and Senator Humphrey would be accusing us of not pulling the rug out from Chiang, of not giving a deadline, of tying ourselves once more to a corrupt military dictatorship.’ According to Kissinger, then, the administration did ‘not have much of a choice’.151 As such, the administration would meet domestic opposition, criticism and support from either the political right or left.

Conclusion The identities and representations embedded in the ‘undetermined’ and ‘determined’ discourses were articulated through numerous hours of drafting the Shanghai Communiqué. The US eventually agreed to declare that ‘the United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position.’152 This was undoubtedly skilful diplomatic manoeuvring. Acknowledging a position is not the same as directly endorsing it. Despite the private assurances and US commitments to the ‘five

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 73 principles’, the US did not acknowledge the one-China principle publicly, but acknowledged that all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait maintained this view. The two most prominent discourses in US Taiwan policy, therefore, performed a constraining and enabling function in explaining how change came about when Nixon and Kissinger laid the foundations for a new US Taiwan policy. As the Nixon administration increasingly acknowledged that the PRC had a vital and constructive role to play in world affairs, the ‘determined’ discourse enabled Washington to treat seriously Beijing claims to sovereignty regarding Taiwan. At the same time, the commitment to Taiwan became difficult to transcend as it rested on the credibility generated by the representation of the US as a leader of the free world. Accordingly, the ‘undetermined’ discourses constrained Kissinger and Nixon’s room for manoeuvre as they aimed to maintain a ‘principled’ approach whereby the ambiguity embedded in the ‘undetermined’ discourse would be emphasised. The complexity entrenched in the changes in US Taiwan policy, which altered representations of the Taiwan issue and shifted US China policy away from the position that the ROC represented all of China to acknowledging the one-China principle, together with the commitment to withdraw US troops from the island, should not be seen as ‘given’ or an automatic result of balance of power logic and the imperative of the distribution of capabilities at the international level.153 Instead, by using a critical constructivist approach we need to connect the understanding of interests to identity and its associated discursive practices. By illuminating how discourse(s) construct a particular reality, I have demonstrated how the Nixon administration changed its Taiwan policy and how the Taiwan issue should be seen as historically contingent and constantly modified and transformed through discursive representations. Nonetheless, such an approach does not dispute that important documents such as the NSSM 106 enlighten our understanding of US China policy. The NSSM 106 provides interesting ‘evidence’ to support a number of explanations about US China policy: that Taiwan was strategically important and that ‘the presence of US forces had helped to deter overt conventional aggression by Asian communist countries’; that the ROC was a long-term ally of the US; that Taiwan represented an important symbol for US credibility, responsibility and commitments; that Taiwan was an important bargaining tool to extract quid pro quo from Beijing; that the close ties between Washington and Taipei were a liability when it came to the objective of improving Sino-American relations; that the administration had to take domestic considerations into account; and that bureaucratic infighting shaped various policy choices.154 Thus, I am not arguing that these factors did not have an impact on policymakers in Washington. Rather it has been suggested that this was not all that was going on in this particular foreign policy discourse. As Dean has pointed out, ‘[a]ll historical explanations, traditional or otherwise, are grounded in theories about the way the world works (although these theories are often left implicit). These theories largely determine what evidence is to be considered and what is to be

74

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72

ignored.’155 By drawing on a critical constructivist approach and inspired by Goh’s novel emphasis on how China, ‘from being America’s most implacable enemy, became its friend and even tacit ally’, this chapter aimed to re-examine aspects of US Taiwan policy which has been inadequately tackled to date.156 It has therefore been argued that a more nuanced understanding of US Taiwan policy during the Nixon administration would first inquire into the ‘how-possible’ questions. Reading foreign policy texts as discourses alerts us to the predicates, presuppositions and categorisations which differentiate discourses and allow us to identify the articulatory practices that construct meanings and reality. As Doty has shown, the possibility of practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action, certain background meaning and the role of the US in world affairs.157 Such a starting point highlights the complexity and the conflicting dynamics behind the Nixon administration’s Taiwan policy. Although I have established that the determined discourse had a predominant role in shaping US Taiwan policy during the Nixon administration and furthermore argued that by the late 1960s the Nixon administration had discarded the ‘red menace’ discourse as ‘unacceptable’, Washington still moved cautiously when signalling their desire for reconciliation with Beijing. Moreover, despite Nixon and Kissinger’s reluctance to support the prospect of an independent status for Taiwan, other policymakers advocated such a proposition, and the White House were keen on making the impression that everything possible had been done to save Taiwan at the UN vote in 1971.158 This suggests that the ‘undetermined’ discourse also had a major impact on decision making and furthermore illustrates how Nixon felt it necessary to take a ‘principled approach’, while Kissinger believed that the administration did not ‘have much of a choice’ with regard to the Taiwan issue. It also explains why the White House needed ‘running room’ in order to ‘disengage gracefully from commitments which are largely a Korean War legacy’. To some extent, then, the discourses about US Taiwan policy overlap and interrelate with each other. As Ole Wæver points out, that one discourse is ‘in ‘opposition’ or even ‘marginalised’ means only that it is ‘outside’ and ‘different’ at the level of manifest politics, while it probably shares codes at the next (deeper) level of abstraction. The ‘dominant’ political line and main opposition most often share a lot (except the question on the agenda), and more marginalised opposition share less, but still some, basic codes.’159 In other words, what each of these discourses was doing was constructing particular subject identities, positioning these subjects vis-à-vis one another and thereby constructing a particular reality which guided US Taiwan policy. This study rejects the notion that a single best explanation is possible for complex historical events. Accordingly, ‘there is no place where we can find an unmediated truth and thus transcend the need to decode information and construct interpretations of the world’.160 Hence, rather than assuming that the US, China and Taiwan had pre-existing, a priori and given national identities and that policymakers acted rationally according to strategic calculus induced by structural changes, a critical constructivist approach permits a reflexive engagement with

Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 75 the ‘reality’ that policymakers were bound up in when constructing a particular US Taiwan policy. Such an approach, therefore, broadens our understanding of decision-makers’ room for manoeuvre and draws our attention to how it became possible to consider and shift US Taiwan policy in a direction which previously had been seen as unthinkable.

4

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

This chapter will demonstrate how the US adherence to the one-China principle, originating in Nixon and Kissinger’s visits to the PRC in 1971–2, is increasingly being challenged by the contemporary contradictions in US Taiwan policy. For Washington, the conflict between the one-China principle and the principle of selfdetermination for the people of Taiwan, the increased attention to human rights violations on the Chinese mainland and the aspirations to promote democracy and freedom globally foreshadow a discomforting dilemma. Paradoxically therefore, the US, the self-defined indispensable promoter of democracy and human rights, finds itself in a precarious situation whereby it has become constrained by the development of democracy in Taiwan. Simultaneously, Taiwan has successfully manoeuvred through the dangerous process of democratisation only to arrive at a democratic transition that threatens to alter the delicate equilibrium in the triangular relationship in a more dangerous direction. Although several writers have pointed out the contradictory and ambiguous aspects of US policy towards Taiwan, this key theme still remains somewhat starved of critical reflection.1 Just a few months after being sworn in as President in 2001, George W. Bush proclaimed on the ABC News programme Good Morning, America that the US would ‘do whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend itself’. In the immediate aftermath of what was seen as the strongest support in Taiwan’s defence in more than two decades, official Governmental representatives attempted to weaken the President’s words while some Congressional members, commentators and scholars expressed concern that the President had decided to alter the longstanding US policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’.2 Others, conversely, applauded what they saw as initiatives to discard performing ‘the rituals and intone the mystical words of their ancestors: “There is only one China”.’3 Although, as Tucker has pointed out, the Bush administration initially continued ‘with bold gestures to redefine U.S. policy towards Taiwan’, the overly sanguine interpretations of Washington’s policy in Taipei alerted the White House to the possibility that Taiwanese leaders might take steps to change the status quo unilaterally, knowing that the US had pledged its support to defend the island. Therefore, during the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to Washington in December 2003, the Bush administration retreated to the position of its

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 77 predecessors, reaffirming US commitments to the one-China policy, warning that the administration opposed any unilateral moves to change the status quo and even confirming that the US did not support Taiwan’s independence.4 For the Bush administration, then, these two statements seemed to define the parameters for contemporary US Taiwan policy. Indeed, James A. Kelly, the former Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, US Department of State, summarised the position in a Congressional hearing a few months after Premier Wen’s visit to Washington: ‘What the President says has a meaning at the time he says it to those listeners. You may have heard one thing. I may have heard another. The fact is the sum of the President’s statements has made very clear to the PRC that we are serious about our defense responsibilities under the Taiwan Relations Act … At the same time, as I noted in the principles of our policy, which are the President’s policy, we oppose actions that would unilaterally alter Taiwan’s status … the US remains committed to our one China policy … [and] the United States does not support Taiwan independence.’5 At first glance, then, the administration’s policy might appear to be clear. However, Kelly’s statement unravels when confronted with the illuminating question posed by House Representative Grace F. Napolitano (D – California): ‘Can the evolution of the full-fledged democracy on Taiwan and the clear emergence of Taiwanese identity meld with the principle of one China, or are they in stark contrast with each other?’ As Kelly responds to the question, we come to the heart of this chapter: ‘There certainly is a degree of contrast … I made the point of our one China, and I really did not define it. I am not sure that I very easily could define it. I can tell you what it is not. It is not the one China policy or the one China principle that Beijing suggests, and it may not be the definition that some have in Taiwan, but it does convey a meaning of solidarity of a kind among the people on both sides of the Strait that has been our policy for a very long time.’6 It is clear from Kelly’s statement that the meaning of the one-China policy today differs from the meaning attached to the key sections on Taiwan in the Shanghai Communiqué and the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the US and the PRC: ‘The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position … The United States of America recognizes the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China … [and] acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.’7 Although the word acknowledges indicates cognisance of, but not necessarily agreement with, the Chinese position, and the statement offered the caveat that a resolution to the Taiwan issue should be peaceful, Kissinger’s assurances to Zhou in July 1971 that ‘we are not advocating a ‘two Chinas’ solution or a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ solution’ and Nixon’s private statement in February 1972 clearly suggested that the Nixon administration did not dispute the Chinese position that Taiwan was part of China or the one-China principle.

78

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

The over-arching aim of this chapter, therefore, is to emphasise that meaning is not intrinsic to an object or an event, but rather that actors, embedded in discursive representations, assign meaning to that object or event which remains contingent and socially constructed. Meaning is revealed and reinforced by the categorisation of things which give it a meaning and a place in a particular context.8 Discourses construct meaning and perform a constraining and enabling function with regard to state action, in the sense that policy options may be rendered more or less reasonable by particular understandings of China, the United States and Taiwan.9 For instance, when a number of US officials and Congressional members emphasise the democratic attributes of Taiwan, they are categorising Taiwan with the self-identified US. The interpretation of China, then, is predicated on the assumption that China is different. The PRC diverges fundamentally from American/Taiwan society in its authoritarian, hierarchical and rigid ways. Such an argument is structured around a series of binaries that help to accentuate differences, which again undermine the possibility of an intermediate position between the opposites. As we shall see, such an understanding has a profound impact on whether the one-China policy is accepted, contested or allowed to remain ambiguous. There are three main sections to the argument. The first offers a closer examination of how the US-enhanced emphasis on the promotion of human rights and democracy in the post-Cold War era interrelates with the emergence of a Taiwanese national identity and growing concern about the ‘rise of China’ in the post-Tiananmen period, which shows how convoluted US policy towards Taiwan has become since the one-China framework was established in the early 1970s. The second section aims to encapsulate how these new meanings in US Taiwan policy are predicated on the predominant way in which the US imagines self and other(s). My intent, then, is to show that the combined discursive representation of a threatening, expansive and authoritarian China, differentiated from the freedom, the flourishing democracy and the exemplary economic development model on Taiwan, creates persuasive commonsensical challenges that increasingly contradict, constrain and undermine the official one-China policy. This section, then, contextualises how the discursively constructed status of Taiwan is negotiated, renegotiated and embedded in discursive practices that intersubjectively establish meanings and work to ‘construct identities and position subjects vis-à-vis one another’.10 The final section emphasises the efforts the executive branch has put on maintaining the one-China policy and the pressure that the US government has initiated in order to curb Chen’s independence activities. It also addresses the declining support for Taiwan in Congress, as congressional members have become increasingly frustrated with the political deadlock and partisan posturing in Taiwan that leads Taiwan not to purchase US weaponry and Chen’s actions that are seemingly dismissive of US interests. I summarise the section by problematising the proposition that US protection of Taiwan is embedded in strategic calculations, before I conclude by briefly arguing what a concern with the identity problematic might entail for the contemporary interpretation of the Taiwan issue.

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 79

From rapprochement to the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era Upholding US leadership On 16 December 1978, a joint Sino-American communiqué announced the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing as from 1 January 1979. Both sides reaffirmed the principles agreed in the Shanghai Communiqué and the US once again emphasised that it ‘acknowledges the Chinese position that Taiwan was an integral part of China’. Although the US agreed to break all official relations with the government of Taiwan and terminate the MDT, the communiqué noted that ‘the people of the United States will maintain cultural, commercial, and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan’.11 The close Sino-American relations were further consolidated by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in November 1978 and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. With regard to the Taiwan question, however, the ‘tight alignment’ was short lived.12 In April 1979, the US Congress adopted the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) which ensured that ‘diplomatic relations’ were maintained through the offices of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) and the Coordination Council for North American Affairs (CCNAA) and routine, if informal, business, cultural and economic ties continued.13 The US and the PRC signed yet another communiqué on 17 August 1982, whereby the US promised to reduce and eventually cease the sale of weapons to Taiwan. Nevertheless, arms sales continued at high levels and military technology transfer bypassed the August Communiqué. The Chinese protested vociferously, claiming that arms sales went far beyond what had been agreed on in the three Communiqués, and the issue has been a thorn in the side of US–China relations ever since.14 It was another event, however, which significantly inflamed US–China relations. The path-breaking events of the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989 brought China’s human rights record to the forefront of the US governmental agenda, and portrayed China as an authoritarian menace causing the US public and the Congress to perceive China’s behaviour in overwhelmingly negative terms. Assisted by bureaucratic changes, congressional legislation and an increased influence of human rights organisations since the 1970s, the structures were in place to condemn the ‘butchers of Beijing’ in the following days after the Tiananmen massacre.15 Sanctions were imposed in the immediate aftermath, and no other country acted as severely or restricted its relations with China as broadly as the United States. It is interesting to note, however, that China was absent as a country scrutinised by US human rights concerns before the late 1980s. Indeed, as former President Carter official Roberta Cohen has noted, the US exemption of China’s poor human rights record before 1987 was bipartisan and it is usual to observe that since 1972 the US and China were able to cooperate against a common enemy.16 With the

80

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, however, the strategic rationale for US–China relations evaporated and sensitive issues, such as Taiwan, human rights, trade disputes, arms sales and nuclear proliferation, increasingly constrained US–China relations.17 The argument developed in this study, however, holds that the main dynamic behind Washington’s increased attention to human rights violations in China was not the concern with human rights per se. To a large extent, US policy had the exact opposite effect of the officially declared intentions of the White House and Congressional actions. Instead of reducing the level of repression, the United States’ sanctions, threats of withdrawing China’s Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trade status and public criticism of China’s behaviour gave Chinese leaders ample reasons to detain more of its citizens and restrict civil rights.18 An insincere and overbearing American attitude often resulted in suspicion about the underlying motives of US human rights policies, incited anti-western feelings, united the Chinese and consolidated additional legitimacy for the Chinese Communist Party. Accordingly, there are reasons to believe that the continued condemnation of China’s human rights violations is a central part of a domestic US political agenda. As many commentators have observed, the Christian right-wing constituency is a central component of any presidency and China’s religious prosecution and one-child policy is an easy target when rallying support back home. In a broader sense, however, a more interesting argument holds that the resilience of promoting human rights derives from its utility. As Sellars has noted, ‘[t]he most important, yet least discussed aspect of the issue is the enormous political and moral benefits it offers its practitioners. The simple truth is that in the campaigns of the modern era, the benefactors have benefited more than – and often at the expense of – the supposed beneficiaries.’19 The central feature of the heightened US concern over human rights abuses could therefore be seen as part of reproducing US identity in the post-Cold War period. Of course, as David Campbell has pointed out, a critical assessment of the ‘shift from old to new discourses of danger drastically oversimplifies the complexity of this cultural terrain. Transformations do not occur in discrete or sequential stages, for there has always been more than one referent around which danger has crystallized. What appears as new is often the emergence of something previously obscured by that which has faded away or become less salient.’20 As will be shown below, therefore, the emphasis on the Tiananmen massacre and the authoritarian characteristic of the Beijing regime demonstrates how previously established discursive strategies of otherness could be invoked and contextualised to provide powerful new modes of representation. As Campbell further reminds us, ‘in times of crisis or in periods in which there is a critical rupture that destabilises the boundaries of identity established earlier, it is a process that assumes added significance’.21 Accordingly, what the following argument suggests is that in the aftermath of the Cold War, as the US was on the outlook for a new foundation to guide its foreign policy, the challenge to promote human rights replaced the emphasis on the United States as the leader

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 81 in the battle against Communism, with America’s increased attention to its image as the champion of freedom and democracy. In other words, the attention to human rights stepped in to fill the breach and replace the anachronistic rhetoric of discrediting Communism with an increased importance of promoting human rights and democracy abroad. The threat of China as a Communist regime, therefore, became obscured by an emphasis on China’s anti-democratic and authoritarian credentials. George H. Bush, who had not yet recognised the value of human rights and democracy as a central principle of foreign policy and was still devoted to an obsolete Cold War mindset, secretly sought to keep lines of communication open, sending high level diplomats (National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Lawrence Eagleburger) to Beijing in order to engage constructively with the Chinese in the months following Tiananmen. When these initiatives became public they caused widespread outcry and turmoil. Echoing the allegations from the Cold War that democrats were ‘soft’ on Communism, Bush was now perceived as ‘soft’ on the authoritarian regime in Beijing and accused of coddling the repressive Chinese leadership. Hence, Bush’s efforts to create some room for manoeuvre in US–Chinese relations became a political liability in the election campaign of 1992 and Clinton used China as one of several grounds upon which to attack the Bush administration.22 Although Clinton reversed his position of linking MFN trade status to improvements in China’s human rights record, he proudly announced that under his administration the US ‘has made human rights a cornerstone of our foreign policy’, reflecting a desire to enhance America’s self-image and provide its foreign policy with a new sense of shared purpose and mission. Moreover, US aspirations in the post-Cold War era to reshape the international order coincided with a deepening of the international human rights regime and an increased appeal to the idea of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s.23 In the post-September 11 era, some human rights advocates have anxiously observed in the words of Michael Ignatieff that ‘the era of human rights has come and gone’ and that strategic interests again appear to prevail over previous concerns with human rights and democratisation.24 Arguably, China has attempted to exploit the situation since 11 September in order to persecute separatist movements, especially in its Xinjiang province. Nevertheless, the promotion of human rights is still firmly on the US agenda and to some extent American rhetoric has become even more determined. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s former National Security Advisor and present Secretary of State, declared one week after 11 September 2001 that ‘[c]ivil liberties matter to this President very much, and our values matter to us abroad … We’re going to continue to press these things; we would not be America if we did not.’25 In a speech before the Heritage Foundation on 31 October 2001, Lorne W. Craner, former Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, goes so far as to assert: ‘We are proud to bear the mantle of leadership in international human rights in this century.’26

82

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

Moreover, President Bush and other officials in the Bush administration have repeatedly reminded the Chinese that the US does not and will not condone governments using counterterrorism as an excuse to silence peaceful expressions of political and religious views. During Bush’s visit to China in February 2002 he stated that ‘my prayer is that all persecution will end, so that all in China are free to gather and worship as they will’.27 Even the September 2002 US National Security Strategy report stressed the need for accountability and allowing the Chinese people to be able to ‘think, assemble, and worship freely’.28 Despite closer strategic cooperation between the United States and China on a tactical level in the war on terror, the United States has not retreated from its approach to human rights promotion in China. As Foot has argued, ‘[i]n fact, US scrutiny of China’s human rights record has survived reasonably well’.29 Compared with US policy prior to 11 September 2001, there has been no significant change and there are reasons to believe that the proclaimed demise of attention to human rights violations has proved to be exaggerated.30 Finally, the United States’ recent reassertion of its commitments to promoting democracy aggressively in the aftermath of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Bush’s determination to spread freedom globally, as revealed in his State of the Union Address in February 2005, indicate that the principle of sponsoring democracy and freedom will be essential to US foreign policy for the foreseeable future.31 Indeed, the March 2006 National Security Strategy maintains that US national security is founded upon two pillars: first, ‘promoting freedom, justice, and human dignity’, and second, ‘confronting the challenges of our time by leading a growing community of democracies’.32 Taiwan in transition The Taiwanese Government fervently condemned the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the US and China as ‘not in conformity with its [US] professed position of safeguarding human rights and strengthening the capability of democratic nations to resist the totalitarian dictatorship’. ‘For all the consequences that might arise as a result of this move’, Taipei warned, ‘the United States Government alone should bear the full responsibility.’33 The incredulity and dismay that characterised Taiwan’s response to closer US–China relations in the 1970s and early 1980s was, however, overcome by continued economic growth, stability in cross-Strait relations, persistent close ties with Washington and more flexible and constructive diplomatic initiatives from Taipei. As Tucker convincingly has argued, ‘conditions on the island did not deteriorate as some had feared’.34 The most profound and increasingly important aspect of development on the island, however, has been Taiwan’s successful management of the often unsettling effects of a democratic transition.35 With the lifting of martial law on 14 July 1987 and increasing democratisation, there has been an unwavering rise in Taiwanese nationalism. Manifested in an emphasis on Taiwanese culture and language, this process has had a paramount influence on Taiwan’s sovereignty and independence debate.36 The growing trend of ‘Taiwanisation’ stands in stark contrast to the

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 83 KMT’s repression of Taiwanese culture, identity and aspirations, beginning with the 28 February incident in 1947 up through the Kaohsiung incident in 1979 and beyond.37 So, at the same time as the promotion of democracy and human rights has achieved a prominent place in US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period, political liberalisation has enhanced Taiwan’s prestige internationally. Taiwan has since the mid-1990s successfully promoted a positive understanding of its democratic image and legitimacy, in particular within the United States, where Taiwan’s maintenance of martial law was for a long time a public relations embarrassment for Taiwan’s supporters.38 Not only did the representations of Taiwan change radically, but these developments, of course, were enhanced by the Tiananmen massacre. After June 1989, as Tucker explains, ‘Taiwan became a focus of hope, for the first time a genuine bastion of freedom in contrast to the communist dictatorship in the mainland’.39 Through exemplary economic and democratic transformation, Taiwan has in the words of President Chen ‘vested sovereignty with the people and begun fostering Taiwan’s national identity’.40 The insistent adherence to the one-China principle common to Mao and Chiang is no longer shared by many Taiwanese leaders who have relinquished the concept in their embracement of Taiwan’s autonomy, freedom, prosperity and growing national unity. Little suggests, therefore, that Taiwanese impulses towards independence will diminish as the older generation, with its historical linkage to the mainland, is replaced by a new generation firmly rooted on the island. The broader implications of Taiwan’s internal democratisation are difficult to foresee, though the process is undoubtedly contributing to the formation of a state identity. As Wu has argued, what democratisation and political liberalisation have accomplished ideologically is a stable common identification with Taiwan as an autonomous and sovereign state and a solid domestic consensus in the democratic right of the Taiwanese people to determine its own future. Put differently, the Taiwanese ‘passive revolution’ during the 1990s managed to construct a domestic discourse with a firm belief in Taiwan’s ‘right to self-determination regardless of the harsh reality of international politics’.41 This situation is further complicated by three critical developments in Taiwan. First, the delicate balance in the Taiwan Strait is threatened by the dynamics of volatile election rhetoric pushing for formal independence as a strategy for securing an election victory on Taiwan. Due to a growing Taiwanese national identity, there exists a temptation to exploit the electoral ‘pull’ – with the danger that Taiwan’s political parties will overbid each other in order to satisfy the increasing tendency towards independence among their constituency. Despite some debate in the literature about polling data, the democratic process has increased the influence of groups demanding greater Taiwanese sovereignty over both domestic and foreign policy.42 The polls most frequently cited are those sponsored by the Mainland Affairs Council and they consistently show that around half or more of respondents prefer a continuation of the status quo and express no view on a final outcome.43

84

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

A more sophisticated survey research, conducted by a team of political scientists from the National Science Council, however, shows the evolution in preferences over time. Those who were principle believers in independence and leaned toward independence constituted 12.2 percent of the total in early 1993, rose to 25.2 in early 1999, and fell to 24.8 in early 2002 (more than doubling since 1993). Those who were principled believers in unification constituted 31.4 percent in 1993, fell to 19.6 in 1999, and rose to 20.9 in 2002 (declining by a third since 1993).44 The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has successfully taken advantage of these sentiments and based its strategy, both in presidential elections and in elections for the Legislative Yuan, on increasing support for Taiwan’s independence and growing national identity. As Chen argued in his first interview in the aftermath of his March 2004 election victory, ‘the fundamental reason I won this presidential election … is because there is a rising Taiwan identity and it has been solidified. I think the Beijing authorities should take heed of this fact and accept the reality’.45 Although President Chen has recently reaffirmed his 2004 inaugural pledge to exclude sovereignty themes from the process of constitutional reform, and in addition stated that he will not declare independence or promote a referendum to change the status quo in regard to the questions of independence and unification, political leaders sensitive to public opinion will find it more difficult to accommodate Taiwan’s policy to the interests of the pivotal triangular relationship.46 The appeal to rising Taiwan national identity will not only contribute to tension during election campaigns, but also increasingly deprive Taiwan’s leaders of their flexibility in dealing with Beijing and their closest ally, the United States. In his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warned against the ‘inclination that brings democracy to obey sentiments rather than reasoning in politics’ and cautioned us that democracies are hardly capable of patiently awaiting the result of a great undertaking or long-matured design.47 Campaigning on an agenda that emphasises Taiwan’s de facto independence and growing national identity to secure a successful outcome in an election will allow the public to determine and influence Taiwan’s foreign policy in unprecedented new ways. Second, Taiwan’s democratic government has increased its legitimacy through a democratic transition, while the influence of the US on the island’s policy is decreasing. Taiwanese leaders have become subjected to periodical elections and have to answer to their own people, not Washington. As the Bush administration experienced on 9 December 2003, when cautioning Taiwan on the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and the United States adherence to the one-China principle, the statement prompted open resentment by senior Taiwanese officials, who argued that the Bush administration was interfering with Taiwan’s democratic practices and prerogatives.48 As the last three presidential elections have exemplified, Taiwan prides itself on standing up to pressure from the Chinese mainland. Reinforced by Bush’s rebuke about the US pledge to the one-China principle, president Chen is now showing that he is willing to stand up for Taiwan, not only to China but increasingly to the US.49 In the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, pro-independence

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 85 President Chen’s DPP is ignoring US and Chinese objections and is pushing for a referendum on whether or not to try to join the UN under its own name. According to the Financial Times, the party has collected more than 90,000 signatures of support, passing the first threshold under the island’s referendum law.50 Third, the danger today is not Taiwan’s aggressive external behaviour, but the domestic changes taking place on the island that facilitate and promote growing sentiments towards independence. Taiwan’s impulses towards independence are comparatively more difficult to control than forestalling the Kuomintang’s aspirations during the 1950s of returning to the Chinese mainland. Chiang Kaishek’s offensive adventures were eliminated before they were put in motion. Unable to move without the US endorsing KMT’s ambition and deeply dependent on the US to provide for its security, Chiang and his followers remained unsuccessful in their attempt to manoeuvre the US into a conflict on the Chinese mainland. Conversely, the impediment to fulfilling Taiwan’s aspirations of independence today, which boils down to declaratory actions instead of a large-scale military campaign, has become comparatively easier to traverse than fifty years ago. An emerging China in world affairs The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee meeting within the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978 was a turning point for the PRC. This meeting marked Deng Xiaoping’s consolidation of power after two tumultuous years following Mao’s death in 1976. It also initiated the process of the four modernisations of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and signified the beginning of economic reforms in China, captured in Deng’s slogan of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.51 After normalising relations with the US, therefore, China vastly increased foreign trade and investment and actively participated in economic institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Deng and his colleagues abandoned the economic self-reliance policy of Mao’s legacy in favour of the ‘open door’ policy, using the capitalist system and its market incentives to bring about immediate improvement in China’s economy by greater involvement and interchange with the outside world.52 With China’s entry into the UN in 1971, its intergovernmental organisations (IGO) membership greatly increased from 1 to 52 in the period 1971–97. During the same period China’s international nongovernmental organisations (INGO) membership increased significantly from 71 to 1,163.53 The Tiananmen massacre, however, constrained China’s ties with the outside world and economic reformers led and symbolised by Zhao Ziyang were thrown out and ideological conservatives such as Yang Shangkun stepped back in. Yet, despite the purge of Zhao and his supporters, China did not enter a period of isolation. Instead, at the meeting of the Thirteenth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on 24 June 1989, the Chinese leadership declared that China ‘will never go back to the old closed door path’ and that the policies of reform and openness ‘will continue to be steadfastly carried out as before’.54 This

86

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

policy was clearly reiterated during Deng’s speeches on his southern tour of early 1992, which accelerated the policies of economic growth and reform. Through trade and investments, China has become increasingly interconnected with its Asian neighbours and made considerable inroads to enhance its regional and global impact. In 2003 China became the largest export market for South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, surpassing the United States.55 China’s trade with Japan reached a total of $207 billion in 2006, making Japan China’s third largest trading partner.56 South Korea’s trade with China was $134 billion in 2006 and South Korea has set up more than 30,000 enterprises in China with an accumulated investment of $35 billion.57 Ranking second only to the United States, China accounted for 16 percent of the growth in the world economy in 2002 and its share of global exports was 6 percent compared with 0.8 percent in the early 1980s.58 In addition, China’s trade with the EU has accelerated rapidly and China has become the EU’s second largest trading partner.59 According to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report published on 28 June 2004, China has overtaken the US as the largest recipient of investments in the world, attracting $53 billion in 2003 compared with $40 billion for the US economy.60 The bulk of these investments is coming from within Asia, notably Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. Consequently, China’s growing economic attractiveness provides Beijing with considerable economic and political leverage. As Jason T. Shaplen and James Laney succinctly put it in a recent New York Times article, ‘China is trading its way to power’.61 In recent years, China has not only had a profound impact on the global economy but also emerged as a prominent diplomatic actor. China’s active role in defusing the North Korean nuclear threat has been a diplomatic breakthrough and showed that China can play a prominent role on the international arena if its interest deemed it necessary. Not only has China’s diplomatic reputation been established by its changing attitudes towards multilateral security cooperation, but also China’s position as a valuable player with regard to peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia has been reinforced.62 Unmistakably, China’s diplomacy has undergone a radical transition from being reactive and defensive to becoming proactive and offensive. China has evidently enhanced its international reputation and influence by becoming more willing, over the past few years, to participate actively in multilateral security and economic organisations. While it is nothing new that China’s entry into international organisations complicates Taiwan’s membership, China’s embrace of IGOs and INGOs in an increasingly interdependent and globalised world ever more compromises Taiwan’s role in the international community. In sum, the evolution of events on Taiwan in a direction that has deprived Taiwan and China of their common objective of a unified one-China principle and increased Taiwanese impulses towards independence are disturbing news to Beijing, who fears that these developments are eroding the possibility of reunification. Indeed, the Chinese leadership believes that any steps that alter the status quo, for example a referendum to change the constitution on Taiwan, will

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 87 make it virtually impossible even to contemplate the idea of reunification with the mainland in the not too distant future. Beijing’s apprehension over the Taiwan issue is further aroused by the US’s amplified consideration about China’s authoritarian behaviour and Washington’s oblique support of Taiwan’s independence, through its efforts to accommodate a more independent role for Taiwan on the international arena and by providing Taipei with advanced military equipment.63 As will be demonstrated in the following section, then, the triangular relationship is confronted with a number of familiar and unfamiliar challenges. I begin my analysis with a consideration of how the contemporary status of Taiwan is contested through new representations of difference and in conjunction with US identity. By investigating how China is discursively constructed as a threatening other, in contrast to Taiwan’s model democracy and the predominant way in which the US is seen as an indispensable promoter of democracy and human rights, my intent is to show how convoluted the official US one-China policy has become and how new meanings have been attached to the foundational texts – the three Communiqués and the TRA – of the triangular relationship.

The status of Taiwan and the identity problematic As seen in previous chapters, US ambiguity on the Taiwan issue had been related in part to ‘a desire to hold open the eventual option of some formal separation of Taiwan’.64 Independence for the Taiwanese was considered unthinkable in the years 1949 and 1950 as the Taiwanese people remained politically impotent and unable to challenge the KMT. The potential ‘for Taiwan’s continued viability separate from the mainland’ had become conceivable in the early 1970s due to the combined success of Taiwan’s economic growth and Washington’s major aid programmes.65 Nevertheless, any US initiative to advance the prospect of Taiwan independence was punctuated by the strong adherence to the one-China principle common to Mao and Chiang. However, in the context of Taiwan’s changing attitude towards the one-China principle, the ramifications of China’s prominent position in East Asia and the (re)production of American identity in the post-Tiananmen and postCold War era, the complexity of the Taiwan issue has the potential of altering the delicate balance in the Taiwan Strait in a more dangerous direction. Certainly, there are differences between the political conflicts of the early Cold War period of the mid-twentieth century, Nixon’s path-breaking opening to ‘red China’ and the Bush administration’s Taiwan policy in the first years of the twentieth-first century. Yet there is something peculiarly similar about the structural logic and modes of representation when juxtaposing these disparate periods. By examining a number of presidential and administration statements, congressional hearings, reports and memoranda, the texts that guide US Taiwan policy today do more than simply offer strategic analyses of the ‘reality’ they confront.66 These texts are self-referential and actively concern themselves with the scripting of a particular American identity, not unfamiliar to the identity politics of the Cold War.

88

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

As Campbell has shown, states do not possess stable, pre-discursive identities. Rather, the process of reproducing the identity of the United States is never completed, never fixed by nature, but instead subject to constant (re)writing.67 Thus, if there is no such thing as an essential ‘we’ to defend, as Ninkovich has observed, it would seem as if the fervent casting around for new dangers to mobilise against, in the name of national security, ‘is more a way of constituting the nation … than a matter of defense against objective external threats’.68 The following sub-sections, then, illuminate how contemporary meaning attached to the Taiwan issue in US foreign policy is constructed around familiar themes such as ‘ally’, ‘self-determination’ and ‘binary opposites’, which again show how the ongoing production and reproduction of American identity shape the discursively constructed status of Taiwan. By considering how, in the absence of a fixed and stable identity, the attempt to inscribe a more permanent US identity provides what Doty has described as ‘the occasion for a reaffirming of what the United States was’, I want to pursue the commonsensical argument invoked in order to challenge the existing one-China policy which differentiates a ‘self’ from an ‘other’, a ‘good’ from an ‘evil’ and a ‘democracy’ from an ‘authoritarian’ regime.69 Concerned with the creation and re-creation of identities, an adequate understanding of the Taiwan issue today would have to inquire into the production of meaning, noting the shift from Beijing’s role in an anti-Moscow partnership to becoming an authoritarian menace. Specifically, the point this analysis wishes to sustain is that because the modes of representation through which the danger of the PRC has been interpreted and the status of Taiwan debated replicate the figurations of past discursive representations, this on-going process constrains and makes possible certain practices.70 Accentuating differences across the Taiwan Strait As a long-standing ally of the US, ties between Taipei and Washington have become deep-seated and cannot be easily put aside. As Tucker explains, the relationship ‘encompasses a broad journey’ whereby the US has provided the essential economic, military and political support during the KMT’s resistance to Japanese imperialism, its struggle against Chinese Communism and in developing a stable and prosperous Taiwan.71 By surviving and blossoming as a ‘Western’ capitalist democracy, Taiwan has for a long time represented an important symbol for American commitments and credibility, accentuated by Washington’s belief in its moral obligation regarding the defence of the island. Taiwan’s democratisation has consolidated the relationship further and ‘[t]he traditional bonds of friendship between the people of the United States and the people of Taiwan remain as strong and vibrant as ever’.72 Indeed, many see these developments as an appropriate time to fortify Washington’s ‘unshakable longterm commitment to our critically important relations with Taiwan’. As House Representative Doug Bereuter (R – Nebraska) emphasises, ‘[w]e are there in Taipei for as long as it takes’.73 In short, ‘[n]ot only is Taiwan a thriving democracy, and

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 89 not only is it America’s tenth largest export market, but Taiwan has also been an important security partner for the United States’.74 As one of the US’s old and notable friends in the region, President Bush has even equated Taiwan with the Philippines, a formal US ally.75 Taiwan finds itself in a distinct and peculiar situation. In most political and historical contexts, the precepts of self-determination and independence are seen as conceptually synonymous. But these two precepts are juxtaposed in the exceptional situation in the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwanese people can have de facto self-determination as long as they do not attempt to be recognised with de jure sovereignty by the international community or on the basis of a referendum.76 However, Taiwan’s democratic transition has brought the delicate balance in the Taiwan Strait towards a new equilibrium. As Sherrod Brown (D – Ohio) succinctly describes the situation, ‘Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and with that comes the right of self-determination’.77 The quandary is embedded in long-held American traditions. On the one hand, Americans have always been favourably disposed to respect Jeffersonian individual rights. On the other hand, the US Government has a long history of Lincolnesque concern for national unity. As the latter noted in a Biblical allusion, a house divided cannot stand.78 These predicaments are eloquently summarised by Tucker: ‘[t]he US has emphasised through much of the twentieth century, in rhetoric if not always in action, the tremendous importance of selfdetermination. People ought to have the opportunity to choose for themselves the kind of government they will live under, the values they will live by, the goal they will live for. But the United States has also stressed respect for national sovereignty as a fundamental organising precept addressing pragmatic and philosophical needs.’79 Accordingly, the danger for the United States rests in the almost inevitable clash between these long-held principles. The contemporary dilemma for the US is that its strong commitment to the people of Taiwan has grown stronger as the island has become democratised, while Beijing is increasingly concerned about the direction in which Taiwan is moving and therefore preparing and modernising its military in order to deal with the situation and potential third-party intervention. Taiwan is often represented as ‘one of the great success stories of the post World War II era’80 and a ‘model for others’,81 serving as a ‘beacon for democracy and economic success in Asia’82 and ‘a lighthouse for democracy off the Chinese coast’.83 According to Derrida, Western thought and language are effectively a history of conceptualising things in terms of pairs. However, these conceptual couples are not just dissimilar, but one of the two is less valued than the other. ‘Logocentrism’ refers to the privileging of terms in this way.84 Binary oppositions, such as ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’, ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ and so on, are therefore commonly used to construct meaning. As Costigliola points out, ‘we tend to organize, define, and evaluate things according to what they are not or to what they are opposed’.85 There are numerous examples of texts about US Taiwan policy that are derived primarily from a discursive construction of otherness. Such a construction is

90

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

predicated on a particular differentiation between the political systems across the Taiwan Strait. Consequently, ‘[w]e have on the one hand a thriving democracy of 23 million people with freedom of speech and religion and free election and a strong human rights record. Across the Strait we have the world’s largest dictatorship with an abysmal human rights record, with little respect for freedom of speech and religious liberty and a long history of threatening the people of Taiwan.’86 Meaning, then, in US Taiwan policy discourse is constructed around binary opposites, such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’. As Doty argues, these binaries are ‘the principle according to which things are given meaning and simultaneously positioned vis-à-vis other things’. These core oppositions, therefore, structure the discourse about the status of Taiwan and the potential for Taiwan’s independence within official circles in the US and serve as a ‘frame of thinking … in which to divide self from other(s)’.87 The opposition between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ serves as an important element to construct the ROC and the PRC as two distinct kinds of subjects; on one side, we find ‘a bunch of gangsters who are threatening to kill innocent human beings on Taiwan’, keeping ‘10 million people in slave labor camps’, and ‘harvesting spleens and livers and kidneys from live prisoners to sell to the world market’. Human rights violations in the PRC ‘are legion … [and] people are mistreated constantly’ by a ‘non-elected Government run by people who are willing to suppress their opposition and throw Christians and Felon gung (sic) members in jail, even when they are being raped and brutalised …’.88 Complementary to the attributes attached to the PRC is that of viciousness which characterises the ‘Communist dictatorship’. ‘These are not admirable human beings’, instead the ‘petty tyrants’ of Beijing signify ‘some very evil people’.89 On the other side, we find ‘the people of free China’, dedicated to ‘the rule of law’ with ‘freedoms of speech, the press and assembly and intensely competitive free political parties’.90 As the Bush administration and several US Congressional members emphasise, the freedom-loving people of Taiwan ‘are threatening no one’, and ‘as an American citizen, we are all very proud of how Taiwan has achieved a political democracy’ and become ‘one of the greatest economic success stories of the last Century’.91 In short, ‘Taiwan has achieved what we hope to achieve globally, to see the economy prosper and to have a full-fledged democracy evolve …’.92 Another set of opposites like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’. It is common to observe that ‘[t]here is a free press in Taiwan, contrary to mainland China. There are political alternatives in Taiwan, contrary to mainland China’. Emphasising the undemocratic aspects of the regime in Beijing, House Representative Rohrabacher (R – California) notes that in the Taiwan situation ‘we are dealing with the people of Taiwan who have a legitimate Government and we have a group of thugs who hold power by violence and force on the mainland’.93 As such ‘we believe as Americans that a legitimate government derives its just power from the consent of the governed’.94

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 91 By becoming a full-fledged democracy, Taiwan is a model for democracy in Asia and holds out the promise for the people of the PRC, ‘further proving that democracy is not an Eastern or Western value, as some might contend, but a universal value and a right of people everywhere’.95 Accordingly, as Tom Lantos (D – California) points out, ‘from an American point of view, there is nothing that could be more desirable than to see an under-developed autocracy become a developed democracy. This stands in sharp contrast with the continuing authoritarian and dictatorial government which rules Beijing …’.96 Counterposing the degeneracy and immorality of the PRC with the decency and righteousness of Taiwan manifests what Campbell has described as an ‘important interpretive tradition in Western experience: the inscription of the other as the barbarian who stands in opposition to the ‘civilized’ self, a characterisation that played a vital role in constituting the identity of America and the New World’.97 Thus, combining the predicates of ‘a group of gangsters or thugs’, and the cruelty of some ‘petty tyrants and very evil people’ into a web of meaning, these discursive representations clearly demonstrate how any opposition to the one-China policy invokes an angry discourse of danger. The attributes attached to the PRC, presented above, have substituted the ‘red menace’ discourse of the Cold War with an emphasis on Beijing’s authoritarian characteristics. The invocation of the ‘slave’ metaphor, an echo of the argument reminiscent of NSC 68, means that the triangular relationship again has become entrenched in the US struggle over identity. In so doing, the only commonsensical, thinkable and appropriate solution to the Taiwan issue seems to be a significant change in the overall attitude of the PRC regime. Predicaments of and challenges to the one-China policy Over the last decade, Congress has had both the opportunity and the motivation to play a more active role in US policy towards China. As Sutter explains, ‘[t]he opportunity came as a result of the greater fluidity and pluralism in US foreign policy decision making after the Cold War, and as a result of the re-evaluation of US policy toward China brought about by the 1989 Tiananmen incident. The motivations came from a variety of sources, including the personal beliefs of individual members of Congress, pressure from groups with a special interest in US relations with China and partisan concerns in American domestic politics’.98 As political liberalisation and democratisation have gradually provided the justificatory foundations for self-determination, sovereignty and independence for Taiwan, the fragile balance in the Taiwan Strait is facing unprecedented challenges as key US Congressional members and other influential policymakers are promoting a change in US policy that might undermine the traditional US adherence to the one-China policy. Senator Sam Brownback (R – Kansas), the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, suggested recently that Taiwan’s democratic evolution is leading to a change of emphasis in US policy.

92

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

In Brownback’s view, ‘[a]s the Cold War melts into history, our first concern should be the preservation and extension of human rights and democracy’.99 Moreover, the Chairman of the Committee on International Relations in the House of Representatives, Henry J. Hyde (R – Illinois), concludes that ‘Taiwan’s attainment of real democracy has established a deep and enduring bond between it and the US’.100 Other House members concur, arguing that ‘the primary focus of American foreign policy should always be the promotion of democracy’.101 In the past, being pro-Taiwanese in the US often meant being a hard core anticommunist hawk. Now, the pro-Taiwanese include sympathisers with the cause of democracy. As House Representative Dana Rohrabacher succinctly puts it, ‘[t]he people of the United States are on the side of those who believe in democracy …’.102 These developments provide additional support for Taiwan’s right to selfdetermination and increase Taipei’s status and prestige. The US has a strong commitment to the people of Taiwan, which has grown stronger as Taiwan has become democratised.103 According to Peter W. Rodman, Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, US Department of Defense, the US takes these obligations very seriously. The President’s National Security Strategy report, published in September 2002, calls for ‘building a balance of power that favors freedom’. Thus, Rodman has recently argued that ‘Taiwan’s evolution into a true multi-party democracy over the past decade is proof of the importance of America’s commitment to Taiwan’s defence. It strengthens American resolve to see Taiwan’s democracy grow and prosper.’104 The influential 2005 Report to Congress by the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission unequivocally summarises this view: ‘China’s military threat against Taiwan is implicitly a threat to the US as a result of both explicit and tacit assurances that have been expressed to Taiwan by every administration since 1949. Taiwan has successfully converted from authoritarian rule to a functioning democracy, making it an even more significant symbol of American interest in the region and increasing the likelihood that a Chinese conflict with Taiwan will also involve US forces.’105 Moreover, according to Robert Kagan ‘the truth is, the ‘One China’ policy has been slowly but steadily collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions for more than a decade’.106 These sentiments are fuelled by America’s traditions. It is a contradiction for many that America with its own identity of self-determination, liberty, the promotion of democratic values and free trade, cannot support independence and self-determination for the people of Taiwan who impeccably embrace these principles. William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, taking these insights directly into the realm of US Taiwan policy, urges that ‘future policy should be designed to reflect new realities’ and notes that the one-China policy ‘expresses neither the situation on the ground in Taiwan, nor U.S. values and interests’.107 As House Representative Dan Burton forcefully argues: ‘With American soldiers dying overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to bring democracy and freedom to people who have long suffered under tyranny, to assume that the US

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 93 cares so little about Taiwan – a vibrant and pluralistic democracy that respects human rights and the rule of law, and has been an important ally of the US for over half a century – is a grave miscalculation in my opinion … If we are serious about enhancing the spread of human rights, democracy and freedom across the globe, we must stand up for the rights of the people of Taiwan.’108 Senator Robert Menendez (D – New Jersey) puts it even more bluntly: ‘The Taiwanese people should have exactly the same right of expression that we have here in America. The US should stand up for that right. Period. This Administration often speaks of democracy and unwavering support of democracy around the world. I can’t understand, therefore, this Administration’s decision to publicly chastise Mr. Chen, the democratically elected president of Taiwan, for his decision to hold a referendum, particular with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, representing a communist dictatorship, at his side.’109 Accordingly, there is a strong consensus among Congressional members and other influential pundits in Washington that more should be done to recognise Taiwan ‘as a shining example of the growth of freedom, prosperity, and democracy’.110 Indeed, House representative Tom Lantos believes ‘that the symbolic aspect of our handling of our relations with Taiwan is arcane, unacceptable, inappropriate and humiliating to us, as well as our friends in Taiwan’,111 while William Kristol thinks that the current US policy ‘dishonors their [Taiwan’s] democracy and ours’.112 In short, the persuasive argument told and retold is that ‘we stand for freedom and democracy’,113 Taiwan is a democracy, and ‘[w]e should be honoring the head of such an entity’.114 For Washington, then, the conflict between the principle of self-determination for the people of Taiwan, the increased attention to human rights violations on the Chinese mainland and the aspirations to promote democracy and freedom globally foreshadows a discomforting dilemma. Consequently, there is a dangerous connection between the US’s active encouragement of Taiwan’s democratisation and Washington’s official support for the one-China policy. If Taiwan takes concrete steps towards independence, for instance by changing its constitution through a referendum, the US will have to choose between ignoring the democratic will of a people who are functionally sovereign and democratic or risking an escalating conflict with China. Should the US turn its back on Taiwan now, it would severely damage the image of the US as a promoter of global democracy and undermine the belief in the US as the indispensable leader of the free and democratic world.115 As President Bush took the oath in January 2005, he made it the mission of his presidency to promote freedom and democracy around the world, vowing to confront ‘every ruler and every nation’ on how they treat their own people. Perhaps, as Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post note, no country presents a greater challenge to this vision than China.116 As Taiwan is an open democracy and one of the most salient counter-examples to the charges by authoritarian Asian governments that democracy is a Western system, abandoning Taiwan would clearly contradict the stated goal of the National Security Strategy to ‘actively work to bring the hope of democracy … to every corner of the world’.117

94

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

Consolidating the one-China principle The changes through which the Taiwanese government is steadily forging Taiwan’s national identity and consolidating a consensus to uphold the ‘Taiwan consciousness’, while the PRC government is preparing to act forcibly to stop that process, make it necessary to ask whether the old institutional framework of the Taiwan issue should be adjusted.118 Developments in Beijing and Taipei, of course, remain the most important factors in determining future eventualities across the Taiwan Strait. However, developments in the Taiwan question cannot be understood without scrutinising the significant impact US policy has had on the shifting status of Taiwan in world affairs. Indeed, it has been emphasised throughout this study that the US plays a momentous role in shaping crucial aspects of the Taiwan issue. The framework of the one-China policy has remained the official policy of the executive branch for more than thirty years, notwithstanding President Bush having ‘muddied the waters’ with his remark that the US would ‘do whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend itself’ in early 2001.119 The Bush administration’s initial tilt towards Taiwan in 2001, a US Taiwan policy initiative that was among the most favourable of any US administration since 1979, was soon turned around and the White House began pulling back from its earlier receptiveness to the Chen government. As a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report for Congress observes: ‘[w]hile still pursuing a closer U.S. relationship with Taiwan, U.S. officials now appear to be balancing criticism of the PRC military buildup opposite Taiwan with periodic cautions and warnings to the effect that U.S. support for Taiwan is not unconditional, but has limits’. The Bush administration has carried out a number of steps to try to rein in Chen’s provocative steps towards a more independent status for Taiwan that are seen as dismissive of US interests.120 Additionally, following the September 11 attacks and growing tension on the Korean peninsula, administration officials believed that benign US–China relations were important in cooperating against terrorism and rogue states.121 Former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, argued in November 2003 that ‘[b]uilding and sustaining a healthy overall relationship is good for America, it is good for China, it is good for the region, and good for the international community’.122 There has even been greater convergence between the US and Chinese administrations on a wide range of issues and growing recognition of the rising importance of China to US interests. As Vice President Cheney articulated during his visit to Shanghai in April 2004, the White House judges that ‘the areas of agreement [between the United States and the PRC] are far greater than those areas where we disagree …’.123 Despite the establishment of a Congressional Taiwan Caucus (CTC), which aims to increase the awareness of issues affecting US–Taiwan relations and strengthen the relationship, the congressional role in Taiwan issues is now overall in decline.124 According to a Congressional Research Service report, ‘U.S. State Department officials in 2006 reported that they felt “less pressure from Congress”

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 95 on executive branch decisions concerning Taiwan’.125 Additionally, the report points out that ‘Member and congressional staff delegations visits … to Taiwan – once a mainstay of Taiwan-congressional relations – have been described as being down while visits to the People’s Republic of China are up.’126 There are at least four possible explanations for the reduced congressional and executive backing of Taiwan’s government. First, as Christopher R. Hill, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, noted in his statement to the House of Representatives on 8 March 2006, the Bush administration is ‘increasingly concerned that Taiwan is not adequately investing in its own defense’. Though Taiwan has purchased $2.73 billion of equipment and systems from the US through seventeen foreign military sales programmes between 2002 and 2005, ‘many other critical programs have been caught in political gridlock’.127 Both the executive branch and Congress are frustrated by the continued failure of Taiwan to act in response to the PRC’s continued military build-up and the politically partisan posturing in Taiwan that leads Taiwan not to purchase US weaponry approved for sale in 2001.128 The US Department of Defense (DoD) and the Pentagon recently argued that Taiwan ‘has allowed its defense spending to decline in real terms over the past decade, creating an increased urgency for the Taiwan authorities to make the necessary investments to maintain the island’s self-defense capabilities’.129 The 2006 DoD report on China’s military power had warned about such developments and the 2001 arms package, according to the report, had been specifically designed to ‘correct imbalances’ in cross-Strait military power.130 As the defence budget stalemate in Taiwan continued, House Representative Steve Chabot expressed the concerns of the CTC in arguing that ‘I continue and many of my colleagues on the Congressional Taiwan Caucus continue to be very disappointed with Taiwan in that the defense modernization bill continues to languish in Taiwan …’.131 Finally, fearing that Taiwan’s leadership was assuming that US commitment was unqualified and therefore there were fewer reasons to speed up military modernisation, the Bush administration urged ‘Taiwan’s political leaders to implement plans to bolster defensive capabilities, irrespective of the outcome of the debate over the Special Defense Budget’.132 Taiwan’s parliament, however, has recently passed T$9.9 billion in funds to buy weapons from the US. Although this was only a fraction of the funds requested by the defence ministry, and with clear indications that acquisitions of new-generation Patriot missiles defence equipment will be cut from the defence budget, this may have been the first step in soothing relations with Washington.133 Second, as pointed out above, there is increasing acknowledgement of the importance of the PRC to US interests and Beijing has also been successful in cultivating good relations with the US.134 Since 2003, Beijing and Washington have worked to contain Chen’s government’s independence impulses.135 Third, the fragmentations and changes in the Taiwan lobby offer another possible explanation, as Congress has become more measured and balanced in its approach to China and generally follows a more pragmatic approach on China–Taiwan issues than in the recent past.136

96

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

Fourth, support for Taiwan may have weakened due to Chen’s provocative steps towards independence that might provoke China into a coercive response.137 As Chas. W. Freeman observes: ‘U.S. policy can no longer hope to deter war exclusively by keeping Beijing at bay. The United States must also discourage decisions and actions by Taipei that could leave Beijing with little choice but to react militarily.’138 The vocal pressure that the US has put on Chen and Taiwan to curb independence activities was, for instance, delivered in early December 2003 in a message from James Moriarty, then the senior director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council. Moriarty delivered a message reportedly from Bush warning Taiwan ‘in no uncertain terms’ against holding a referendum that could provoke the PRC.139 As one scholar points out, ‘Chinese and Taiwanese officials readily acknowledged that repeated public U.S. interventions against Chen Shui-bian’s pro-independence stance prior to a December 2004 legislative election significantly turned public opinion in Taiwan, and opinion in its government, away from an assertive pro-independence stance the president and his party had been pursuing with considerable success since late 2003.’140 After Chen’s re-election in March 2004, the tough US statements continued with comments in April 2004 from Cheney, who while visiting the PRC stated, ‘[w]e oppose unilateral efforts on either side to try to alter the current set of circumstances …’.141 Thus, Chen’s pro-independence views conflict with US policies that support the status quo and the one-China principle. Visiting Beijing in October 2004, former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, reinforced the US’s ‘total commitment to our One China Policy’, while emphasising that the policy had ‘created conditions of stability and security throughout the Asia-Pacific region’ and reiterating its advantageous aspects to all the parties.142 In an interview the same day, Powell further clarified any misapprehensions about the US’s adherence to the ‘oneChina’ policy by stating: ‘[t]here is only one China. Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm policy … To repeat it one more time: we do not support an independence movement in Taiwan.’143 This position has recently been reiterated by President Bush during President Hu’s visit to Washington in April 2006 and in Assistant Secretary Hill’s unambiguous statement that ‘[o]ur position, the position of this Administration, as it has been the position for the last six United States Presidents, continues to be that there is a One-China policy. Indeed, we have cautioned against any unilateral moves by either of the parties, and we have urged them to resolve these issues through peaceful dialogue.’144 The burden of leadership Although the White House still adheres to the one-China principle, the re-writing and re-production of US identity in the post-Cold War era, together with increased attention on the binary opposites that differentiate the political systems on either side of the Taiwan Strait, are increasingly compromising the one-China policy. The

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 97 fixing of a US identity is never completed. In other words, the identity constructed for the US is essentially precarious. It is by its very nature continually under attack and therefore constantly needs to be reasserted and reinforced.145 Indeed, without a clear identity, US national security cannot be safeguarded, for there will be no basis upon which national interest can be defended. After all, ‘securing something requires its differentiation, classification and definition. It has, in short, to be identified.’146 The question therefore is not how to defend the national interest but how decision-makers define it and identify threats to the nation. Identities which give meaning to beliefs and expectations help to specify, among other things, which objects are to be protected and which constitute threats. There are few strategic incentives for a conflict between the US and China over Taiwan. China possesses intercontinental ballistic missiles which can reach the US and does not need Taiwan to interrupt strategic sea lines of communication in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. Indeed, the ports of Taiwan are further from the contested areas of the South China Sea than are the major Chinese naval bases in Hainan and Guangdong provinces. The United States no longer needs Taiwan as an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, if indeed it ever did. As Nathan has pointed out, ‘Chinese naval technology lags so far behind that of the United States and its allies that the occupation of Taiwan would swing matters in the west Pacific or the South China Sea only if the United States were to pull out of Asia and cede these waters to the Chinese.’147 Nevertheless, the US would probably not stand idly by if China attacked Taiwan, even if the attack were provoked by reckless Taiwanese behaviour. In order to understand such eventualities, identities and discourses should be our starting point, while strategic calculations, traditionally the main focus of analysis, should play a secondary role. Several decision-makers and other observers have argued that America’s ability to keep peace in the Taiwan Strait is essential to its credibility.148 Rodman argues that a Chinese attempt to use force would inevitably involve the US, because ‘American words and the spirit behind them have wider meaning. America’s allies and others who rely on us will be watching how we live up to our commitments.’149 And Richard Bush forcefully maintains that ‘[t]he U.S. stake in peace and security in the Taiwan Strait is so great and the need to preserve its credibility among all regional actors so profound that it cannot simply wash its hands of the issue’.150 Credibility, however, remains essentially socially constructed. The objectivity of US credibility exists and arises from the construction of a particular US identity. The responsibilities and duties thrust upon the US are therefore inextricably linked to the self-image of a redeemer nation.151 Credibility only becomes real because it is represented as real within a particular dominant discursive representation. In Chapter 2, we discussed how the Truman administration regarded intervention in the Taiwan Strait not only as a necessary precaution, but fundamentally as a necessary obligation embedded in the characteristics associated with US identity: its leadership in the battle against Communism and its commitment to freedom.

98

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

Despite strong sentiment among its key allies in Asia and Europe that intervention in the Taiwan Strait might be counterproductive to greater strategic objectives in Asia, the Truman administration felt compelled to act. The question might then be: credibility for whom? According to a January 2004 poll, South Koreans saw the Untied States as a greater threat to Korean security than North Korea.152 Moreover, Australia has voiced concern that US involvement in a conflict in the Taiwan Strait would jeopardise Australian interests. This argument suggests that it might be erroneous to relieve the practitioners of American statecraft of all responsibility for making the world in which they work. The representation of the unique American security role in the world assumes that the US uses its power for benign purposes. The Quadrennial Defence Review Report (QDR), published by the US Department of Defense in 2001, is one example of many of the sanguine interpretations of the US’s role in the world: ‘America seeks to use its current political, economic, and military advantages not to dominate others, but to build a durable framework upon which the US and its allies and friends can prosper in freedom now and into the future.’ The indispensable position of the US to act around the world for the greater good of humankind, then, provides the boundaries of possibility: ‘the US cannot retreat from the world. It provides a general sense of stability and confidence, which is crucial to the economic prosperity that benefits much of the world.’153 As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry H. Shelton, argued in 2001, ‘maintaining a credible military capability to respond to multiple crises worldwide is absolutely fundamental to America’s global leadership role’.154 However, the logic of credibility is fundamentally circular and tied to US identity. The need for credibility prompts the US to make additional commitments, which in turn become potential sites for threats to US credibility. As Weldes points out, US national interest turns out to be the very maintenance of its credibility. Consequently, protecting Taiwan becomes essentially preserving the identity of the US.155 There are few strategic incentives for a conflict between the US and China over Taiwan. However, Washington has indicated it would intervene if China tried to take Taiwan by force, even if the attack were provoked by reckless Taiwanese behaviour. The coerced incorporation of Taiwan into the PRC, which is construed either as a Communist menace or an authoritarian regime, still represents an intolerable danger to US identity. In short, America is confronted by an immense challenge. It aspires to transform China by promoting human rights and democracy yet the US needs to restrain Taiwan’s emerging impulses towards independence which is tied to the process of democratisation on the island. Taiwan’s democratic transition, therefore, has brought the delicate balance in the Taiwan Strait towards a new equilibrium. Indeed, the complexity of the Taiwan issue today renders the current emphasis on the promotion of human rights and democracy in US foreign policy contradictory and US Taiwan policy has paradoxically become constrained by the developments of democracy in Taiwan. The contradictory aspects of US Taiwan policy are further complicated by the contemporary conundrums of cross-Strait relations. The situation in the Taiwan

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 99 Strait today does not resemble the belligerence in the 1950s. However, the situation is no less potentially dangerous. Although Chiang Kai-shek defied US efforts to reduce tensions in the Taiwan Strait through his ultimate aim of restoring the KMT’s rule on the mainland by drawing American troops into the animosity, America retained the supreme balance by forestalling Chiang’s offensive capabilities and refusing to support any large-scale attack on China. Moreover, the KMT was a discredited authoritarian regime, lacking vital international support. In comparison, contemporary Taiwan is a flourishing democracy with a firmly rooted identity. Taiwan’s democratic transition has not increased its bellicosity; however, it has deprived Taiwan and China of their common objective of a unified, one-China principle and increased the Taiwanese people’s embracement of the freedom, prosperity, autonomy and sovereignty they enjoy. Whereas the KMT was unable to fulfil its aspirations of returning to the mainland without US endorsement and military support, Taiwan’s impulses towards independence are comparatively more difficult to control as they depend on declaratory actions instead of a large-scale, military manoeuvre. Finally, China and Taiwan are increasingly competing for international status, with Taiwan desperately seeking international space, fearful that a more dominant rising China will isolate it further. If Taiwan’s aspirations are not contained, the US will compromise its one-China policy and be confronted with a destabilised and hostile situation in the Taiwan Strait. The US National Security Strategy report states that ‘[t]he United States will stand beside any nation determined to build a better future by seeking the rewards of liberty for its people’.156 The United States invested time and valuable resources in promoting democracy and boosting the image of the Kuomintang regime during the Cold War. Now that democracy exists, Washington has problems dealing with it. If Taiwan votes for a referendum on independence, the US will have to choose between ignoring the democratic will of people who are functionally sovereign and democratic or risking an escalating conflict with China. Should the US turn its back on Taiwan, it would severely damage the image of the US as a promoter of global democracy. To reiterate the major findings from the discussion above, the attempt to fix a stable identity for the US ‘self’ and an absolute difference that denotes nothing but otherness and threats for the PRC, out of what are in fact volatile identities, closes down a legitimate space for alternative ways of understanding an inherently protean, amorphous Taiwan question. As a result, to paraphrase the words of Pan, it becomes difficult to recognise that the future trajectory of the ‘Taiwan issue’ is essentially contingent on how the ‘we’ in the United States want to see the Taiwan question as well as on how the Chinese and Taiwanese choose to shape it.157 In other words, the discursive strategies of perceiving the ‘Taiwan issue’ through the lenses of ‘us’ and ‘them’, highlight the incongruity and contradictory aspects of US Taiwan policy and affect how decision-makers understand other(s) while certain courses of action become incomprehensible and improper. This chapter, then, has tried to investigate the discursive representations and the logic behind contemporary declarations about the new dangers and possibilities facing US Taiwan policy. I argued that America’s human rights policies towards

100

Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy

China have been a central part both in reinventing the United States’ identity in the post-Cold War era and in upholding America’s self-image to make coherent a set of clear values essential to fortify and establish support for foreign policy initiatives. As the emphasis on US identity as the leader in the battle against Communism was replaced by America’s increased attention on its identity as the champion of human rights and democracy in the post-Cold War period, new modes of representations were invoked in order to differentiate between an authoritarian regime in Beijing and Taiwan’s flourishing democracy. This resembles previous discursive practices of differentiating between a Communist and an anticommunist regime. By problematising the commonsensical argument invoked to challenge the existing one-China policy differentiating a ‘self’ from an ‘other’, a ‘good’ from an ‘evil’ and a ‘democracy’ from an ‘authoritarian’ regime, I showed how the on-going process of constituting a particular American identity is shaping the discursively constructed Taiwan issue in US China policy. I then asserted that the additional effect of Taiwan’s democratisation and changing attitude towards the one-China principle and the ramifications of China’s attempt to establish a salient position in East Asia create unprecedented challenges to the fragile balance in the Taiwan Strait. As Taiwan’s democratisation process increasingly provides the justificatory foundations for self-determination, sovereignty and independence for Taiwan, there is a dangerous connection between the US’s active encouragement of Taiwan’s democracy and Washington’s official support for the one-China policy. The interrelation between America’s enhanced emphasis on the promotion of democracy and the emergence of a democratic Taiwan has unleashed forces that are difficult to control. Accordingly, the complexity of the ‘Taiwan issue’ provides commonsensical arguments which challenge and contradict the official US pledge to the one-China principle. As House Representative Dan Burton convincingly argues, ‘[i]f we are serious about enhancing the spread of human rights, democracy and freedom across the globe, we must stand up for the rights of the people of Taiwan’.158 As identities change, so do the meanings drawing new attention to the predicaments in cross-Strait relations and the foundations of US Taiwan policy. The meanings attached to the one-China principle, therefore, are never stable, fixed or complete, but are constantly evolving and always in the process of becoming. This process, however, is inextricably linked to discursive representations. From this perspective, rediscovering the process of the discursive production and reproduction of a contingent US identity illuminates how the carefully constructed ambiguity of the one-China principle is undermined by declarations to do with the nation’s meaning and purpose.

5

Debating US strategy towards China

The purpose of this chapter is to move from the specifics of US Taiwan policy to the overall US China policy by showing that the theme of engagement and containment of a rising China in world affairs, which for a long time has been treated as having a certain and fixed meaning, is being challenged conceptually by a vibrant field of enquiry that increasingly sees US strategy as hedging against unknowns in its policy towards China in the twenty-first century. It is argued that the engagement/containment debate is becoming obsolete and that the US has adopted a China strategy that is best described as ‘engagement plus hedging’. By moving towards a new conceptualisation of US policy towards China, the aim is to show that the insight offered by approaches sharing essential assumptions of constructivism provides theoretically rich as well as practical analytical guidance. Instead of basing its strategy on concrete ends of containing or defeating the Chinese Communists’ state, US China policy is currently in a process of establishing a policy that emphasises hedging and managing risks associated with the rise of China. As policymakers, scholars and pundits cannot decide on the ends of a US China strategy and fiercely disagree whether China represents a friend or an enemy, the dichotomised containment/engagement debate is becoming redundant and cannot grasp the new dimensions of US policy towards China. The key objective in the following analysis, as with much of the previous analysis, is not so much to assess the ability of competing theories to explain facts. Rather, by drawing on hedging, risk management and constructivism, the objective is to develop a conceptual tool for analysing risks related to the rise of great powers and the end of Cold War constraints. The chapter starts by introducing the containment/engagement debate. It then shows how various recent re-conceptualisations of this debate invite us to consider the multifaceted strategies of hedging and risk that have come to replace the old analytical concepts of the Cold War era.

Engagement or containment? Since the end of the Cold War, there has been no shortage of sensational remarks about how the rising economic, political and military power of the PRC presents

102

Debating US strategy towards China

a variety of challenges to US interests. More specifically, the Taiwan issue is affected by a particularly significant component of US China policy: namely the issue of whether containment or engagement is the best way to deal with a ‘rising China’.1 Searching for the best ways to manage relations with a rising China, Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power, edited by Alistair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross, draws our attention to a debate that has produced a flurry of publications in the United States in the last decade.2 On the one hand, there are scholars who argue that China is a dangerous adversary and a potential threat to American interests; consequently, they advocate a policy of containment. On the other hand, there is a minority view that emphasises positive developments in US–Chinese relations and promotes the logic of engagement. The engagement approach has characterised official US policy towards China since Nixon’s visit in February 1972. Accordingly, a consistent aim of successive presidents and US administrations has been to draw the PRC into a constructive relationship with the world community.3 Emphasising the positive developments in US–China relations, the basic premises of the engagement approach hold that China should be encouraged to participate in various international institutions which may increase its conformity to the implicit norms of the international community.4 Reflecting on US–Chinese relations in the twenty-first century, former president Clinton declared that ‘China’s remarkable economic growth is making China more and more dependent on other nations for investment, for markets, for energy, for ideas.’5 In the economic realm, liberals believe that trade and economic interaction are sources of peaceful relations between states, because the mutual benefits of trade and expanding interdependence between national economies will tend to foster cooperative behaviour.6 Many promote the logic of engagement in US–Chinese relations.7 In 2003, Beijing held 8.4 percent of all US treasury notes held by foreigners, second only to Japan. But the debt that China holds of the US is considerably larger than just treasury notes. The PRC also holds about $50 billion in US state, local, and corporate debt instruments. In sum, the total debt instruments of the US that China holds as of the end of 2002 amounted to some $150 billion.8 As the historian Neill Ferguson points out, the American ‘debtor empire’ depends on China continuing to channel its surplus savings into the US economy. Otherwise the US would not be able to run its enormous fiscal deficits, and could not live up to its Medicare obligations to its own citizens.9 Moreover, as Lampton told a Senate Hearing in 2003, ‘the notion that Chinese power is just us investing in them is only part of the story’, indeed, ‘you will find the US has invested considerably less in China than they have invested here’.10 Accordingly, the US–Chinese trade relationship is seen as mutually beneficial, creating and supporting American jobs.11 Finally, it has been observed that the potential gains for the US from the growth of Chinese power are much greater than the potential problems. The fact that China is embedded in global supply and production chains that incorporate the value-added components made by many

Debating US strategy towards China 103 of America’s friends throughout the East Asian region, ‘means that Washington increasingly will discover that to economically retaliate against China is to economically strike America’s allies and friends’.12 In addition to China’s significant economic interdependence, the engagement approach maintains that the Chinese are not simply using multilateral diplomacy to pretend to be cooperative while expanding their economic growth and building up the military in a quest to supplant the United States as the hegemon of the region. Instead, as Medeiros and Fravel argue, ‘[i]n contrast to a decade ago, the world’s most populous country now largely works within the international system. It has embraced much of the current constellation of international institutions, rules, and norms as a means to promote its national interests’.13 Evidently, China has become more willing, over recent years, to participate actively in multilateral economic and security organisations, such as the AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC), the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the ASEAN Plus Three and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Though China initially was sceptical to these organisations, the ARF has facilitated a China–ASEAN ‘code of conduct’ in the disputed South China Sea, while the ASEAN Plus Three has been a forum whereby China, Japan and Korea have been able to extend economic discussions to include political and security issues. Through the SCO, China is stabilising and consolidating its boarders in Central Asia and even participating in joint military exercises to develop counterterrorism measures. With its origin in the ‘Shanghai Five’ in 1994, the SCO is the first international multilateral organisation that China has founded, and it has helped to build domestic support for multilateral diplomacy.14 Having adamantly opposed peacekeeping operations in the past, Chinese participation in UN peacekeeping operations has expanded dramatically. According to the monthly summary of contributions to UN peacekeeping operations in May 2007, China is ranked 11th of all contributing countries and, with France, is the largest contributor of UNSC members.15 Thus, despite contentious obstacles remaining, the multiple channels of contact and mutual trust mechanisms developing within US–Chinese relations, make it increasingly difficult for traditional power politics to function. When it comes to cross-Strait relations, both China and Taiwan are interested in avoiding instability and disruption to the increasing economic ties across the Taiwan Strait. Thus there are reasons to believe that ‘[t]he surging level of Taiwanese investment in China is the single most compelling sign that unification might occur without war’.16 China and Taiwan depend upon foreign markets, on foreign investments and a peaceful environment for continued economic growth. As Tucker and others have argued, ‘developments during the last decade have produced radically contradictory impulses that are pulling Taiwan and China apart at the same time as they are being drawn irresistibly together’.17 In short, China’s growing economic interdependence will encourage the Chinese leadership to cultivate benign relations with neighbouring countries and its most important trading partner, the United States.

104

Debating US strategy towards China

The advocates of engagement have been increasingly challenged by scholars who see the rise of China as a threat to American interests.18 Believing that there is an underlying tension in US–China relations and that China is a dangerous adversary, these writers advocate a policy of containment and emphasise the aggressive and threatening aspects of a China that is developing ever more lethal offensive military capabilities.19 Fuelled by historical analogies to rising powers, such as Wilhelmine Germany and post-Meiji Japan, several scholars hold that rising powers have proved to be disruptive and that the rise of China is thus not encouraging for a peaceful world order. As Richard K. Betts and Thomas J. Christensen point out, ‘[l]ike Germany a century ago, China is a late-blooming great power emerging into a world already ordered strategically by earlier arrivals’. The quest for a rightful ‘place in the sun’ will, it is argued, ‘inevitably foster growing friction with Japan, Russia, India or the United States’.20 Others have identified some of the important historical experiences that are likely to influence Chinese foreign policy behaviour. These may be summarised as the ‘myth of national humiliation’, the idea of China as the Middle Kingdom and the historical existence and relevance of a parabellum strategic culture.21 Many China scholars believe that ‘the myth of the national humiliation’ has given rise to Chinese bitterness that their nation has been subject to insults at the hand of imperialist powers.22 To understand fully the psychological depth of this humiliation, one must also consider the notion shared by most Chinese of China as a Middle Kingdom. Consequently, China would like to restore its position as the centre of the civilised world and is determined never again to leave itself vulnerable to the meddling of foreign powers. As Mao stated in September 1949, China ‘will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.’23 These analysts, therefore, find in China a state determined to reassert ancient imperial pretensions to ‘restore its dominant role in East Asia’ and they assert that ‘China’s excessive territorial claims present a dangerous challenge to US policy’.24 Considering China’s drive for military modernisation, the US Department of Defense concludes that China emphasises balance of power, the development of ‘comprehensive national power’, and approximation of ‘strategic configuration of power’ in order to ‘adjust its grand strategy, as well as for opportunities to advance national interest’.25 Accordingly, China is a rising power, committed to modernising its armed forces and a possible challenger to US interests in Asia in the near future.26 Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Randall G. Schriver, notes that ‘the Chinese have invested heavily in their military modernisation, mostly directed at Taiwan, mostly in the area of ballistic and cruise missiles development and deployment, and that is of great concern’.27 Statistics on China’s military expenditure tend to be controversial and generate more questions than answers about the nature of and increase in China’s military modernisation in the past decade. But even the most cursory examination of some elementary figures suggests trends that can hardly be denied. According

Debating US strategy towards China 105 to China’s officially reported defence budget, China has had a double-digit growth in military expenditures for the last fifteen years and an average budget growth of 13.5 percent annually in the past nine years. In 2005, China announced a 12.6 percent increase to $29.9 billion.28 China has announced a 17.8 percent increase in the 2007 budget, bringing it to $44.9 billion.29 According to the US Defence Department’s 2005 Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China (2005 DoD Report), it is widely recognised that China’s officially published defence budget substantially under-reports actual expenditure. By some calculations, therefore, the 2005 DoD Report notes that the official figure under-reports Beijing’s actual defence spending by a factor of two or three, estimating that China’s defence establishment could have received as much as $90 billion in 2005.30 Despite China’s close economic ties with both the United States and Taiwan, the Chinese have indicated a readiness to use force in the pursuit of high-value issues concerning sovereignty.31 In an interview with the executive editor of the Washington Post before an American tour in December 2003, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao declared that ‘the Chinese people will pay any price to safeguard the unity of the motherland’.32 More recently, China’s National People’s Congress, the ruling Communist Party’s rubber-stamp parliament, approved an anti-secession law by a vote of 2,896 to 0, with two abstentions, authorising the use of force against Taiwan if it moves toward formal independence.33 Additionally, the economic trade relationship between the US and China is deteriorating as a result of US imports from China outpacing US exports to China by more than five to one. US trade deficit with China is expected to exceed $200 billion in 2005, an increase of more than 140 percent in only four years. In 2006 the US trade deficit with China reached $232 billion.34 Moreover, the marvel of Chinese economic power and China’s extensive quest for natural resources have become considerable sources of concern in the United States.35 Though China’s growing engagement with multilateral organisations is evident, a number of scholars argue that China’s actual ‘learning’ from and integration with a wide range of international organisations remain shallow.36 Hence, China attempts to enjoy the benefits of economic interdependence and the prestige of participating in international society, while controlling and guarding against any impact on Chinese society, particularly any erosion of Chinese sovereignty.37 This approach has been characterised by Samuel Kim as a ‘maxi–mini approach’: a strategy of maximising the benefits of organisational participation by maximising China’s rights and interests and minimising China’s responsibility and normative costs such as dependency and loss of sovereignty.38 Sceptical about what China officially describes as ‘a new security concept’, Michael Yahuda believes the changes in Chinese foreign policy statutes are ‘more apparent than substantive’.39 On substance, Yahuda is supported by a number of realist scholars who argue that the structural imperatives of the international system ‘will probably force the United States to abandon its policy of constructive engagement in the near future’.40 John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is at the cutting edge of realist scholarship. According to Mearsheimer,

106

Debating US strategy towards China

the US is the only regional hegemon today and ‘it is clear that the most dangerous scenario the United States might face in the early twenty-first century is one in which China becomes a potential hegemon in Northeast Asia’.41 As Mearsheimer warns us, ‘if a regional hegemon is confronted with a peer competitor, it would no longer be a status quo power. Indeed, it would go to considerable lengths to weaken and maybe even destroy its distant rival’.42 Accordingly, the rivalry will intensify in the future because the underlying contention within the US–Chinese relationship has not been altered.43 As the 2002 US–China Security Review Commission’s report to Congress argues, and the 2005 report reiterates, the two countries have ‘sharply contrasting world views, competing geo-strategic interests and opposing political systems’.44 As one prominent scholar succinctly summarises the containment approach, ‘[i]n short, Sino-American tensions have ‘real’ causes that cannot somehow be erased through dialogue, papered over with communiqués and elaborate verbal formulations, or eliminated simply by narrowing differences on specific policy issues’.45 Although it is not the aim of this book to be drawn into an us/them dichotomisation of the ‘China problem’ by reducing the analysis to whether an emerging China should be contained or engaged in contemporary world politics, this debate does usefully highlight that our underlying representations and categories about the world shape what we see and what we conclude about ‘reality’. China’s emergence from its isolationist tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s and its growing interaction with the outside world in the last three decades are facts. However, the key question is the meaning that policymakers and other observers attach to the ‘rise of China’, which also has important implications for the way they understand the Taiwan issue. Arguing that the dynamics of economic interdependence between Taiwan and China provide the greatest opportunity for reconciliation across the Taiwan Strait, and accompanied by a growing number of economic and security issues that facilitate more cordial US–China relations, the engagement discourse tends to be supportive of the official US commitment to the one-China principle. The view is that Washington’s policy of a peaceful resolution to cross-Strait differences, which opposes any unilateral moves that could change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, will provide benign relations in East Asia.46 Conversely, the containment discourse resembles many of the assumptions associated with the ‘red menace’ discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the emphasis is no longer on the anachronistic Communist credentials of the PRC, the containment discourse emphasises the aggressive and threatening aspects of a China that is increasingly modernising its military capabilities and poses a formidable threat to Taiwan’s de facto sovereignty.47 Thus, the containment policy is intrinsically linked to the construction of China as a threatening other.48 As such, these writers remain sympathetic to the argument that the one-China policy should be jettisoned in favour of a policy that recognises the ‘reality’ of Taiwan’s independence and Taiwan’s importance as an ally in containing the rise of China.49

Debating US strategy towards China 107 The engagement and containment literature could therefore be seen as a particular kind of discursive representation that dichotomises the US, China and Taiwan as self and others. Rather than an objective reflection of contemporary developments in East Asia per se, the discursive construction of otherness provides the ‘conceptual lens’ that remains an important reference point for US decisionmakers.

A new middle ground Today, Washington’s China policy faces the traditional challenge of responding to a rising great power. Will China become a benign or aggressive power? What role will Beijing choose to play in world affairs? How will US–China relations evolve? Will China become a partner or will it aggressively challenge US interests? Given the uncertainty and the impossibility of forecasting the future, some scholars have argued for a new, blended strategic option, which they have labelled ‘congagement’. By transcending the polarised containment and engagement debate, this policy ‘attempts to combine the advantages of engagement and containment: hoping for long-term positive developments while still reckoning on the eventuality that China will pursue a course of confrontation with the United States’.50 A policy of ‘congagement’ would continue the efforts to integrate China into the international community while giving equal attention to deterrence and preparing for the possibility of a hegemonic conflict.51 As Peter Rudolf argues, ‘[d]epending on the way China developed, such a strategy of congagement could be transferred into a strategy of either containment or partnership’.52 According to Zalmay Khalilzad at the RAND Corporation, a strategy of ‘congagement’ encompasses three objectives: ‘preserve the hope inherent in engagement policy, deter China from becoming hostile, and hedge against the possibility that a strong China might challenge US interest’. As a hedge against potential conflict with China, Khalilzad suggests that the US move on three fronts. First, avoid doing anything that directly helps the growth of Chinese military power. Second, encourage US friends and allies not to contribute directly to enhance China’s military capabilities. Third, strengthen US capabilities and those of friends and allies.53 In my view, there are two reasons why a more sophisticated analysis would move beyond the strategy of ‘congagement’ and instead explore the concept of hedging as a potential new middle ground in US China policy. First, a containment policy has to some extent become anachronistic and cannot simply be mixed with engagement policy. Second, the concept of hedging is underdeveloped within the literature and there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of how to apply the concept of hedging to US China policy. The post-Cold War security environment, together with the effects of globalisation and growing economic interdependence, pose a new set of challenges that make it increasingly more difficult to pursue a viable containment policy of China. Indeed, there are reasons to question whether the US can contain Chinese regional

108

Debating US strategy towards China

dominance or even prevent the rise of China in world affairs. Reflecting on these issues, former Deputy Secretary of State, Robert B. Zoellick, convincingly argued that the China of today is simply not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s: It does not seek to spread radical, anti-American ideologies; While not yet democratic, it does see itself in a twilight conflict against democracy around the globe; While at times mercantilist, it does not see itself in a death struggle with capitalism; And most importantly, China does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system.54 Accordingly, Zoellick asks: ‘how should we view China at the dawn of the 21st Century?’ ‘If the Cold War analogy does not apply, neither does the distant balance-of-power politics of 19th-Century Europe’, argues Zoellick. ‘The global economy of the 21st Century is a tightly woven fabric. We are too interconnected to try to hold China at arm’s length …’ Thus, in Zoellick’s view, the US should foster constructive cooperation with China and encourage Beijing ‘to become a responsible stakeholder in the international system’.55 As Randall Schweller points out in his assessment of rising great powers, ‘[t]he key question is whether the rising power views the protection and promotion of its essential values as dependent on fundamental changes in the existing international order; or whether it is merely dissatisfied with its prestige in the existing international order’.56 Zoellick thinks China belongs to the latter – a dissatisfied state but not a revolutionary one. According to Schweller then, ‘[t]he key to the success of a strategy designed to cope with a rising, dissatisfied power is accurately distinguishing limited-aims revisionist states, which merely seek changes within the existing order, from revolutionary powers, which aim to overthrow the system’.57 Thus Zoellick and Schweller arrive at the same conclusion; that engagement is the appropriate strategy with regard to limitedaims revisionist states. However, cooperation as stakeholders does not imply any absence of differences and friction. To counter uncertainties, a lack of transparency and risks related to ‘how China will use its power’, Zoellick points out that the United States, and others as well, will ‘hedge relations with China’.58 A more adequate description of US China policy therefore would be ‘engagement plus hedging’ which does not have the references to containment that ‘congagement’ does.59 Indeed, ‘engagement plus hedging’ characterises US China policy in major official policy statements. The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report acknowledges that the US will attempt to foster cooperation, encourage ‘China to play a constructive, peaceful role in the Asia-Pacific region’ and ‘serve as a partner in addressing common security challenges …’. Simultaneously, in recognising that of all the major and emerging powers, ‘China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States’, the QDR states that ‘the United States, its allies and partners must

Debating US strategy towards China 109 also hedge against the possibility that a major or emerging power could choose a hostile path in the future’.60 The White House’s National Security Strategy published in March 2006 adopts a similar position: ‘the United States will welcome the emergence of a China that is peaceful and prosperous and that cooperates with us on common challenges and mutual interest’. As China becomes active globally and contributes to regional and international stability as a responsible stakeholder, ‘[m]utual interest can guide our cooperation on issues such as terrorism, proliferation, and energy security’. Consequently, the White House strategy ‘seeks to encourage China to make the right strategic choices for its people, while we hedge against other possibilities’.61 Finally, in stressing the uncertainty and the lack of transparency surrounding ‘the future course China’s leaders will set for their country, including in the area of China’s expanding military power and how that power might be used’, the US Department of Defense and the Pentagon assert that China’s developments will ‘naturally and understandably prompt international responses that hedge against the unknown’.62

‘There are no free lunches’ – entering hedging Undeniably, as Robert Sutter points out, ‘hedging is the name of the game’ and the US are not going to ‘put all their eggs in one basket’.63 Hedging has become the ‘watchword in China relations’ or ‘a new buzzword in U.S. strategic discourse’ as Washington is ‘[h]edging the China bet’.64 Nonetheless, the concept of hedging, as several writers have noted, ‘is admittedly a difficult concept’ and ‘a term used widely and with varied meanings by international observers’.65 Further clarification is needed before hedging can fruitfully be adopted by an analysis of US China strategy. In its calls for ‘engagement plus hedging’ – an approach ‘that seeks cooperation but also creates prudent hedges against the possibility that cooperative approaches by themselves may fail to preclude future conflict’ – the QDR provides some clarification by arguing that ‘[a] successful hedging strategy requires improving the capacity of partner states and reducing their vulnerabilities’.66 In this regard, the US will ‘seek to strengthen partner nations’ capabilities’, ‘dissuade major and emerging powers from developing capabilities that could threaten regional stability’, ‘deter conflict’, ‘defeat aggression should deterrence fail’, and diversify ‘its basing posture’.67 Yet, there is still room for refinement. ‘Hedging must become an active strategy as opposed to a mere slogan’, argues Tkacik, and ‘that word, and the ideas and observations it embodies, must be developed into a coherent policy set’. However, Tkacik’s analysis is more or less the same as traditional analyses: advance reform in China; strengthen ties with Japan and India; protect democracies in Asia; deepen the strategic dialogue with Europe; downgrade the strategic dialogue with China; support Taiwan’s democracy; confront Beijing’s subtle but substantial support to

110

Debating US strategy towards China

the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes; and maintain military preeminence in the Pacific.68 In one of the most comprehensive analyses of hedging as a strategic concept in international relations, Goh persuasively argues that ‘to be useful’, hedging ‘needs to be defined properly’ and distinguished from ‘balancing, containment, bandwagoning, buckpassing, and other straightforward strategic choices’. Focusing her analysis on Southeast Asian states, Goh points out that there has been no systematic study of the hedging strategies or hedging behaviour. Indeed, according to Goh ‘[t]here is no satisfactory exposition of hedging as a strategy. What does hedging behaviour look like?’69 Goh’s preferred definition of hedging is ‘a set of strategies aimed at avoiding (or planning for contingencies in) a situation in which states cannot decide upon more straightforward alternatives such as balancing, bandwagoning, or neutrality’. In hedging, states ‘cultivate a middle position that forestalls or avoids having to choose one side [or one straightforward policy stance] at the obvious expense of another’.70 In my view, Goh’s analysis has taken some important steps in operationalising and explaining the concept of hedging in strategic terms. Ultimately, however, I disagree with Goh’s insistence that ‘hedging is, in fact, a luxury of the relatively weak only. A country like the United States, which wields preponderant power in the international system, cannot lay claim to hedging strategies.’71 Before developing the argument that a hedging strategy is appropriate when trying to understand the overall US China policy, I will briefly discuss some aspects of hedging that remain underdeveloped, thereby providing a richer framework for analysis. Elaborating somewhat on Goh’s definition of hedging, Foot emphasises the ‘insurance policy’ embedded in hedging.72 Examining Chinese strategies in a US hegemonic global order, Foot shows that China seeks to build on the coincidence of interests with the United States or accommodate the current US-dominated global order. Conversely, if this strategy ultimately became unworkable, ‘China could try to use its newly formed bilateral and multilateral relationship to offset any serious deterioration in relations with America’. In this sense, Foot notes that ‘Beijing’s strategy contains an important hedging element, or insurance policy, through which China seeks to secure its future’.73 In succinct terms, hedging just means insuring. In finance, a hedge is a way of insuring an investment against risks or a strategy designed to reduce risks. To some economists, ‘to hedge with futures contracts may also mean to trade in order to profit from future price changes’.74 Companies attempt to hedge because there are risks that are peripheral to the central business in which they operate. One cannot, however, expect trading profits as well as risk reduction. ‘One must keep in mind the well-repeated adage: “There are no free lunches”.’75 As with states, hedging objectives vary widely from firm to firm, and in an era of globalisation the spectrum of hedging instruments available is becoming more complex. Firms hedge in order to improve or maintain the competitiveness of the firm. Hedging,

Debating US strategy towards China 111 however, is contingent on the preferences of the firm’s stakeholders: some are risk takers, others are more risk averse. Alfred W. Jones is generally credited with having come up with the first hedge fund. To limit his market risk, Jones did not just buy stocks and hope he had made the right analysis and that the wind was at his back, he also had a certain percentage of his portfolio on the ‘short’ side – that is, he was betting those stocks would go down. Since his shorts were likely to make money in a down market, they acted as protection – a hedge – when his ‘longs’ performed poorly. The model was improved by a revision of the so-called efficient-market hypothesis, while other tests compared risk-adjusted historic returns of two different types of stocks – value stocks versus growth stocks. Economists soon discovered that the hedging strategy not only worked with stocks but with currencies, commodities and even entire economies.76 Exploring the links between speculative and hedging demands for securities in markets, Dow argues that it is not possible to construct a hedge that eliminates all risk. Some residual, or basic, risk will remain.77 The idea behind hedging is that you find two closely related assets and then buy one and sell the other in proportions that minimise the risk of your net position. The key issue, as Brealey and Stewart point out, ‘is to find the hedge ratio or delta – that is, the number of units of one asset that is needed to offset changes in the value of the other asset’. According to Brealey and Stewart, ‘this calls for a strong dose of judgment’, as any financial manager needs to decide how much a rise in one asset could affect another asset.78 Another core aspect of a hedging strategy is to strike a balance between uncertainty and the risk of opportunity loss. Consider the example that Chand Sooran gives: a Canadian steel company, 75 percent of whose product is sold in US dollars to customers located worldwide. The company closes a deal for US$10 million worth of product and they know that in a month they will receive payment. If they do not hedge the transaction in any way, they do not know with any certainty at what rate of exchange they can exchange US$10 million when it is delivered. If we call the prevailing spot rate, for sake of argument, 1.5300 and the prevailing one month forward outright rate at which the company could hedge itself 1.5310, the company knows without any question at what rate the exchange will be if they enter into a forward contract. It will be 1.5310. But the company has now taken on an infinite risk of opportunity loss. If the Canadian dollar weakens because of some unforeseen event and in one month’s time the prevailing spot rate turns out to be 1.5600, then the company has foregone 290,000 Canadian dollars. This is the opportunity loss.79 Within the economic sphere there are instruments that address both certainty and opportunity loss, called derivates or derivates products. Thus most financial institutions choose the optimal hedging strategy and risk management solutions involving derivates products. How does this insight from finance and risk management translate to US China policy? How do states improve or maintain

112

Debating US strategy towards China

their competitiveness? Which actors are risk-acceptant or risk-averse? How do states balance their ‘shorts’ and ‘longs’? And what are the strategies for dealing with uncertainty, opportunity loss and risks in the security area? As Harding says, ‘the trick is going to be for the US to explain to China what security hedging means, as opposed to hedging in the stockmarket’.80 Harding views financial hedging as impersonal (and often entirely secret), while security hedging is quite visible and ‘personal’. That is, when investing in a hedge fund or future contracts to counteract or insure against downside risks of holding certain equities, the firm may not even be aware that an investment has been placed or does not ‘take it personally’. On the other hand, if a state develops a potential military alliance to counteract the strategic risk posed by another country, such an alliance would most likely be interpreted as a sign of mistrust, which another state may have to counter.81 To what extent, then, does hedging differ from balancing, bandwagoning and soft balancing? In contrast to traditional balance of power theory which emphasises ‘forming and maintaining open military alliances to balance a strong state or to forestall the rise of a power or a threatening state’, hedging is more conditional.82 A state adopts a hedging strategy to be able and prepared for the eventuality that it may need to balance against another state in the future. Hedging, therefore, can be seen as developing the ability to balance, if that becomes necessary. The US efforts to enhance security operations with Japan, Australia and India do not represent balancing against China in traditional terms, but preparing to balance if Washington finds it necessary.83 Undoubtedly, the US has strengthened its military presence and redeployed military forces from Europe to East Asia.84 However, as Medeiros argues, US policy has been driven by ‘numerous motivations that are not all tied to balancing Chinese power, such as burden sharing with capable allies, counterterrorism, nonproliferation and maritime security’.85 These changes can therefore be seen as developing the ability to balance. In comparison to the realist approach to hard balancing, it is neither an overtly competitive strategy, nor solely directed at China. A central feature of a US hedging strategy towards China is that Washington cannot decide in the post-Cold War strategic environment, shaped by globalisation and growing interdependence, whether China represents a friend or an enemy. By insuring against uncertainties and future potential risks, Washington’s hedging strategy towards China creates room for manoeuvre and greater flexibility than traditional balancing politics. Hedging differs from traditional balance of power theory with its key proposition predicting ‘that a state or group of states, facing another state or group of states whose power is growing and is judged to be a threat, will act to offset the growing strengths of the threatening party’, by incorporating important elements from Goh’s definition, in particular, how hedging ‘forestalls or avoids having to chose one side at the obvious expense of the other’.86 According to Schweller, danger arises when states are identified as either rising revolutionary powers or limited-aims revisionist states. Although Schweller believes that the greatest danger arises when a revolutionary power is misidentified

Debating US strategy towards China 113 as a limited-aims revisionist state, the opposite mistake in recognition ‘will also lead to unnecessary conflict and possibly war …’.87 The containment discourse in US China policy argues that when a status quo power faces an expansionary adversary – such as a revolutionary power – ‘it would no longer be a status quo power. Indeed, it would go to considerable lengths to weaken and maybe even destroy its distant rival’.88 Schweller, however, warns us that ‘recognition error can become a self-fulfilling prophesy: by treating a limited-aims revisionist as if it were a revolutionary state, the defenders of the status quo unwittingly induce such a conversion’.89 While it was probably never Schweller’s objective, his argument in many ways links up with the securitisation theory developed by the ‘Copenhagen School’. Instead of taking the security environment as a pre-given and treating threats and their referent objects as ‘brute facts’ that can be known outside the social context and the discursive representations in which they emerge, the theory of securitisation proposes studying the process through which specific issues become illocutionarily constructed as security issues.90 Thus, spotting an issue of security is itself a social construction. On the basis of that construction, policymakers apply a specific set of rules concerning how to stop the security threat, resist it and counter it. What counts as a security issue depends on how social actors frame the issue.91 Neither can the hedging strategy in US China policy be described as bandwagoning. Although the US certainly works with China to solve a number of issues in world affairs, there is no strategic alliance. Bandwagoning usually occurs when a state chooses to align itself with the threatening power in order to limit the threat, neutralise it, or profit from the new distribution of power. This hardly corresponds to US China policy. Additionally, because my focus is on US China policy, I have omitted buckpassing and binding from the analysis. Buckpassing might characterise European countries’ attempt to free ride on the balancing efforts of others and binding may be the responses of weak states dealing with Chinese power in Asia. However, I do not see these concepts as prominent in US strategies towards China. Soft balancing is usually referred to in the literature as behaviour that complicates and undermines US foreign policy through the formation of anti-hegemonic coalitions and an attempt to ‘rework balance of power theory to accommodate a world without hard balancing …’.92 To date, there are few comprehensive studies that show how the US engages in soft balancing with China. Most analysts work from the assumption that soft balancing ‘appears to be essential to understanding states’ reaction to U.S. hegemony’ and that soft balancing provides an explanation for the apparent absence of intense hard balancing at the systemic level after the Cold War.93 Although the soft balancing argument is debated by scholars who claim that soft balancing is occurring in response to US power, and others argue that ‘there is no empirical basis for the soft-balancing argument, and hence any effort to invoke it as means of buttressing balance of power theory is fruitless’, soft balancing shares many of the characteristics associated with a hedging strategy.94 T.V. Paul

114

Debating US strategy towards China

defines soft balancing as involving ‘tacit non-offensive coalition building to neutralize a rising or potentially threatening power. At the moment, the rising state may not be a challenge, but in the future, without counterbalancing, it may emerge as a key source of insecurity for the states concerned.’ The balancing of the US and India vis-à-vis China is an example of soft balancing, according to Paul.95 Conversely, Paul and others later recognise that ‘India’s future balancing behaviour will depend on who emerges as the major threat to its security, the United States or China.’96 Embedded in the essential assumptions of balance of power theory, soft balancing resembles too much the one-way billiard ball model of deterministic systemic theorising about relations between great powers. To enrich realist balancing assumptions that flow directly from a fixed and primary interest for survival and power maximisation in an anarchic environment that focuses on ‘threats’ as objectively given, we need a more thorough understanding of how ‘national interests’ become constructed by political practices that cannot be understood apart from in a wider social context.97 Soft balancing, therefore, lacks the contingent and reflexive aspects associated with a hedging strategy. As Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth adequately put it in their critique of the soft balancing argument: ‘Analysts would be wise to invest their talents in investigating the novel dynamics of great power bargaining in today’s unipolar world rather than seeking to stretch old analytical concepts that were created to deal with the bipolar and multipolar systems of the past.’98 ‘Rather than seeking to stretch old analytical concepts’, hedging provides one way of ‘investigating the novel dynamics of great power bargaining’. As a policy that is pursued in order to reduce the risk of other policies, hedging contains both cooperative and competitive elements. It is a strategy designed to minimise exposure to unwanted risk, for example that China became aggressive, while still allowing the US–China relationship to profit and develop within the overall strategy of engagement. Boiled down, the US is trying to understand the relationship between risk and reward, and aims to develop a hedging strategy that profits from China’s role as a ‘responsible stakeholder’. Clearly, there is no ‘magic formula’, as Schweller points out. But a hedging strategy nicely encompasses and incorporates the importance of ‘managing a rising challenger’.99 Goh is right in pointing out that ‘hedging behaviour is the norm in international relations – most states adopt insurance policies’.100 But as Goh’s work shows, states pursue different hedging strategies and the concept needs to be differentiated from traditional balancing concepts.101 More importantly, Goh underestimates the value of a systematic analysis of a US hedging strategy towards China in claiming that ‘hedging is not a particularly helpful term in understanding or making US China policy’.102 On the contrary, as Robert Sutter succinctly argues, ‘the United States is no exception in the post-Cold War pattern of hedging, which is especially evident in regard to U.S. policy and behavior toward China’.103 In response to the uncertainty inherent in determining whether China represents a partner or an adversary, Medeiros argues that the US ‘has chosen to hedge its security bets by adopting

Debating US strategy towards China 115 both cooperative and competitive policies towards China’s rise in Asia, resulting in a geopolitical insurance strategy of sorts’.104 According to Medeiros, ‘the US hedging strategy rests on four key assumptions’: first, ‘China is decidedly dissatisfied with certain aspects of the current international system’. On the other hand, ‘US policymakers seem to conclude that China has a continued stake in maintaining the current status quo …’. Third, ‘because the economic costs of balancing and containing China are extraordinarily high’ and ‘because the U.S. allies and partners in Asia would not support such a confrontational approach, it would undermine the relative U.S. position in Asia as well as its regional economic interests’. Finally, ‘confronting China through explicit external balancing and containment policies would simply turn it into an enemy, achieving the very outcome the United States seeks to avoid’. Thus, ‘given its multiple and competing interests in Asia, hedging its security bets is the optimum choice for the United States’.105 Medeiros has developed some important insight that comprehends our understanding of contemporary US China policy and he provides an important starting point in examining how hedging has become a prominent concept in official US strategy papers. His analysis, however, misrepresents one important aspect of a hedging strategy in claiming that ‘because the US business community is now divided about whether China represents a continued opportunity or a threat to US economic security’ and because ‘the United States has yet to answer core questions about its future relations with China … the political sustainability of the current hedging strategy will remain precarious’.106 Indeed, a hedging strategy will remain precarious. It will remain dynamic and shaped by the uncertainties that characterise US–China relations. This, however, is precisely why the US is ‘hedging against unknowns’.107 Thus, to develop our understanding of Washington’s hedging strategy, we need to remember that hedging is a concept with strong roots in finance and explore the link between hedging and risk management.

Managing the risks of a rising power Borrowing eclectically from Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Anthony Gidden’s reflexive modernity and Foucault’s emphasis on governmentality, a number of studies use the concept of risk in their analysis of new security challenges, such as terrorism, immigration, environment, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and so on. The concept of risk, however, has not only become an important tool in sociologists’ and criminologists’ analyses of Western government’s pursuit of security in the post-Cold War era. Increasingly, risk is being applied to more traditional security issues, such as in Yee-Kuang Heng’s War as Risk Management and Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen’s The Risk Society at War.108 To date, however, no one has linked the concept of risk to hedging or explored how such an analysis can shed light on great power politics. The engagement/ containment debate about US China policy is essentially embedded in Carl Schmitt’s rendering of the political as the exceptional decision that constitutes the border between friend and enemy. In a Schmittian framework, the essence

116

Debating US strategy towards China

of the political consists of the constitutive decision to decide on the enemy: ‘to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy’. Consequently, the political opposition between friend and enemy constitutes the most extreme of dichotomies.109 Hedging, as seen above, together with risk, does not rely on the binary opposition between friend and enemy. Risk and hedging operate on the assumption that identities are contingent, not on the basis of stable identities. The shifting dynamics depend upon the specific configurations of factors that are more or less likely to concretise in the foreseeable future. The goal of risk management is intervention before the situation reaches the point of extremity in which exceptional measures are called for.110 Hedging and risk strategies seek to manage and control the complexities of world politics, not eliminate or destroy the challenges of today’s world. Unlike the mainstream debate about US China policy, such an approach aims to provide a richer understanding of the problematic of the ‘rise of China’ and a better conceptual grasp that goes beyond the ‘either-or’ dichotomy of traditional discourse. Hedging and risk management are strategies, to borrow Schweller’s words, ‘conducive to successful management’ of US China relations and essential to ‘the success of any effort to manage a power transition …’.111 As Rasmussen points out, in the traditional security discourse, the future described in a scenario is a consequence of present inaction. This policy defines the threat in a certain way and argues that, under these circumstances, the enemy would attack you in the future or prevent you from doing something you wanted if you did not change your policy.112 Those favouring containment identify and define Chinese capabilities and intentions in a particular way and argue that inaction by Washington will lead to Chinese regional dominance. Where risk is concerned, argues Rasmussen, the danger is evolving.113 A strategy based on ‘engagement plus hedging’ emphasises that China is decades away from challenging the US militarily and points to the potential benefits of China’s role as a responsible stakeholder. Hedging focus on minimising risks and opportunity losses by facilitating a stakeholder role for China and can be thought of in the security realm as a strategy for dealing with risk in the present in order to prevent threats in the future. Accordingly, we can differentiate between threats and risks. A threat is a specific danger which can be precisely identified and measured on the basis of capabilities plus intent.114 A risk is a scenario followed by a policy proposal for how to prevent this scenario from becoming real. Risks are therefore consequences of actions yet to be made.115 As Beck notes, ‘future events that have not yet occurred become the object of current action’. This aspect reverses the causality of the threat and ‘the relationship between past, present and the future’. A cause is supposed to be identified in terms of its effect. At present there is no effect, only scenarios of what might happen, what Beck terms ‘real virtuality’.116 The contest for influence in East Asia is a competition in which the US must maintain the upper hand. Not because anyone can challenge the US at present, but because the scenario that China might be able to challenge the US becomes a ‘real virtuality’. As Heng has noted ‘[w]e continuously assess security less

Debating US strategy towards China 117 in terms of what is but what yet may materialise’.117 Traditional means–ends rationality focused on achieving security and the national interest by gauging capabilities and specifying goals to be achieved and calculating means needed. A probabilistic risk calculus works to avert adverse consequences that have not yet happened.118 A risk or hedging argument is not a figment of our imagination or unreal. It is based on actual events. However, the central feature of dealing with risk and hedging is judgement and interpretation. Policymakers must chose which risks they need to prevent and which they have to accept.119 In future scenarios, shaped by political discourses, the interpretation of what these events will lead to is more important than taking stock of what the enemy is capable of now.120 US ‘national interests’ and US policy towards China, then, cannot be regarded as given, but as something which could be shaped by the construction of possible alternative future scenarios. In short, hedging shares three characteristics associated with risk, identified by Rasmussen: management, the presence of the future and the boomerang effect.121 When financial actors hedge they do so in order to minimise the risk of their business activity. However, they can never eliminate risk. Instead, they manage their investments through different hedging strategies. In a risk society we cannot achieve perfect security. High or late modernity, according to Giddens and Beck, is characterised by society’s inability to secure itself against risks.122 Consequently, risks cannot be determined and definitively solved. Instead, risks need to be managed. As Albert has noted, ‘[t]he openness of the future and the always present need to decide in time precludes the avoidance of risk by managing risks’.123 In the discussion of hedging strategies above, we saw how companies balance uncertainties and the risk of opportunity loss in the future by developing a hedging strategy that avoids the identified risk becoming reality. By taking out insurance against the probability of your house burning down, such a scenario becomes a reality in your life, a reality you have to deal with by paying the costs of insuring your house. ‘The presence of the future’ is not limited to finance and insurance policy. States, whether great powers or not, all take out ‘insurance’ because they know that acting on their own is an inefficient use of assets. Such strategies are increasingly part of US China policy as Washington debates future scenarios that have not yet occurred, leaving the White House compelled to act. The boomerang effect in a risk society is that no one can escape the consequences of their actions. Beck’s reasoning that pollution and environmental degeneration affect us all is illustrative. But there are other boomerang effects, such as the paradoxical effect of increasing anxiety about risk through the intensity of their focus and the issue that risk-averse actors will have to either accept defeat or prove that they are willing to take risk. Finally, risk literature shows how the reduction of risks leads to riskier behaviour. Adams’ example is that ‘while a seat belt certainly makes your chances of surviving a road accident much greater, mandatory use of seat belts also means that drivers expect to survive road accidents and therefore seem to drive more recklessly’.124 Another example is that purchasing

118

Debating US strategy towards China

an insurance policy may actually increase the probability of the risk by creating ‘moral hazards’. A concept such as hedging, of course, does not translate straightforwardly from finance to security issues. Usually, financial hedging strategies do not increase the probability of the risk being countered. But since hedging strategies in the security realm are often ‘personal’ and visible in the conduct of foreign policy, hedging strategies can and often do increase the probability of the risk being countered. This leads to a boomerang effect similar to what John Hertz described as the process known as the ‘security dilemma’. Foucault’s metaphor of modern governance (governmentality) as a ship is enlightening to summarise the argument above. From the seventeenth century onwards, politics has been about guiding the ship to a safe harbour. In a risk society, that safe harbour has disappeared from the horizon.125 In this context, it is interesting to notice that risk is a concept which developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was first coined by early Western explorers. The word was assimilated into the English language via its use in Spanish and Portuguese, and referred to sailing in uncharted waters.126 As governments can no longer guide the ship of state to a safe harbour, but instead focus on keeping the ship of state afloat, Rasmussen argues that governments no longer master ends, only means. There is a temporal dimension to the ‘end’ in means–end rationality. There is no end to risk.127 Security, as Albert observes, is no longer preoccupied with ‘ “making” something secure (from an external threat of danger), but rather to hedge risks while anticipating the necessary failure of that processing as a regular feature of the system’s function. The social system in question cannot be made “secure”, but it can be “insured” by providing for its continued ability to process risks.’128 Politics is about managing the process, as governments come to identify political success in terms of their ability to manage processes of transformation.129 In order to manage US policy in relation to the rise of China in world affairs, events are placed in the context of certain discursive representations. Political discourse is therefore constituted, in Beck’s words, by ‘definitional struggles over the scale, degrees and urgency of risks’.130 US China policy has not arrived at a safe harbour, whether that be containment or engagement. The US is still manoeuvring in the Pacific Ocean trying to grasp the changing security environment of the twentyfirst century and how to deal with the rise of China. A new analytical framework, embedded in risk management and hedging, is called for to guide policymakers in Washington as they focus on keeping the ship of state afloat in a world shaped by risk society and globalisation. When managing the risks in future scenarios to do with the rise of China, it is important to keep in mind the manner in which Lupton emphasises how risks are socially constructed. She describes risks not as realities lying outside, but as ‘assemblages of meanings, logics, and beliefs around material phenomena giving phenomena form and substance’.131 The challenge in US China policy is to live with the ambivalence of a rising China and to explore the complexities of an ‘engagement plus hedging strategy’. Security theorists who cling to old concepts

Debating US strategy towards China 119 will continue to reflect on an old discourse when the US is in the process of constructing a new US China policy. Although one can make the case that the overall US China policy has been marked by a transition from deterrence to managing the risks of a rising power, we need to differentiate between the overall US China policy and more specific issues such as US Taiwan policy. In short, a new analytical framework that emphasises risk and hedging provides a new perspective on contemporary US China policy; while traditional threat-based analysis still provides important insight into our understanding of current US Taiwan policy. This is not to argue that the constructivist approach developed throughout this book does not remain important. Rather it is argued that we need to appreciate the distinctive levels of analysis and the difference between ‘why’ something happened and ‘how possible’ it happened, and the contribution that different theoretical and methodological orientations can make to understand this difference. Security risks differ from security threats in the sense that security risks cannot be precisely defined and measured according to the basis of capabilities an enemy has to realise a hostile intent as in threat assessments. For example, security risks do not present Taiwan with an instant challenge that endangers the survival of the Republic of China. China’s military modernisation, however, represents a direct military threat to Taiwan’s de facto sovereignty and existence. Thus, in explaining the current standoff in the Taiwan Strait, Christensen and Ross convincingly demonstrate why core concepts of deterrence theory remain relevant.132 The research questions developed throughout this study, however, have not focused on why the US government has intervened in the Taiwan Strait, but instead have asked how US policymakers arrived at the idea that intervention in the Taiwan Strait and protection of Taiwan would make the US more secure. The research agenda allowed me to examine how US Taiwan policy was framed so that policy options were rendered feasible, thinkable and commonsensical. In other words, this has been a study of discursive possibility and the context in which US policymakers have defined US ‘interests’ regarding Taiwan differently over the years. As such, this book aims to provide a new perspective on the evolution of US policy towards Taiwan since 1949 and to show how the various discourses identified have repeatedly influenced and complicated the prevailing direction of American policy over the Taiwan issue with regard to China. The findings will now be discussed in more detail in the final chapter.

6

Understanding US Taiwan policy The linkage between history and theory

This work has sought to illustrate in a number of ways the inadequacies of traditional thinking on US Taiwan policy, particularly with respect to the Taiwan issue in US China policy. More precisely, the point is that the multifaceted problem of the Taiwan issue in international affairs cannot be solved by recourse to crude power politics dogma or solely by focusing on strategic calculations. Instead we need to rethink how the status of Taiwan is a particular historical construct that remains contingent and inextricably linked to discursive representations and identities. By encouraging more reflexivity about how the meanings we bring to a decision-making environment contribute to particular outcomes and how discourses shape identities and interest, the aim has been to examine how certain discursive representations underline the production of knowledge and identities and how these representations make certain courses of action possible. Hardly any work has been done to explore US Taiwan policy from a discoursebased reading of archival material from the Truman and Nixon administration, together with an in-depth analysis of contemporary sources. Using critical constructivism as its central conceptual framework, this book’s chief claim to originality lies in its attempt to connect the Taiwan issue with US identity, and American representations of China and Taiwan. By showing how US Taiwan policy is tied to the discursively constructed US identity, first, as the leader in the battle against Communism, and second, as the champion of promoting democracy and freedom worldwide, this study has sought to highlight how identities are produced, reproduced and transformed, thereby exploring how identities and various discourses about the Taiwan issue set the parameters for possibility in US Taiwan policy. By way of conclusion, then, I want to point out some of the implications of theorising identity in this manner for the nexus between IR theory and history and the practice of US Taiwan policy.

History and theory nexus A constructivist approach such as the one used here helps to strengthen historical research on US Taiwan policy by providing theoretical and conceptual tools to re-examine aspects of this triangular relationship which have been inadequately tackled to date and to trace historically the origins of what is known today as the

Understanding US Taiwan policy 121 ‘Taiwan issue’. This stance involves applying a refined constructivist methodology that blends a discursive strategy with historical inquiry. As the analysis pursues substantive interests in the historically contingent and constructed aspect of US Taiwan policy, the analysis is unmistakably interested in elucidating US Taiwan policy in a broad historical sense. However, insofar as this substantive interest is sustained by a meticulous elucidation of related theoretical issues, the study is also concerned with metatheoretical issues. The point is that in approaching constructivism with open-mindedness and appreciation of its intellectual insight, one does not need to renounce the allegiance to the tenets of traditional archival research. Critical scholarship within the reflectivist camp presupposes an attitude of openness toward language, ideas and knowledge that helps us, as Ninkovich has pointed out, ‘to think more precisely about what our traditional paradigms have illicitly smuggled in as what they have left out’.1 In short, by focusing on the nexus between history and theory this study demonstrates the utility of studying US Taiwan policy from a constructivist perspective, while at the same time being attentive to how the historical analysis and the empirical findings broaden and demonstrate the usefulness of critical constructivism. This book shows both how one can carry out substantive theorising and what the contribution of this sort of study can tell us about a particular area of investigation, thereby offering empirical insight that amplifies and enriches constructivist analysis. Although, as seen in Chapter 2, constructivists disagree on the weight of international versus domestic factors in shaping state identities and interests, they challenge the a priori assumptions that are made by rationalist approaches. Social facts, such as identities, interests, credibility and sovereignty, have no material reality but exist only because people collectively believe they exist and act accordingly. Thus, understanding how identities and interests change and fundamentally shape state actions is the major concern for constructivist analysis. Mainstream rationalist approaches in the study of US–China relations implicitly favour the distribution of material capabilities and traditional strategic categories such as ‘balance of power’, ‘national interest’ and ‘national security’. Constructivist approaches have so far been underemployed in studying US– Chinese relations. In this regard, the use of constructivist thinking in this study is a starting point for transcending the prominent role rationalist approaches have occupied in accounting for US–China relations and US Taiwan policy in particular. This suggests giving a discourse analytical approach its due and that there is room for refining method and theory within the traditional realm of studying US Taiwan policy. Knowledge will necessarily vary with the many different questions we ask and the various tools at our disposal for answering them. Because constructivism and mainstream theories require different methods in empirical research, they answer different questions. Throughout this study I have differentiated between ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions and argued that ‘why’ questions are insufficient as they generally take as unproblematic the possibility that particular decisions or courses of action

122

Understanding US Taiwan policy

could happen. Hence, in posing a ‘how possible’ question we can investigate the practices that enable policymakers ‘to act, to frame policy as they do, and to wield the capabilities they do’. Such an inquiry also illuminates how meanings are produced and attached to particular subject identities, thus positioning these subjects vis-à-vis one another and thereby ‘constituting particular interpretive dispositions which create certain possibilities and preclude others’.2 For instance, the central question asked in Chapter 3 emphasised how in the summer of 1950 US officials came to define intervention in the Taiwan Strait as an appropriate course of action in response to North Korea’s attack on South Korea. Going beyond the existing literature which sees US protection of Taiwan in June 1950 as a strategic necessity and compulsory obligation, I have shown how the decision to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait was embedded in discursive representations forged by US officials in the process of reasserting US identity as the leader of the free world and thereby providing the occasion for a reaffirmation of what the Unites States was. Similarly, I do not ask why the Nixon administration changed US Taiwan policy in the early 1970s, but how it was possible for Nixon and Kissinger to open up space on the Taiwan issue to consider alternatives which had previously been understood as unrealistic. I demonstrated how discourse(s) construct(s) a particular reality creating background knowledge and conferring meaning on social phenomena and political events. By examining how the Nixon administration changed representations of self and others, articulated new identities and dislocated discourses, I explained the necessary and possible conditions for how US Taiwan policy was re-defined and the Taiwan issue re-constituted. In other words, the representations embedded in discourses about US Taiwan policy by definition changed the ‘reality’ and revealed the historically contingent, contested and unstable status of Taiwan. The Taiwan issue, therefore, should be seen as discursively constructed and constantly modified and transformed by what we are saying, thinking and doing, not as an essential feature of balance of power logic. The question being asked therefore is not why a particular course of action was chosen, but how it was possible for decision-makers to understand their national interests in one particular way rather than in some other way. Such an analysis differs from more conventional approaches to US Taiwan policy by treating more elements of policymaking as problematic and taking fewer as given. Counter to mainstream rationalist accounts that claim that the international system exerts some ‘objective’ causal influence on states’ actions and that the ‘national interest’ is an independent reality accessible to decision-makers, this study rests upon the assumption that objects and events do not present themselves in a pure and direct fashion to the observer. Critical constructivism does not deny the existence of a material world outside our heads: ‘it does oppose, and this is something different, that phenomena can constitute themselves as objects outside of knowledge independently of discursive practices’.3 Referring to something as socially constructed does not imply that it does not exist. However, there is no way of describing ‘brute facts’ independent of discourses and interpretation. Thus, we cannot leave our constructions – ‘facts’

Understanding US Taiwan policy 123 do not speak for themselves, but are always theory laden, socially constructed and reconstructed by our very discursive practices and language. Such propositions lead to a more critical stand towards the ‘national interest’ argument that mainstream approaches to US Taiwan policy so prominently invoke. Consequently, we need to rethink how all interests are particular historical constructions and that “determining what the particular situation confronting a state is; what, if any, threat a state faces; and what the correct national interest with respect to that situation or threat is always require interpretation’.4 As Wendt has noted, ‘actors do not have a “portfolio” of interests that they carry around independent of social context; instead, they define their interests in the process of defining situations’.5 For instance, the main priority when the Truman administration approached the summer of 1950 was to instigate a split in the Communist bloc, disentangle itself from Chiang and his followers, and prevent the Chinese Communists from becoming an unequivocal enemy of the US. The Korean War and the decision to interpose the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait diluted this strategy. However, in understanding how the Korean War instigated policies which contradicted the efforts to differentiate between what was argued to be vital and what was considered to be peripheral to US national security, we need to connect how identities are the basis for interests and thereby explain how particular situations are understood in the national interest in the first place. Accordingly, when interpreting the events on the Korean peninsula as a pivotal struggle between the Communist world and the free world led by the US, the Korean War was represented as a threat to US identity from a monolithic Communist bloc which compelled the Truman administration to preserve its identity by protecting the discredited anti-communist regime on Taiwan and abandon the incentives for reconciliation with Beijing. Thus, the means chosen to combat the threat to US identity as the leader in a global struggle with Communism undermined the ends the Truman administration was seeking in its China policy. The kinds of interest-based explanations that have enjoyed enormous influence among a broader community of social scientists and diplomatic historians, therefore, need to be met with much more scepticism than they typically receive. Indeed, the record of explanations based on realist objective certainties has been disappointing. As Ninkovich has argued, ‘[n]owhere has the failure to prove objectivist contentions been as evident as in the American habit of ignoring the precepts of power politics and economic self-interest by intervening repeatedly in areas where the nation’s strategic and economic stakes were, by most conventional measures, negligible’.6 The question therefore is not how to defend the national interest but how discursive representations identify threats to the nation. This book has argued that applying a critical constructivist approach provides a more nuanced understanding of US Taiwan policy which moves beyond much of the rationalist approaches found in conventional accounts. The aim has not been to jettison conventional insight. Rather it has been to develop a new perspective on US Taiwan policy that emphasises identity and discourse analysis found in critical constructivism. However, this study also aspires to make a contribution in

124

Understanding US Taiwan policy

advancing constructivist theory in IR. Against the tendency whereby conventional constructivism threatens to become a mere ‘facelift of the mainstream’ this study has aimed at refocusing constructivism toward the ‘construction of social reality’ and the ‘social construction of knowledge’.7 Conventional constructivists tend to take a certain reality as given as the starting point of inquiry which places limits on what social construction can mean. Wendt’s ‘thin’ constructivism brackets off the internal determinants of state identity by treating the identity and interests of states as exogenously given prior to interaction at the systemic level. Normative constructivists are increasingly bringing investigation of global norms back into domestic politics.8 However, to encapsulate how norms define and reformulate understanding of interests and limit a range of acceptable policy choices, a further push towards reconstructing the social discursive context that makes possible the particular understanding of that norm is needed.9 Throughout this study we have seen how those individuals who act in the name of the state have already constructed some notion of self and other(s) prior to interaction. Nixon, for instance, had for a long time been interested in establishing ways of bringing the Chinese Communists into a more constructive role in international affairs. With this in mind, he had instructed Kissinger to explore possible ways of contact with the Chinese and to initiate a policy review of China policy. Although identities and interests were constructed, maintained and transformed through four high level meetings in 1971 and 1972, facilitating new perspectives on US Taiwan policy, both Nixon and Kissinger emphasised that a certain reality had been established which necessitated a ‘principled approach’ regarding the Taiwan issue. Indeed, as Nixon argued, the Taiwan issue could not be handled ‘in a way that destroys or weakens our position of leadership in Asia and in the world’.10 The existence of such preconceptions suggests that Wendt’s ‘thin’ constructivism remains socially and historically underspecified as Wendt leaves the social and domestic aspect of identity construction unexplored.11 This is not to deny that identity construction is a product of interaction with other actors in world politics. Instead, it suggests that in order to advance and expand constructivism we need to explore the nature of state identity, thereby grasping what decision-makers are bringing with them into their interaction with others. While one of the objectives of establishing the theoretical framework was to differentiate between conventional and critical constructivists, I have restricted the analysis of works that explicitly and implicitly challenge constructivism on the metatheoretical level. This study is inspired by poststructuralist analysis which has developed some stimulating reassessment of the inconsistency and contradictions inherent in key assumptions advocated by pioneering constructivist studies.12 Although drawing a distinction between poststructuralists and critical constructivists ‘goes against an increasing common tendency’ whereby ‘much critical work combines in a productive way the different positions’, poststructuralism tends to privilege the ‘problematic of subjectivity and its political constitution’.13 This has led to a critique of poststructuralist analysis for dwelling on ‘the ontological impossibility of a secure and self-enclosed self’ at the expense of a ‘concern

Understanding US Taiwan policy 125 with the epistemology of identity’.14 Poststructuralists refuse to bracket off either ontological or epistemological issues because ‘new political enactments both depend on and themselves perform the problematization of subjectivity’.15 This seems to mark, as Campbell has pointed out, an important distinction between poststructuralists and critical constructivists: The former appreciates that the deconstruction of identity both widens the domain of the political to include the ways in which identity is constituted, and contains within it a necessarily affirmative moment through which existing identity formations are denaturalized and alternative articulations of identity and the political are made possible. The latter can appear hesitant to pursue this radical logic to its ultimate conclusions, preferring instead to secure some dimensions of identity as a way of anchoring analysis.16 As we cannot know whether a subject exists prior to identity or talk about any reality outside of the discursive realm, I have concentrated my analysis on how identities are discursively constructed, both at the domestic and international level, and how actions became possible and necessary, rather than being preoccupied with the question of what might lie behind discourse. Not everything needs to be problematised at once, and this book has emphasised epistemology and methodology over ontology, aiming to accumulate understanding instead of showing how the world really is. Thus, in response to repeated calls for constructivists to cease and desist their discussion of ‘metatheory’, I have focused on how abstract analysis would translate into empirical research and aimed to demonstrate the comparative advantage of applying critical constructivism to a specific area of investigation. We cannot address empirical issues, however, unless we have a framework for doing research that makes state identity and interests an issue for both theoretical and empirical inquiry. A key objective in this work, then, has been to focus on a critical constructivist method that explores how discourse produces policy practices and meanings. Once a number of excellent constructivist approaches have established that ideas, identities and discourses matter, a next obvious step is to investigate how, exactly, they came to matter and how they came to exist at all.

Th practice of US Taiwan policy The foregoing chapters have employed the rubric of discursive representations in explaining US Taiwan policy since 1949. As Doty has pointed out, there are two important aspects of a ‘discursive practice approach’. One aspect is to identify the discourse itself by examining the various textual mechanisms at work in the discourse. The second aspect analyses how various discourses relate to each other, how one eventually becomes predominant and from this construction and positioning, various possibilities of practices emerge.17 I have analysed policy documents and diplomatic records (such as cables, minutes of meetings, memorandums, telephone conversations) because this material

126

Understanding US Taiwan policy

provides the richest sources of policymakers’ understanding of US Taiwan policy. I also sought to compare different administrations’ discursive understanding of the appropriate US Taiwan policy, and this practically necessitated using archival sources. Exploring questions such as what distinguishes the US from others and what is important about being the US provides an important starting point to explore the characteristics associated with US identity. Four discourses about the status of Taiwan which have been essential to US Taiwan policy since 1949 were identified within official documents and records: the status of Taiwan as ‘determined’; the status of Taiwan as ‘undetermined’; Taiwan as ‘independent’; and Taiwan as representing all of China (the ‘red menace’ discourse). Each of the competing discourses carried particular predicates and representations of the perceived identity of the US, China and Taiwan, which can be compared and contrasted by examining the descriptive characteristics, adjectives, adverbs and capabilities attributed to the various subjects. State officials create representations that serve to populate the world into a variety of objects, including both self and others. Each of these others is given an identity – sometimes precise and certain, at other times vague and unsettled: it might be aggressive, rival, hostile, peaceful, ally, dangerous, strong, weak or backward. These identities help to specify among other things which objects are to be protected and which constitute threats.18 The next step was to analyse more closely the discourses themselves, their internal logic and conditions of possibility. Which courses of action seemed more reasonable than others based on a particular representation of subjects and the relations between them? Although there are differences between the early Cold War period of the late 1940s, Nixon’s reconciliation and rapprochement with Beijing in the early 1970s and the Bush administration’s China policy today, there is something similar about the structural logic and modes of representation when juxtaposing these disparate periods. Indeed, the meanings attached to the Taiwan issue in US China policy were constructed around a series of binaries that helped to accentuate differences and the process of producing and reproducing the identity of the United States, while never completed, actively worked to shape the discursively constructed US Taiwan policy. By recognising the ROC as the sole legitimate government of China in the aftermath of the Korean War, the ‘red menace’ discourse was saturated in a particular set of meanings about the Cold War that relied on binary opposites. The oppositions between ‘order’ and ‘chaos’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’, described unrivalled danger that made it increasingly more difficult to maintain a nuanced view of the Communist bloc. These oppositions also worked to objectify Taiwan as an object at stake in the worldwide struggle with the US acting for the protection of the entire free world and with the Communist movement pursuing world domination. Taiwan, therefore, became an essential part of the Asian offshore island chain of bases and a testing ground for American leadership. This made re-intervention in the Civil war between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists thinkable and interposing the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait possible.

Understanding US Taiwan policy 127 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, it became according to Nixon and Kissinger ‘unacceptable’ to continue with a policy coherent with the ‘red menace’ discourse as they capitalised on the representations first advanced by the ‘determined’ discourse advocated by Acheson in 1949 and 1950. As Nixon assiduously worked to redefine US identity according to the principles of partnership, strength and willingness to negotiate, the PRC was represented as a potentially friendly nation distinct from the Communist bloc. With the recognition of the PRC as a major power with a constructive role to play in the international community, the two sides became attentive to the principles of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. Consequently, it became impossible to advocate a position that denied the reality of PRC existence by preventing its representation in the UN and it became thinkable to treat seriously Beijing’s claim to sovereignty regarding Taiwan. Although the White House still adheres to the one-China principle and the ‘determined’ discourse today, the re-writing and re-production of US identity in the post-Cold War era, together with an increased attention to the binary opposites that differentiate the political systems across the Taiwan Strait, are gradually compromising the one-China policy. When a number of US officials and pundits in Washington emphasise Taiwan’s economic model and democratic transition, they often invoke commonsensical arguments about Taiwan’s role as a ‘normal’ state within the international community with its attendant rights to self-determination. The PRC, on the other hand, is often construed as a threatening other not unfamiliar to the identity politics of the ‘red menace’ discourse during the Cold War period. The PRC, therefore, diverges fundamentally from Taiwan in its revolutionary, Communist, authoritarian and aggressive ways. The binary oppositions structure the discourse about the potential for Taiwan’s independence and serve as an important element to construct the ROC and the PRC as two distinct kinds of subjects. Finally, the complexities surrounding US Taiwan policy since 1949 cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the ambiguity represented by the ‘undetermined’ discourse. As we have seen, Truman drew heavily on the assumptions entrenched in the ‘undetermined’ discourse when he declared in the authoritative statement on 27 June 1950 that the “determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations”. This position laid the foundations for the controversies that would later be known as the ‘Taiwan issue’ in US–China relations. Despite Nixon and Kissinger’s private assurances and commitments to the ‘five principles’, the US did not publicly recognise the one-China principle until normalisation of US–China relations in 1979. Thus, declaring that the US ‘acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one-China and that Taiwan is part of China’ indicated cognisance of, but not necessarily endorsement of, the PRC’s position. Moreover, while President Bush in his remarks to President Hu in April 2006 forcefully maintained that the US remains committed to the one-China principle, there have throughout his

128

Understanding US Taiwan policy

presidency been a number of statements indicating nuances with regard to the US position.19 Indeed, James A. Kelly, the former Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, US State Department, argued with regard to the US position that ‘[i]t is not the one China policy or the one China principle that Beijing suggest, and it may not be the definition that some have in Taiwan’.20 To some extent, then, the discourses about US Taiwan policy overlap and interrelate with each other. The fact that one discourse is in opposition or even marginalised does not mean that there is no relationship between them. In short, the predominant discourses that guided US Taiwan policy in the aftermath of the Korean War were the ‘undetermined’ and the ‘red menace’ discourse, while the ‘determined’ and ‘undetermined’ discourses were most prominent in shaping policy during the Nixon administration. The contemporary policy could be located in the opposition between the ‘independent’ and the ‘determined’ discourses. The status of Taiwan should therefore not be seen as intrinsic to an object, a concept, an event or a communiqué, but instead understood by an examination of the discursive representations that signify meaning and perform a constraining and enabling function with regard to state action, in the sense that policy options may be rendered more or less reasonable by particular understandings of the US, China and Taiwan.

Notes

1 Refocusing the study of US Taiwan policy 1 In my understanding of rationalist and reflectivist approaches, I draw on Robert Keohane’s distinction in his presidential address to the International Studies Association in 1988, when he argued that the main theoretical division in international relations theory no longer goes between neorealism and neo-liberalism, but rather between rationalists on the one hand and the reflectivist on the other. Robert Keohane, ‘International Institutions: Two Approaches’, International Studies Quarterly, 32 (4), 1988, pp. 379–96. 2 Stefano Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 6 (2), 2000, pp. 147–82, 159. 3 Harry Harding, A Fragile Relationship: US–Chinese Relations Since 1972, Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1992, p. 5. 4 Harding, A Fragile Relationship, p. 180. 5 Rosemary Foot, The Practice of Power, US Relations With China Since 1949, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 1–2. 6 Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War, New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, and John D. Singer, ‘The Level of Analysis Problem in International Relations’, in James N. Rosenau (ed.), International Politics and Foreign Policy, 2nd edition, New York: Free Press, 1986. 7 David Shambaugh, ‘Patterns of Interaction in Sino-American Relations’, in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh (eds), Chinese Foreign Policy, Theory and Practise, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 197–223. 8 Shambaugh, ‘Patterns of Interaction’, p. 222. 9 Richard Madsen, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. See also Owen A. Aldridge, The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993, and Edward Q. Wang, ‘Images, Perceptions and Foreign Policy: New Directions in the Study of Sino-American Relations’, Journal of Contemporary China, 6 (15), 1997, pp. 389–402. 10 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy, Yale: Yale University Press, 1987. For other work that emphasises the aspects of ideology and identity see among others: Christopher Coker, Reflections on American Foreign Policy Since 1949, London: Pinter, 1989, and David Campbell, Writing Security, United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, 2nd edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. 11 David Shambaugh, Beautiful Imperialist, China Perceives America, 1972–1990, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Among an enormous literature on Chinese perception of the outside world and its foreign relations, see for instance: John King Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1968; Lucian W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics; A Psychocultural Study

130

12

13

14

15

16 17

Notes of the Authority Crisis in Political Development, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968; John Gittings, The World and China, 1922–1972, New York: Harper and Row, 1974; Mark Mancall, China at the Centre, 300 Years of Foreign Policy, New York: The Free Press, 1984; Steven I. Levine, ‘Perceptions and Ideology in Chinese Foreign Policy’, in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh (eds), Chinese Foreign Policy, Theory and Practice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 30–47; and Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, China’s Search For Security, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; Harding, A Fragile Relationship; Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China: A History of SinoAmerican Relations, 4th edition, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000; Michael Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 1945–1995, London: Routledge, 1996. Robert L. Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S.–China Relations, 1989–2000, Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2003; Ramon Myers, Michel C. Oksenberg and David Shambaugh (eds), Making China Policy: Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001; David Lampton, Same Bed Different Dreams: Managing U.S.–China Relations, 1989–2000, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, From Nixon to Clinton, New York: Knopf, 1999; Patrick, Tyler, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History, New York: Century Foundation, 1999. Ronald W. Pruessen, ‘Over the Volcano: The United States and the Taiwan Strait Crisis, 1954–1955’, in Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin (eds), Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.–China Diplomacy, 1954–1973, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 77–105; Ralph N. Clough, Cooperation or Conflict in the Taiwan Strait?, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999; Robert Accinelli, ‘ “A Thorn in the Side of Peace”: The Eisenhower Administration and the 1958 Offshore Island Crisis’, in Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin (eds), Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.–China Diplomacy, 1954–1973, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 106– 40; and Robert Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment, United States Policy Toward Taiwan; 1950–1955, University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Nancy B. Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, New York: Twayne, 1994; Richard C. Bush, At Cross Purposes, US–Taiwan Relations Since 1942, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2004, p. 3; Richard C. Bush, Untying the Knot, Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005; Alan D. Romberg, Rein In at the Brink of the Precipice, American Policy Toward Taiwan and U.S.–PRC Relations, Washington, DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2003; and Martin L. Lasater, The Taiwan Conundrum in U.S. China Policy, Westview Press, 2000. It should be noted that Lasater’s main concern is with the US–Taiwan policy during the Clinton presidency and he only briefly engages with earlier periods. See also John W. Garver, The Sino-American Alliance: Nationalist China and American Cold War Strategy in Asia, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997; Stephen P. Gibert and William M. Carpenter (eds), America and Island China: A Documentary History, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989; Ralph, N. Clough, Island China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Review of the World Situation, 10 January 1950, p. 141. The commitment to return Taiwan to China was also confirmed in the Potsdam Proclamation of 26 July 1945. John L. Gaddis, ‘The Strategic Perspective: The Rise and Fall of the “Defensive Perimeter” Concept, 1947–1951’, in Dorthy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years, Chinese–American Relations, 1947–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 61–118; Robert M. Blum, Drawing the Line: The Origin of

Notes

18

19

20

21 22

23 24

25 26

27 28

131

the American Containment Policy in East Asia, New York: W.W. Norton, 1982; David M. Finkelstein, From Abandonment to Salvation: Washington’s Taiwan Dilemma, Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1993; Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries, Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996. Henry Kissinger, White House Years, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979; Harding, A Fragile Relationship; Robert S. Ross, Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969–1989, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995; and Romberg, Rein In at the Brink. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, April 2004; US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on China as an Emerging Regional and Technology Power: Implications for US Economic and Security Interests, 108th Congress, 12–13 February 2004; US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington, DC, July 2005; John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W.W. Norton, 2001; Adam Ward, ‘China and America: Trouble Ahead?’ Survival, 45 (3), 2003, pp. 35–56; Aaron L. Friedberg, ‘11 September and the Future of Sino-American Relations’, Survival, 44 (1), 2002, pp. 33–50. Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 2, and Yosef Lapid, ‘Culture’s Ship: Returns and Departures in International Relations Theory’, in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (eds), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1996, pp. 3–20. Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, p. 7. Roxanne L. Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of US Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly, 37 (3), 1993, pp. 297–320, 299, and Evelyn Goh, Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974, From ‘Red Menace’ to ‘Tacit Ally’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 5. Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, p. 7. Liu Yongtao, ‘Norms, Identity, and Prospects of Sino-American Security Cooperation’, in Peter H. Kohen and Joseph Y.S. Cheng (eds), The Outlook for U.S.–China Relations: Following the 1997–1998 Summits: Chinese and American Perspectives on Security, Trade, and Cultural Exchange, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999, pp. 127–38; Alastair I. Johnston, ‘Is China a Status Quo Power?’ International Security, 27 (4), 2003, pp. 5–56; Jonathan D. Pollack, ‘China and the United States Post-9/11’ Orbis, 47 (4), 2003, pp. 617–27; Denny Roy, ‘Rising China and U.S. Interests: Inevitable vs. Contingent Hazard’, Orbis, 47 (1), 2003, pp. 125–34. March Lynch, ‘Why Engage? China and the Logic of Communicative Engagement’, European Journal of International Relations, 8 (2), 2002, pp. 187–230, and Goh, Constructing. Frank Costigliola, ‘Reading for Meaning: Theory, Language, and Metaphor’, in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 279–303, 287. Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 299. Maja Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations: the Politics of Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 60, and Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall, ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, in Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall (eds), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 9.

132

Notes

29 See Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It’, International Organization, 46 (2), 1992, for a first contribution to the bridge building project. A more comprehensive account is found in Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. See also Emanuel Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 3 (3), 1997, pp. 319–63; Steve Smith, ‘Positivism and Beyond’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 11–44, and Ole Wæver, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Inter-Paradigm Debate’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 148–85. 30 Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane, and Stephen Krasner, ‘International Organization and the Study of World Politics’, International Organization, 52 (4), 1998, pp. 645–85, 646, and Steve Smith, ‘Reflectivist and Constructivist Approaches to International Theory’, in Smith (ed.), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 224–48, 226. The abbreviation IR refers to the institutionalised academic discipline of international relations. 31 Zehfuss, Constructivism, pp. 2–3; Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relation’, World Politics, 50 (2), 1998, pp. 324–48; Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Dangerous Liaisons? Critical International Theory and Constructivism’, European Journal of International Relations, 4 (3), 1998, pp. 259– 94. 32 For the ‘success story’ see Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction’, p. 147, and Smith, ‘Reflectivist and Constructivist’, p. 242. On the bridge building project see Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, p. 394; Alexander Wendt, Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, and Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground’. For an excellent discussion of the Third Debate see Yosef Lapid, ‘The Third Debate: On the Prospect of International Theory in a Post Positivist Era’, International Studies Quarterly, 33 (3), 1989, pp. 235–54. 33 Wendt, Social Theory, p. 1. 34 Wendt, Social Theory, p. 40. 35 Wendt, Social Theory, p. 90. 36 Steve Smith, ‘Wendt’s World’, in ‘Forum on Social Theory of International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 151–63, 152. 37 Katzenstein et al., ‘International Organization’. 38 Zehfuss, Constructivism, quotes at p. 5 and 260 respectively. 39 Zehfuss, Constructivism, pp. 5, 259–60. 40 Robert O. Keohane, ‘Ideas Part-Way Down’, in ‘Forum on Social Theory of International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 125–30, 129. 41 Stephen D. Krasner, ‘Wars, Hotel Fires, and Plane Crashes’, in ‘Forum on Social Theory of International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 131–6, 131. 42 Katzenstein et al. ‘International Organization’, p. 678. 43 Smith, ‘Wendt’s World’, p. 152. 44 Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt’s “Social Theory of International Politics” and the Constructivist Challenge’, Millennium, 29 (1), 2000, pp. 73–101, 97. 45 Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction’, quotes at pp. 149, 160. 46 Katzenstein et al. ‘International Organization’, pp. 645–85. 47 John G. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 241.

Notes

133

48 Ted Hopf, ‘The Promise of Constructivism in International Theory’, International Security, 23 (1), 1998, pp. 171–200. 49 Wendt, Social Theory, pp. 1–2. See also Price and Reus-Smit, ‘Dangerous Liaisons?’, pp. 259–94 and Karin Fierke and Knud Jørgensen, ‘Introduction’ in Karin Fierke and Knud Jørgensen (eds), Constructing International Relations, the Next Generation, London: M.E. Sharpe, 2001, pp. 3–12. 50 Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, pp. 244–45; Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘Norms, Institutions, and National Identity in Contemporary Europe’, International Studies Quarterly, 43 (1), 1999, pp. 83–114, 84–5, and Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics, Identities & Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 & 1999, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002, p. 279. 51 Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, pp. 391–425; Alexander Wendt, ‘Identity and Structural Change in International Politics’, in Lapid and Kratochwil (eds), Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1996, pp. 47–64; Alexander Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation and the International State’, American Political Science Review, 88 (2), 1994, pp. 384–96; Wendt, Social Theory. 52 Martha Finnemore, National Interest in International Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 53 Audie Klotz, Norms Reconstituting Interests: Global Racial Equality and US Sanctions Against South Africa’, International Organization, 49 (3), 1995, pp. 451–78. 54 Nina Tannenwald, ‘The Nuclear Taboo: The US and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-Use’, International Organization, 53 (3), 1999, pp. 433–68. 55 Richard Price, ‘Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines’, International Organization, 52 (3), 1998, pp. 613–44. 56 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, International Organization, 52 (4), 1998, pp. 887–917. 57 Alice Ba and Matthew J. Hoffman, ‘Making and Remaking the World for IR 101: A Resource for Teaching Social Constructivism in Introductory Classes’, International Studies Perspectives, 4 (1), 2003, pp. 15–33 and Hopf, Social Construction, p. 279. 58 Hopf, Social Construction, p. 271. 59 Hopf, Social Construction, p. 280, and Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, pp. 244–5. 60 Alexander Wendt, ‘On the Via Media: a response to the critics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 165–80; Wendt, Social Theory; Wendt, ‘Constructing International Politics’, International Security, 20 (1), 1995, pp. 71–81; Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’; Wendt, ‘Anarchy’. 61 Hopf, Social Construction, pp. 288–9. 62 Wendt, Social Theory, p. 11. 63 Wendt, Social Theory, pp. 244–6. See Kenneth Waltz, ‘Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics’, in Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 322–45. 64 Roxanne L. Doty, ‘Desire All the Way Down’, in ‘Forum on Social Theory of International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 137–9, 138. 65 Smith, ‘Wendt’s World’, pp. 160–2. 66 Patrick Finney, ‘Introduction: What is International History?’ in Finney (ed.) Palgrave Advances in International History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 1–36, 19, and Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction’, p. 148. 67 Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction’. 68 Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation, Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999, p. 34, and Campbell, Writing Security, p. 220. 69 Wendt, Social Theory, p. 328. 70 Wendt, Social Theory, see pp. 133, 244, 328, respectively.

134

Notes

71 Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interest, The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, and Hopf, Social Construction. Wendt does not argue that ‘scholars should not ask how internal processes construct the state’, however, he ‘self-consciously brackets first- and second-image determinants of state identity, not because they are unimportant (they are indeed important), but because like Waltz’s objective’, Wendt is interested in developing system-level theory. See Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, p. 396 and Wendt, ‘On the Via Media’, pp. 165–80. 72 Weldes et al., ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, pp. 1–33, 13. 73 Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations, University of South Carolina Press, 1989, p. 38; Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction’, p. 159; Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 25; Kratochwil, ‘Constructing a New Orthodoxy’. 74 Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourses, Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p. 94. 75 Weldes et al., ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, p. 12. 76 Weldes et al., ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, p. 12. 77 Weldes et al., ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, p. 12. 78 Rosemary Foot, The Wrong War, American Policy and the Dimension of the Korean Conflict, 1950–1953, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 65. 79 Weldes, Constructing, pp. 102–3. 80 Howarth identifies five major theoretical perspectives on the concept of discourse with particular ontological and epistemological foundation. Positivists and empiricists view discourse ‘as ‘frames’ or ‘cognitive schemata’ that can foster common perceptions and understanding’ and they seek to measure how effectively discourses are bringing about certain ends. Philosophical realism stresses the ‘underlying material resources which makes discourse possible’, arguing that the ‘social world consist of an independent existing set of objects, in which case it is necessary for realists to focus on language in its own right’. Marxist accounts share the underlying assumptions of realism, but emphasise ‘the way in which discourses have to be explained by reference to the contradictory process of economic production and reproduction’. Critical discourse differs in insisting on the ‘mutually constituting relationship between discourses and the social system in which they function’ and emphasises ‘the actions and reflexivity of human agents in reproducing and changing social relationship’. Finally, poststructuralists put forward a more comprehensive concept of discourse by ‘regarding social structures as inherently ambiguous, incomplete and contingent systems of meaning’. David Howarth, Discourse, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000, pp. 3–5. 81 Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock, 1972; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1985; Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, London: Routledge, 1978; Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980; Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, Textual Analysis for Social Research, London: Routledge, 2003; and Ruth Wodak, Disorders of Discourse, London: Longman, 1996. 82 For approaches within this terrain, see among others: Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’; Hopf, Social Construction; Neumann, Uses of the Other; Hansen, Security as Practice; Campbell, Writing Security; Jennifer Milliken, The Social Construction of the Korean War: Conflict and its Possibilities, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001; Karin Fierke, Changing Games, Changing Strategies: Critical Investigation in Security, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. 83 Howarth, Discourse, p. 8. 84 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, p. 108. 85 Howarth, Discourse, p. 9.

Notes

135

86 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, p. 112. 87 Howarth, Discourse, p. 10. 88 ‘For instance, as speech-act theorists such as Austin have argued, saying something such as ‘I do’ in a wedding ceremony is just as much an action as exchanging the wedding rings. Both actions can only be understood as part of the wider meaningful practice of ‘getting married’’. Taken from Howarth, Discourse, p. 104. 89 Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism & International Relations, Bringing the Political Back In, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996, p. 46. 90 Edkins, Poststructuralism, pp. 45–6. 91 Hansen, Security as Practice, p. 7. 92 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th edition, New York: Knopf, 1978, p. 92. As Hunt argues, ‘[t]he cynical would contend that carefully staged public appeals are occasions not for frank and nuanced expression but for cant intended to fool the gullible and mask true intentions’. Hunt, Ideology, p. 15. 93 Hunt, Ideology, p. 16. 94 Weldes, Constructing, p. 116. 95 Quote taken from Weldes, Constructing, p. 116. 96 Weldes, Constructing, p. 117. 97 Emanuel Adler, ‘Constructivism and International Relations’, in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth Simmons (eds), Handbook of International Relations, London: Sage Publication, 2002, pp. 95–118, 109. See also Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5 (2), 1999, pp. 225–54, and David Dessler, ‘Constructivism Within a Positivist Social Science’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1), 1999, pp. 123–37. 98 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’; Weldes, Constructing; Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse’. 99 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony. 100 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, pp. 306, 310. 101 Taken from the Shanghai Communiqué, see John H. Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, An Insider’s Account of the Normalization of US–China Relations, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997, pp. 263–75. 102 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 306. 103 Weldes, Constructing, p. 98. 104 Weldes, Constructing, p. 98. 105 Weldes, Constructing, p. 98. 106 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, p. 113. 107 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 306. 108 Doty, Imperial Encounters, The Politics of Representation in North–South Relations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 11. 109 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 11. 110 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 306. 111 Weldes, Constructing, p. 103. 112 Weldes, Constructing, p. 104. 113 Weldes, Constructing, p. 107. 114 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 312. 115 Weldes et al., ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, p. 21. 116 Hopf, Social Construction, p. 32. 117 Quoted in Hopf, Social Construction, p. 32. 118 See the Digital National Security Library . 119 William Burr (ed.), The Kissinger Transcripts, The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow, New York: The New Press, 1998. 120 Rosemary Foot, ‘Chinese strategies in a US–hegemonic global order: accommodating and hedging’, International Affairs, 82 (1), 2006, pp. 77–94, 78.

136

Notes

2 Discourses and the origins of the ‘Taiwan Issues’ 1949–50 1 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955, p. 357. 2 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 298. 3 Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, ‘Beyond Beliefs: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 3 (2), 1997, pp. 193–237, 220. 4 Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment, pp. 30–1. The strategic importance of Taiwan was never questioned and according to Accinelli the ‘JCS had always allowed for military action to hold Taiwan in case of incipient or actual war’. The Korean War also enhanced Taiwan’s military and strategic significance, in particular, with respect to diverting the Chinese Communist from Southeast Asia and to protect the southern flank of the military operations in Korea. See also John L. Gaddis, ‘The Strategic Perspective’; June M. Grasso, Truman’s Two-China Policy, 1948–1950, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1987, and Finkelstein, From Abandonment. 5 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 298. 6 US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The Situation in the Far East, 26 January 1950, p. 243. 7 Dorthy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years; Nancy B. Tucker, Patterns in the Dust, Chinese–American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949– 1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983; Blum, Drawing the Line; Harry Harding and Yuan Ming, Sino-American Relations, 1945–1955: A Joint Reassessment of a Critical Decade, Wilmington: SR Books, 1989; Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992; Cohen, America’s Response; Michael Sheng, ‘The Triumph of Internationalism: CCP–Moscow Relations before 1949’, Diplomatic History, 21 (1), 1997, pp. 95–104; and Odd Arne Westad, ‘Losses, Chances, and Myths: The United States and the Creation of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1950’, Diplomatic History, 21 (1), 1997, pp. 105–15. 8 Harry S. Truman Presidential Library (hereafter HSTL), Papers of Dean Acheson (hereafter PDA), Press Conference Files 1949–1950, Box 72, Press Conference 23 June 1950. 9 The red menace discourse is borrowed from Goh. Although Goh points out that China was identified as ‘Red’ but only an unwitting ‘Menace’ until China’s entry into the Korean War, I use the red menace discourse to identify Communist China ‘in terms of the prevailing American representations of Cold War international politics’. See Goh, Constructing, pp. 18–19. 10 Tucker, Patterns, p. 14. See also Christensen, Useful Adversaries. 11 Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1949, 9: 261–2. 12 FRUS, 1949, 9: 281–6. 13 FRUS, 1949, 9: 261–2, 271–5, 281–6, 288–96, 392–7. In 1948–1949 there were five JCS and NSC reports on the Taiwan question: November 1948, February 1949, March 1949, August 1949 and December 1949. For an elaboration see FRUS, 1949, 9: pp. 261–397 and General Bradley’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The Situation in the Far East, 26 January 1950, pp. 239–45. 14 FRUS, 1949, 9: 305. 15 Warren I. Cohen, ‘Acheson, His Advisers, and China, 1949–1950’, in Borg and Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years, pp. 13–52, 16. 16 Tucker, Patterns, pp. 190–2. 17 Tucker, Patterns, p. 172. 18 FRUS, 1949, 9: 385–6. 19 FRUS, 1949, 9: 279–80. 20 FRUS, 1949, 9: 329–30, 359–64, 369–71. 21 FRUS, 1949, 9: 385–6.

Notes 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52

137

FRUS, 1949, 9: 392–7. FRUS, 1949, 9: 401. Blum, Drawing the Line, pp. 160–77. FRUS, 1949, 9: 460–7. FRUS, 1949, 9: 466. FRUS, 1949, 9: 466–7, see also Thomas H. Etzold, and John L. Gaddis (eds), Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 251–76. HSTL, Public Papers of President HST, ‘The Presidents News Conference’, 5 January 1950. (accessed 5 July 2007). See also US Department of State Bulletin, 16 January, 1950, p. 79. Blum, Drawing the Line, pp. 180–1. Tucker, Patterns. Gaddis, ‘The Strategic Perspective’, pp. 85–6. FRUS, 1950, 7: 161–5. FRUS, 1950, 6: 347–9. See also Tucker, Patterns, p. 187. FRUS, 1949, 9: 356–9. Nancy B. Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies in the Literature on US–China Relations Since 1945’, in Warren I. Cohen (ed.), Pacific Passage: The Study of American–East Asian Relations on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 213–46, and Evelyn Goh and Rosemary Foot, ‘From Containment to Containment? Understanding US Relations with China since 1949’, in Robert D. Schulzinger (ed.), A Companion to American Foreign Relations, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 255–74. Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies’, p. 215. Borg and Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years. Cohen, ‘Acheson, His Advisers’, p. 25. See also Tucker, Patterns. Steven M. Goldstein, ‘Chinese Communist Policy Toward the United States: Opportunities and Constraints, 1944–1950’, in Dorthy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years, pp. 235–78, 273. David McLean, ‘American Nationalism, the China Myth, and the Truman Doctrine: The Question of Accommodation with Peking, 1949–1950’, Diplomatic History, 10, 1986, pp. 25–42; Leffler, A Preponderance of Power; Christensen, Useful Adversaries. Christensen, Useful Adversaries, pp. 70–1. Goldstein, ‘Chinese Communist Policy’, p. 273. Goldstein, ‘Chinese Communist Policy’, p. 278. Michael Sheng, ‘The Triumph of Internationalism’, and Odd Arne Westad, ‘Losses, Chances, and Myths’. Gaddis, ‘The Strategic Perspective’, pp. 92–3. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; June M. Grasso, Truman’s; Tucker, Patterns; Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies’ and Christensen Useful Adversaries, pp. 128–32. Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies’, p. 218. FRUS, 1950, 6: 335–9 and HSTL, Papers of Harry S. Truman (hereafter PHST), President’s Secretary’s Files (hereafter PSF): Subject Files, Box 214, CIA Report ‘Probable Developments in Taiwan’, ORE 7-50, 20 March 1950. Tucker, Patterns, pp. 187–9; Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies’, p. 218, and Christensen, Useful Adversaries, pp. 131–2. Gaddis, ‘The Strategic Perspective’, p. 85. FRUS, 1950, 7: 1455–6, FRUS, 1950, 6: 396–8, Truman, Memoirs, p. 433. Gaddis, ‘The Strategic Perspective’, pp. 92–3. See also Ralph Clough, Island China, pp. 6–8.

138

Notes

53 David M. Finkelstein, From Abandonment. See also Christensen, Useful Adversaries, p. 133. 54 John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War, revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 124. 55 Tucker, Patterns, pp. 174, 197. 56 Tucker, Taiwan, pp. 25, 51 respectively. 57 Blum, Drawing the Line, p. 215. 58 Foot, The Wrong War. 59 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 5. 60 Weldes, Constructing, p. 14. 61 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 304. 62 Hopf, Social Construction, p. 22. 63 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Press Release File, 1945–1953, Box 59, Statement by the President, 5 January 1950. 64 US Department of State Bulletin, ‘Acheson’s address at the Commonwealth Club of California at San Francisco’, 27 March 1950, pp. 467–72. 65 HSTL, PDA, Classified Speeches – Extra Copies [Declassified], Box 74, Statement by Acheson before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, 5 June 1950. 66 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Historical File, Topics Folder (China), Box 193, Dean Acheson Press Conference, 5 January 1950, my emphasis. See also Department of State Bulletin, 16 January 1950 and George Elsey Subject File (C-H) Box 59. 67 HSTL, PDA, Classified Speeches – Extra Copies [Declassified], Box 74, Statement by Acheson before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, 5 June 1950. 68 HSTL, PDA (Secretary of State File), Memoranda of Conversation, 1949–1953, Box 66, Memcons DA-HST, 17 November 1949. See also Maury Maverick’s letter to Truman on 19 November 1949 which the President thought was ‘the most sensible letter I’ve seen on the China situation’. As he wrote back to Maverick: ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciated it [the letter]. There are so many crackpots who know all about what to do and who really know nothing about what to do, it is a pleasure to hear from somebody who has a little common sense in the matter’. HSTL, PHST, PSF Subject Files, Foreign Affairs Box 151, 19 November 1949. 69 FRUS, 1949, 9: 466. 70 David M. Finkelstein, From Abandonment, pp. 85–123. 71 Text of the extemporaneous remarks by Dean Acheson at the National Press Club, 12 January 1950. 72 HSTL, PDA (Secretary of State File) Memoranda of Conversations, 1949–1953, Box 66, Memcon Dean Acheson and Senator William F. Knowland and Alexander H. Smith, 5 January 1950. 73 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Subject Files Box 214, CIA Report ‘Probable Developments in Taiwan’, ORE 7-50, 20 March 1950. 74 HSTL, PDA (Secretary of State File), Memoranda of Conversations, 1949–1953, Box 66, Memcon Dean Acheson and Senator William F. Knowland and Alexander H. Smith, 5 January 1950. 75 HSTL, PDA (Secretary of State File), Memoranda of Conversations, 1949–1953, Box 66, Memcon Dean Acheson and Senator William F. Knowland and Alexander H. Smith, 5 January 1950. 76 Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing, Executive Session, Review of The World Situation, statement by Dean Acheson, 10 January 1950, pp. 141–2. 77 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Historical File, Topics Folder (China), Box 193, Dean Acheson Press Conference 5 January 1950 and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing, Executive Session, Review of The World Situation, statement by Acheson, 10 January 1950, pp. 141–2.

Notes

139

78 Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing, Executive Session, Review of The World Situation, statement by Acheson, 10 January 1950, p. 147. 79 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Historical File, Topics Folder (China), Box 193, Dean Acheson Press Conference, 5 January 1950. 80 Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing, Executive Session, The Situation in the Far East, 29 March 1950, p. 276 and HSTL, PHST, PSF: Subject Files Box 214, CIA Report ‘Probable Developments in Taiwan’, ORE 7-50, 20 March 1950. 81 HSTL, PHST PSF: Subject Files Box 214, CIA Report ‘Probable Developments in Taiwan’, ORE 7-50, 20 March 1950. In the discussion of economic aid for Formosa, Butterworth, the Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, mentioned that the disposition of that island would have to await the Japanese Peace Conference at which the ‘passage of Manchuria, the Pescadores and Formosa back to Chinese sovereignty’ would be recognised. See HSTL, PHST, PSF: Subject File, Foreign Affairs, Folder ‘Formosa’, Box 154, Memorandum for the Secretary of Defence from Department of the Army, Office of the Under Secretary, 14 December 1949 and HSTL, PHST, PSF: China Lobby Box 139, Executive Session Senate Foreign Relation Committee, 25 March 1949. 82 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Session, Review of The World Situation, 10 January 1950, p. 141, my emphasis. 83 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Session, Review of The World Situation, 10 January 1950, p. 143. 84 Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment, p. 9, and Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies’, p. 219. See also Finkelstein, From Abandonment and Grasso, Truman’s. 85 Finkelstein, From Abandonment, p. 3, and Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment, p. 9. 86 Tucker, Taiwan, p. 29. 87 Tucker, Taiwan, p. 29; Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies’, p. 219; Finkelstein, From Abandonment, chapter 5–6; Grasso, Truman’s, chapter 3. 88 HSTL, PDA (Secretary of State File) Memoranda of Conversations, 1949–1953 Box 66, Memorandum of conversation Dean Acheson and Senator Alexander Smith, 30 November 1949. 89 As seen previously, Rusk and Dulles would in the spring of 1950 advocate that the US might go through the UN to set up Taiwan as a UN trusteeship. See FRUS, 1950, 6: 347–9. George Kennan even suggested that the US should intervene militarily in order to remove the present Nationalist government. See FRUS, 1949, 9: 356–9. And General MacArthur warned that if Taiwan would be dominated by an unfriendly power it would be a ‘disaster of outmost importance to the United States’. See FRUS, 1950, 7: 161–5. 90 HSTL, Papers of Eban A. Ayers, Diary 1941–1953, Box 20, 5 January 1950. 91 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Historical File, Topics Folder (China), Box 193, Dean Acheson Press Conference, 5 January 1950. 92 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Session, Review of the World Situation, 10 January 1950, pp. 145–8. 93 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Session, Review of the World Situation, 10 January 1950, p. 147. 94 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Session, Review of the World Situation, 10 January 1950, pp. 147–8. 95 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Session, Review of the World Situation, 10 January 1950, pp. 147–8. 96 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Session, Review of the World Situation, 13 January 1950, p. 184. 97 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Speech File, 1945–1953 Box 25, Truman’s Inaugural Address, 20 January 1949. 98 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Speech File, 1945–1953 Box 25, Truman’s State of the Union Address, 4 January 1950.

140

Notes

99 HSTL, Papers of Matthews, Secretary of Navy, Speeches, Box 57, ‘Address by Acheson, American Society of Newspapers Editors’, Washington DC, 22 April 1950. See also Acheson’s statement before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, 5 June 1950, in HSTL PDA, Speech File, Box 74. 100 Department of State Bulletin, ‘Acheson address at the Commonwealth Club of California at San Francisco’, 27 March 1950, pp. 467–72. See also Acheson’s speech before the Governor’s Conference, White Sulphur Springs, West Va., 20 June 1950 in HSTL PDA, Speech File, Box 73. 101 Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, pp. 164–9. 102 Cited in Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, pp. 164–9, 173–211. 103 Emily S. Rosenberg, ‘US Cultural History’, in Ernest R. May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy, Interpreting NSC 68, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993, p. 160–4, 161. 104 The NSC 68 can be found in May, American, pp. 23–81. 105 May, American, p. 27 and Rosenberg, ‘US Cultural’, p. 162. 106 Bruce Kuklick, ‘US Intellectual History’, in May, American, pp. 156–60, 157–58. 107 Etzold and Gaddis, Containment. 108 Rosenberg, ‘US Cultural’, p. 161. 109 HSTL, PHST PSF China Lobby Box 139, Senate Foreign Relation Committee, 12 October 1949. 110 FRUS, 1950, 7: 466–8. The American consulate staff had been imprisoned in Mukden by the Chinese Communists from November 1948 to December 1949 which only led to greater hostility and deeper tension between the Americans and the Chinese Communists. See Grasso, Truman’s, p. 168. 111 FRUS, 1950, 6: 397–8. 112 Notes form Acheson’s Princeton Series, US Library of Congress, Box 90, 13 February 1954, p. 1198. 113 FRUS, 1950, 7: 125–6, 148–54, 157–61. 114 FRUS, 1950, 7: 159. 115 FRUS, 1950, 7: 139. 116 FRUS, 1950, 7: 169. 117 Weldes, Constructing, p. 97. 118 HSTL, Public Papers of President HST, ‘Statement by the President on the situation in Korea’, 27 June 1950. (accessed 5 July 2007). 119 Truman, Memoirs, p. 365. 120 HSTL, PDA Press Conference Files, Box 72, Press Conference 28 June 1950. 121 FRUS, 1950, 6: 128–30. 122 FRUS, 1950, 6: 128–30. 123 Weldes, Constructing, pp. 201–2. 124 NSC 68 in May, American, pp. 23–81. 125 HSTL, PHST, PSF: Speech File, 1945–1953, Box 25, Luncheon of American Society of Newspaper Editors, 20 April 1950. 126 HSTL, Public Papers of President HST, ‘Radio and television report to the American people on the situation in Korea’, 1 September 1950. (accessed 5 July 2007). 127 FRUS, 1950, 7: 347. 128 Cited in Truman, Memoirs, p. 433. 129 Truman, Memoirs, p. 357. 130 Truman, Memoirs, pp. 357–8, 365, 377–9. 131 HSTL, Public Papers of President HST, Meeting with Dewey, 27 June 1950. (accessed 5 July 2007). 132 FRUS, 1950, 7: 347–51. 133 Truman, Memoirs, pp. 357–8, 377–9.

Notes 134 135 136 137 138

139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

148 149 150 151 152 153 154

141

Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse’, pp. 233–4. Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 134. Truman, Memoirs, p. 358. FRUS, 1950, 6: 381. Acheson was clearly anxious in regard to whether the actions in Korea were the first in a series of coordinated Soviet military actions as he telegrammed certain diplomatic and consular offices on 26 June 1950 instructing them to ‘maintain utmost vigilance and report any positive or negative evidence however fragmentary re situation or country’. See FRUS, 1950, 7: 166. John Davies of the Policy Planning Staff commented ‘that the fact that the Russians had gone so far so openly meant that they thought all the Far East their ‘oyster’’. Moreover, a discussion among the most senior officials in the State Department had brought out that America’s reaction ‘was of extreme importance and that the United States could not meet the situation with half measures’. It was further pointed out that ‘if they [USSR] could get away with this move they would probably move in other areas’. See FRUS, 1950, 7: 143. HSTL Papers of George M. Elsey (GME), Subject File Japan, Surrender of 1945 to Korea July 19, Box 71, Memorandum of conversation HST and GME, 26 June 1950. FRUS, 1950, 7: 278. FRUS, 1950, 6: 380. Papers of GME, Personal Correspondence file – Dean Acheson, Box 101, Dean Acheson Interview with the Columbia Broadcasting System, 8 September 1950. Truman, Memoirs, pp. 357–8, 377–9. HSTL, Papers of GME, Subject Files Japan, Surrender of 1945 to Korea 19 July 1950, Box 71, Truman’s meeting with Congressional leaders, 27 June 1950. FRUS, 1950, 7: 159, 200–2, 279, 430 and Truman, Memoirs, p. 356. FRUS, 1950, 7: 430. HSTL, PHST, PSF Subject Files 1945–1953, Foreign Affairs, Box 151, Memorandum from General MacArthur to Department of Defense and transmitted to HST 16 July 1950. Attached is HST reply to Acheson instructing him to inform Department of Defense and General MacArthur that any attack on the Mainland ‘will be considered an unfriendly act’. HSTL, PDA, Press Conference File 1949–1950, Box 72, Press conference by Acheson, 2 August 1950. Weldes, Constructing, p. 104. Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 312. Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 5. FRUS, 1950, 7: 380–5. FRUS, 1950, 7: 380–5. Weldes, Constructing and Weldes et al. (eds), Cultures of Insecurity.

3 Opening space on the Taiwan question 1969–72 1 By and large, the significant declassification of Nixon administration documents from 1996 onward has allowed researchers to critically re-examine memoir accounts and to reassess conventional insight in order to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the difficult process leading to Nixon’s historic visit to the PRC in February 1972 which marked Sino-American rapprochement. See Goh, Constructing; Nancy B. Tucker, China Confidential: American Diplomats and Sino-American Relations, 1945–1996, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001; Mann, About Face; Tyler, A Great Wall. Other useful starting points are Harding, A Fragile Relationship; Ross, Negotiating Cooperation; Jonathan D. Pollack ‘The Opening to America, 1968–1982’, in John King Fairbank and Roderick MacFarquar (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 402–72.

142

Notes

2 Both the President and Kissinger went to considerable lengths in order to assure the Chinese leaders on the Taiwan issue and Nixon ‘completely endorsed the five principles’ advocated by Kissinger in previous meetings in 1971: ‘One, there is one China, and Taiwan is part of China. There will be no more statements made – if I can control our bureaucracy – to the effect that the status of Taiwan is undetermined. Second we will not support any Taiwanese Independence Movement. Third, we will discourage Japan from moving into Taiwan. Fourth, we will support any peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue … And related to that point, we will not support any military attempts by the ROC to resort to a military return to the Mainland. Finally, we seek the normalization of relations with the PRC …’ Nixon’s assurances to Chinese leaders can be found in Nixon Presidential Material (hereafter NPM) National Security Council (hereafter NSC) Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 848 and NPM NSC, Henry A. Kissinger (hereafter HAK) Office Files, China Folder, Box 91, ‘Memcons Nixon–Zhou’, 22 February 1972 (2.10–6.00 pm). 3 Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, p. 165, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle, New York: Farrar Straus, Giroux, 1985, p. 198. The US and the PRC agreed to recognise each other and to establish diplomatic relations as of 1 January 1979. See the Joint Communiqué in Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, pp. 269–75. 4 Alexander Wendt, ‘On Constitution and Causation in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 24 (5), 1998, pp. 101–17. 5 Fierke, Changing Games, p. 156. 6 Fierke, Changing Games, p. 157, and Karin Fierke, ‘Critical Methodology and Constructivism’, in Karin Fierke and Knud Jørgensen (eds), Constructing International Relations, the Next Generation, London: M.E.Sharpe, 2001, pp. 116–36, 121–2. In 1852, Karl Marx wrote: Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weights like a nightmare on the brain of the living’, Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte, New York: International, 1963, p. 15. 7 Onuf, World of Our Making, and Ole Wæver, ‘European Integration and Security: Analysing French and German Discourses on State, Nation and Europe’, in David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds), Discourse Theory in European Politics, Identity, Policy and Governance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 33–68, 34. 8 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, p. 113. 9 Fierke, ‘Critical Methodology’, pp. 117–18. 10 Weldes, Constructing, pp. 4–6. See also Robert Dean ‘Commentary, Tradition, Cause and Effect, and the Cultural History of International Relations’, Diplomatic History, 24 (4), 2000, pp. 615–22. 11 Hopf, Social Construction, p. 16. 12 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 298; Goh, Constructing, pp. 5–6, 256; and Weldes, Constructing, pp. 15–16. 13 Wendt, ‘On the Via Media’, p. 168. 14 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 4. 15 The exception is to some extent Goh’s Constructing, see in particular pp. 192–205. 16 Truman, Memoirs, p. 357. 17 Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State (hereafter RG 59, DOS), Subject Numeric Files 1970–1973, Political and Defence, Box 2614, Robert I. Starr to Charles T. Sylvester, ‘Legal Status of Taiwan’, 13 July 1971. 18 NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 848, HAK to RN, ‘The Offshore Islands’ in the State Department Briefing Books for the China Trip, forwarded to Richard Nixon (hereafter RN) by HAK on 14 February 1972. On the Taiwan Strait crisis, see Accinelli, ‘A Thorn in the Side’; Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment; and John Garver, The Sino-American Alliance.

Notes

143

19 Lasater, The Taiwan Conundrum, p. 116, and Tucker, Taiwan. 20 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, China Folder, Box 86, ‘1971 – The Watershed Year an Overview’, 9 February 1972, p. 30. 21 Goh, Constructing, pp. 101–23. 22 Richard Nixon, ‘Asia After Vietnam’, Foreign Affairs 46 (1), 1967, pp. 111–25. Also printed in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Vol. 1, ‘Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1969–1972’ (hereafter, FRUS Vol. 1, 1969–1972), Washington: US Government Printing Office, 2003, document 3, pp. 10–21, 17. 23 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 341, RN to HAK, 1 February 1969. See also Kissinger, White House Years, p. 169, and Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1978, p. 545. 24 The NSSM 14 asked the following: 1. The current status of US relations with Communist China and the Republic of China; 2. The nature of the Chinese Communist threat and intentions in Asia; 3. The interaction between US policy and the policies of other major interested countries toward China; 4. Alternative US approaches on China and their cost and risks. NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, China Folder, Box 86, NSSM 14, 5 February 1969 and NPM NSC Files, Institutional Files, Box H 134, NSSM 13/14. See also Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, pp. 30–1 and Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 169–70. 25 RG 59, DOS Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, Box 1973, Green to Rogers, ‘Next Steps in China Policy’, 6 October 1969; RG 59, DOS 1967–69, Box 1973, memorandum Rogers to the President, ‘US policy toward Peking and Instructions for the February 20 Warsaw Meeting’, discussion paper February 1969, p. 12. See also interview with State Department officials in Ross, Negotiating Cooperation, footnote 36, p. 292. 26 In July 1969, the administration permitted non-commercial purchases of Chinese goods and in December 1969, subsidiaries of American firms abroad were allowed to engage in commerce between mainland China and third countries. In March 1970, it was announced that US passports would be validated for travel to mainland China for any legitimate purpose and in April 1970, selective licensing of non-strategic US goods for export to mainland China were authorised. By August 1970, certain restrictions on American oil companies operating abroad were lifted so that most foreign ships could use American-owned bunkering facilities on trips to and from mainland Chinese ports. On 15 March 1971 the government announced that US passports no longer needed special validation for travel to mainland China and in April 1971 the Administration moved to further the momentum that had clearly developed and decided on the following measures which had been under governmental study since December 1970: expedite visas for visitors from the PRC; US currency controls would be relaxed to permit the PRC to use dollars; restrictions on US oil companies providing fuel to ships or aircraft en route to or from China (except those bound to or from North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba) were eliminated; US vessels or aircraft would be permitted to carry Chinese cargoes between non-Chinese ports, and US– owned foreign flag carriers could call at Chinese ports; and a list of items of a nonstrategic nature would be compiled for direct export to the PRC. On 7 May 1971 US controls on dollar transactions with China (except those previously blocked accounts) and certain controls on US bunkering facilities and flagships were removed and in June 1971 the government issued a general export licence for a long list of non-strategic items for China and designated other items to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Restrictions on the import of Chinese goods were simultaneously lifted. See NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 13, Peter Rodman to HAK, ‘Who Invited Whom?’ October 13, 1971; NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 86 and NPM NSC Files, For the President’s File, Box 1036. 27 Although it was decided to withdraw the two navy destroyers which had regularly patrolled the Taiwan Strait for budgetary reasons back in August 1969, at State

144

28 29 30 31

32

33

34

35 36

Notes Department request and as part of the preparation to launch anew the Ambassadorial talks in Warsaw in January 1970, the CIA undertook by a secret operation to make a Chinese Communist official overseas aware, on a basis not attributable to the US, that the Patrol had been modified. In early January 1970 an intelligence report indicated ‘that Chinese Communist officials were indeed aware of the modification of the Patrol and that they saw this as a modification of US policy in the Taiwan Strait area’. See, NPM NSC Files, W. Lord files, Box 848, Department of State background paper for Nixon’s China visit, ‘Modification of the Taiwan Strait Patrol’, delivered to the president on 14 February 1972. See also Digital National Security Archive (hereafter DNSA) (accessed 5 July 2007). Green to Under Secretary (Elliot Richardson), ‘Next Steps in China Policy’, 6 October 1969, p. 2. NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, China Folder, Box, 86, ‘1971 – The Watershed Year an Overview’, 9 February 1972, p. 41, and Nixon, The Memoirs, p. 545. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 168–9. Nixon, The Memoirs, p. 545. NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 86 annual Foreign Policy Report, 25 February 1971 and Nixon, The Memoirs, p. 548. At a press conference on 4 March 1971, Nixon restated the government’s desire to normalise relations with the PRC and in his speech in Kansas City on 6 July 1971 Nixon argued that only the US could take the first steps to end China’s isolation. On several occasions Nixon also expressed his desire to visit China. In a TIME interview on 5 October 1970, Nixon said: ‘If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China. If I don’t, I want my children to’. On 16 April 1971 Nixon told the American Society of Newspaper Editors of a recent conversation he had with his daughter on the possibility of their going to China someday. ‘I hope they do. As a matter of fact, I hope sometime I do’. In a news conference on 29 April 1971 Nixon informed reporters that ‘I hope, and, as a matter of fact, I expect to visit Mainland China sometime in some capacity – I don’t know what capacity. But that indicates what I hope for the long term’. Finally, in the ‘end-of-year backgrounder’ on 24 December 1970 Kissinger told the press that: ‘We remain prepared, at Warsaw, or elsewhere, to talk to the Communist Chinese about difference that divides us’. See NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files – Administrative and Staff Files, Box 13, Peter Rodman to HAK, ‘Who Invited Whom?’ 13 October 1971. Speaking a month later, Under Secretary of State Elliot Richardson, in a response to the Sino-Soviet border tensions, disclaimed any US interest in exploiting Sino-Soviet division and clearly signalling to Beijing that Washington would not collude with Moscow against China. See NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files – Administrative and Staff Files, Box 13, Peter Rodman to HAK, ‘Who Invited Whom?’ 13 October 1971. Nixon had told Ambassador Stoessel that Washington was ‘seriously interested in concrete discussions with China’ in a meeting at the White House. See RG 59, DOS 1967–69, Box 1973, ‘Conversation with the President Concerning China and US– Chinese Contacts’, 9 September 1969. NPM, HAK Telephone Conversations Transcripts (hereafter Telecons), Box 3, 1 November 1969 – 26 January 1970, 13 December 1969, 12:59 p.m. According to Kissinger there had ‘been an unbelievable amount of leaking from the State on China meeting’ and they had given a full debriefing to the Japanese. RG 59, DOS 1967–69, Box 1973, ‘Conversation with the President Concerning China and US–Chinese Contacts’, 9 September 1969 and NPM, HAK Telecons, Box 3, 1 November 1969 – 26 January 1970, 13 December 1969, 12:59 p.m. Pakistani, Romanian, Afghan and Yugoslav channels were all used to transmit oral or written messages between the two sides. On 15 June 1971 the White House suggested the creation of a secret regular channel through General Vernon A. Walters who worked as military attaché and interpreter at the American Embassy in Paris.

Notes

145

37 The message read ‘if the US has a desire to settle the [Taiwan] issue and a proposal for its solution, the PRC will be prepared to receive a US special envoy in Peking’. The chronology of private and public statements can easily be followed in NPM NSC, HAK Office Files – Administrative and Staff Files, Box 13, Peter Rodman to HAK, ‘Who Invited Whom?’ 13 October 1971. 38 See among others: Kissinger, White House Years; Harding, A Fragile Relationship; Ross, Negotiating Cooperation; Romberg, Rein In at the Brink. 39 Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 167–82. Key assumptions of realist and neorealist thinking assume that the state is a unitary actor pursuing goals associated with power and security in an international system that is decentralised and anarchic. States are the principle units whose interactions form the structure of the international system. The distribution of capabilities across units and the functional differentiation of the units define international structures. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theories of International Politics, New York: Random House, 1979, chapters 5 and 6. 40 Kissinger, White House Years, p. 192. 41 See Ross, Negotiating Cooperation, pp. 1, 17; Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies’, p. 229; and Romberg, Rein in at the Brink, p. 19. Without being able to fully transcend the conventional view about the primacy of realpolitik, several scholars have pointed out that both the US and China also had a range of other motives for pursuing improved relations. As Tucker has argued, for both sides, reconciliation ‘meant significant savings in military expenditures with the added bonus of forcing the Soviet Union to increase its own military budgets to cope with the heightened menace of a coalition on its Asian frontier’. Additionally, the US sought to secure Chinese participation in arms control agreements. Nixon and Kissinger further expected the opening to the PRC would provide some leverage in their dealings with Hanoi and they also hoped that reconciliation would provide peace and stability in Asia, thereby portraying Nixon as a great statesman with a vision for peace, which again would be favourable to his election campaign in 1972. Finally, access to the long-fabled China market also grew as the domestic economy suffered recession. See Tucker, ‘Continuing Controversies’, pp. 229–30. 42 Goh, Constructing, p. 264. 43 Goh, Constructing, pp. 9, 265. 44 Goh, Constructing, pp. 4–6. See also Evelyn Goh, ‘Nixon, Kissinger, and the ‘Soviet Card’ in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971–1974’, Diplomatic History, 29 (3), 2005, pp. 475–502. 45 Tucker, Taiwan. 46 Ross, Negotiating Cooperation, p. 2. 47 Richard C. Bush, At Cross Purposes, p. 3; Romberg, Rein In at the Brink; Lasater, The Taiwan Conundrum. It should be noted that Lasater’s main concern is with the US–Taiwan policy during the Clinton presidency and he only briefly engages with the period 1949–50 and 1969–72 on pp. 114–20. 48 As noted earlier, Goh’s analysis is to some extent the exception. See Goh, Constructing, pp. 192–205. 49 Frank Ninkovich, ‘Feature Review, Where Have All the Realists Gone?’ Diplomatic History, 26 (1), 2002, pp. 137–42, 137. 50 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 303. See also Michael Shapiro, The Politics of Representation – Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Political Analysis, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. 51 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 303. 52 Laffey and Weldes, ‘Beyond Beliefs’, p. 210. 53 Jacob Torfing, ‘Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges’, in David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds), Discourse Theory in European Politics, Identity, Policy and Governance, London: Palgrave, 2005, pp. 1–32, 23. 54 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse’, p. 229.

146

Notes

55 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, pp. 111–13. Such analysis meets up with thinkers which – from Heidegger to Wittgenstein, to Foucault to Derrida – have insisted on the impossibility of fixing ultimate meanings. 56 Torfing, ‘Discourse Theory’, p. 7. 57 Goh, Constructing, pp. 20–30. 58 Rosemary Foot, The Wrong War, pp. 27–8. 59 Goh, Constructing, pp. 18–19. 60 Goh, Constructing, p. 20. 61 RG 59, DOS 1967–1969, Box 1973, memorandum for the President, Secretary Rogers’ discussion paper, ‘US policy Toward Peking and Instructions for the February 20 Warsaw Meeting’, February 1969, p. 4. See also RG 59, DOS 1967–1969, Speech by Assistant Secretary William P. Bundy at the Cincinnati World Affairs Council, 19 February 1968 and Under Secretary Katzenbach’s National Press Club speech on 21 May 1968. 62 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, 23. 63 NPM NSC Files, Institutional Files, Box 134, Memorandum HAK to RN, ‘The 14 August 1969 NSC Meeting on Korea and China’. One of the Nixon administration’s first interdepartmental studies on China policy, the NSSM 14, asserted that the ‘huge Chinese army is largely defensive in orientation’. See NPM NSC Files Institutional Files, Box 134. 64 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, 22. 65 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, 22. 66 RG 59, DOS 1967–1969, Box 1973, Memorandum Rogers to the President, ‘US Policy Toward Peking and Instructions for the February 20 Warsaw Meeting’, discussion paper February 1969. 67 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62. 68 RG 59, DOS 1967–1969, Box 1973, memorandum Rogers to RN, ‘US Policy Toward Peking and Instructions for the February 20 Warsaw Meeting’, February 1969. 69 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, 4. 70 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, Memorandum RN to HAK, 10 February 1970. 71 As Kissinger told Zhou, ‘if we want to put the relations between our two countries on a genuine basis of understanding, we must recognise each other’s necessities’. See, NPM NSC Files, W. Lord Files, Box 846 and NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 90, memcon 9 July 1971 (4.35 p.m. – 11.20 p.m.). 72 NPM NSC Files, President’s Files – China, Box 1032, HAK to RN, ‘Taiwan’ (in preparation for HAK’s July trip to the PRC), 30 June 1971, p. 1. 73 RG 59, DOS 1970–1973, Box 2190, John R. Stevenson to Marshall Green, ‘Legal Aspects of Normalization of Relations with China’, 12 November 1971. 74 RG 59, DOS 1970–1973, Box 2190, Memo Rogers to the President, ‘US Strategy in Current Sino-US talks’, January 1970. 75 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, 39. 76 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, 41. 77 NPM NSC Files, Institutional File, Box H 177, UN speech by Secretary Rogers, 2 August 1971. 78 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Country Files, Box 81, HAK to Agnew, ‘Your Visit to Taipei’, 17 December 1969.

Notes

147

79 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, quotes at pp. 4, 39 respectively and NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files – China, Box 1031, ‘Discussion of Chinese Representation’, 14–16 May 1971. See also Edwin O. Reischauer ‘Transpacific Relations’ in Kermit Gordon (ed.), Agenda for the Nation, Washington: Brookings Institution, 1968, pp. 421–24, 423. 80 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 88, Department of State briefing paper ‘The Future of Taiwan: Proposal for a ‘Policy of Peaceful Settlement’,’ February 1972, p. 9. 81 RG 59, DOS 1967–1969, Box 1973, Rogers to the President, ‘US Policy Toward Peking and Instructions for the February 20 Warsaw Meeting’, discussion paper February 1969, my emphasis. 82 The National Security Archive (hereafter NSA) (accessed 5 July 2007) book no. 18. NSSM 124, ‘Next Steps Toward the PRC’, 19 April 1971, p. 4. 83 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, US Foreign Policy for the 1970s, A new strategy for peace, 18 February 1970. See also FRUS vol. 1, 1969–1972, document 60, pp. 195–203, 196. 84 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 394, State of the Union – Draft 2-B, 9 January 1970. 85 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 394, State of the Union – Draft 2-B, 9 January 1970. 86 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 312. 87 NPM NSC Files, Institutional Files Box H 164, NSSM 80 working papers on The President’s Annual Review of American Foreign Policy, December 1969. 88 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, US Foreign Policy for the 1970s, A New Strategy For Peace, 18 February 1970. See also FRUS vol. 1, 1969–1972, document 60, pp. 195–203. 89 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, US Foreign Policy for the 1970s, A New Strategy For Peace, 18 February 1970. See also FRUS vol. 1, 1969–1972, document 60, pp. 195–203. 90 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, memorandum RN to HAK, 10 February 1970. 91 RG 59, DOS Policy Planning Council, Policy Planning Staff, Director’s Files (W. Lord), 1969–77, Box 333, ‘The American Transition’ draft article by HAK, 26 October 1970, p. 8. 92 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, memorandum RN to HAK, 10 February 1970. 93 RG 59, DOS, Policy Planning Council, Policy Planning Staff, Director’s Files (W. Lord), 1969–77, Box 338, Foreign Policy Report 1970. 94 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files 325, State of the Union Address, 22 January 1970. See also FRUS vol. 1, 1969–1972, document 52, pp. 169–74, 173. 95 NPM, HAK Telcons, Box 12, 25 January – 30 April 1972, 15 January 1972. 96 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, State of the Union Address, 22 January 1970. 97 NPM, HAK Telcons, Box 12, 25 January – 30 April 1972, 15 January 1972. 98 NPM NSC Files, President’s Files – China, Box 1032, HAK to RN, briefing book (in preparation for HAK’s July trip to the PRC), ‘Opening Statement’, 30 June 1971. 99 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, US Information Agency, Infoguide, Office of Policy and Plans, No. 70-8, 20 March 1970. 100 NPM NSC Files, Institutional Files, Box H 196, third annual Foreign Policy Report 9 February 1972. See also FRUS vol. 1, 1969–1972, document 104, pp. 355–9.

148

Notes

101 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, US Foreign Policy for the 1970s, A New Strategy For Peace, 18 February 1970. See also FRUS vol. 1, 1969–1972, document 60, pp. 195–203. 102 NSA Book 70, document 20, HAK to RN, ‘My October China Visit: Discussions of the Issues’ 11 November 1971. 103 NPM NSC Files, White House Central Files, CO 34-2, Box 18, Nixon’s speech ‘US Foreign Policy for the 1970s’ Part II, 18 February 1971. 104 See the various briefing papers preparing HAK’s visit to the PRC in July and October 1971, Colonel Alexander Haig, HAK’s deputy, visit in January 1972 and the Presidential visit in February 1972, together with the memcons of these meetings found in NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, China Folder, Boxes 86–92, NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files – China, Boxes 1031–7, NPM NSC Files. For the President’s Files (Winston Lord) – China Trip, Boxes 846–51. 105 On 26 October 1971, in a toast to visiting President Ceausescu of Romania, Nixon referred to the PRC by its official title. This was the first time an American president had ever done so. Prior to Nixon’s statement, the US government referred to the PRC as Communist China or Red China. 106 NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, US Foreign Policy for the 1970s, A New Strategy For Peace, 18 February 1970, p. 2. See also FRUS vol. 1, 1969–1972, document 60, pp. 195–203. 107 RG 59, DOS Policy Planning and Council, Policy Planning Staff, Director’s Files (W. Lord), 1969–1977, Box 338, ‘Highlights of the President’s Foreign Policy Report’, 18 February 1970. 108 NSA book 70, document 20, HAK to RN ‘My October visit’, 11 November 1971. 109 RG 59, DOS Policy Planning and Council, Policy Planning Staff, Director’s Files (W. Lord), 1969–1977, Box 335 and HAK ‘The American Transition’. 110 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 90, memcons HAK–Zhou, 9 July 1971, 4:35 p.m. – 11:20 p.m., my emphasis. 111 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 91, HAK Memorandum for RN, ‘The Chinese as Contrasted With Other Communists’, February 1972. 112 NPM NSC, HAK Office Files, Box 91, HAK Memorandum for RN, ‘The Chinese as Contrasted With Other Communists’, February 1972. Indeed, Kissinger had told Nixon that he ranks Zhou along with the former French President De Gaulle ‘as the most impressive statesman I have ever met’. 113 NPM NSC Files, Presidential/HAK memcons, Box 1026, ‘What the Administration See in the China Trip’, HAK briefing for staff, the family theatre of the White House, 7 March 1972. 114 NPM NSC Files, Presidential/HAK memcons, Box 1026, ‘What the Administration See in the China Trip’, HAK briefing for staff, the family theatre of the White House, 7 March 1972 and NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 90, memcons HAK to Zhou, 24 October 1971. 115 NPM NSC Files, President’s Files – China, Box 1032, HAK to RN, briefing book (in preparation for HAK’s July trip to the PRC), ‘Scope Paper’, 30 June 1971. 116 Wæver, ‘European Integration’, p. 41. 117 Adrian Jones, ‘Word and Deed: Why a Post-Poststructural History is Needed, and How it Might Look’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2), 2000, pp. 517–41, 528. The concept of praxis (pratique) is from Foucault, The Archaeology. 118 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 315. 119 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, China Folder, Box, 86, ‘1971 – The Watershed Year an Overview’, 9 February 1972, p. 41; NPM NSC Files, Subject Files, Box 325, US Foreign Policy for the 1970s, A New Strategy for Peace, 18 February 1970. See also FRUS vol. 1, 1969–1972, document 60, pp. 195–203 and Nixon, The Memoirs, p. 545.

Notes

149

120 NPM NSC Files, Box 1032, HAK memorandum to RN, ‘My Talks with Chou Enlai’, 14 July 1971. 121 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item no. CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, 22. 122 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item no. CH 00039, ‘Review of the International Situation’, NSSM 9, 23 January 1969; NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Country Files, Box 81, HAK to Agnew, ‘Your Visit to Taipei’, 17 December 1969 and NSA Book no. 18, NSSM 124, 19 April 1971. 123 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Country Files, Box 81, ‘Republic of China’, 8 December 1969 and NSC Files HAK Office Files; Country Files, Box 81, HAK to Agnew, ‘Your Visit to Taipei’, 17 December 1969. 124 Foot, The Practice, p. 45. The issue of Chinese representation at the UN from 1949– 1971 is thoroughly examined in Foot’s The Practice, pp. 22–51. 125 Following the announcement that Kissinger and Nixon would visit China in the near future, the US UN delegation reported on 16 July 1971 that reaction to the President’s announcement among the foreign press and UN delegates was ‘markedly favourable’. Most officials immediately saw direct implications for the Chinese representation issue at the 26th General Assembly, concluding generally that the chances of entry of the PRC at the expense of the GRC are ‘radically increased’. NPM NSC Files, Presidential Trip Files, Box 499, Memorandum from Theodore L. Elliot Jr. to HAK ‘Reactions to the President’s Announcement on July 15, 1971’, 22 July 1971. 126 NSA Briefing Book 70, Document 6, ‘Conversation between RN and HAK, followed by Conversation among RN, HAK and George Bush’, 30 September 1971. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 776. 127 NSA Briefing Book 70, Document 7, ‘Conversation among RN, Rogers and HAK’, 30 September 1971 and Document 6, ‘Conversation between RN and HAK, followed by Conversation Among RN, HAK and George Bush’, 30 September 1971. 128 NSA Briefing Book 70, Document 8, ‘Conversation between RN and HAK’, 30 September 1971. 129 NSA Briefing Book 70, Document 7, ‘Conversation among RN, Rogers and HAK’, and Document 8, ‘Conversation between RN and HAK’, 30 September 1971. 130 NPM NSC Files, President’s Files – China, Box 1032, HAK to RN, ‘Scope Paper’ (in preparation for HAK’s July trip to the PRC), 30 June 1971, p. 8. 131 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 13, HAK to RN, ‘Your Encounter With the Chinese’, 5 February 1972. See also NSA Briefing Book 70, document 27, and document 20, HAK to RN, ‘My October China Visit: Discussions of the Issues’, 11 November 1971. 132 NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (Winston Lord) – China Trip, Box 851, HAK to RN, ‘My October China Visit: Drafting the Communiqué’, pp. 5–6 and NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (Winston Lord) – China Trip, Box 851, HAK and Zhou Memcon, 11 July 1971, 10.35–11.55 a.m., pp. 7–8. 133 NSA book 66, Telecon RN and HAK, 27 April 1971. 134 NPM NSC Files, Presidential Trips Files, Box 502, ‘The Shanghai Communiqué’, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 28 February 1972, p. 475. 135 NPM, NSC Files (W. Lord), Box 846, HAK and Zhou Memcon, 9 July 1971, 4.35 p.m. – 11.20 p.m.; Memcon 10 July 1971, 12.10 – 6.00p.m. The memcon of the July visit is also found in NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Box 90. 136 NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 847, ‘The Language of the Draft Joint Communiqué’, p. 12, my emphasis. The structure and purpose of these briefing books are explained by Holdridge: ‘By ‘preparing the books’, Kissinger meant creating a detailed set of briefing papers in loose-leaf binders. These were to include a scope paper describing what the situation in China was believed to be at the time and what we hoped Kissinger’s visit would accomplish, his opening statement, and a series of position papers touching on every conceivable issue that

150

137

138

139

140 141 142 143

144

145 146

147

Notes might come up in talks in Beijing. The position papers followed a set form: first came a description of the particular issue being addressed … where both the United States and the Chinese had interests; next was a brief outline of the anticipated Chinese position; and finally a section entitled, ‘your response’’. See Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, p. 45. NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 847, ‘Taiwan’, p. 7 and NPM, President’s Personal File, Box 7 ‘China Notes and China Trip Announcement’, RN notes dated 15 February 1972. As Goh has noted, ‘it may be that we have read too much into what was essentially the short-hand manner in which Nixon wrote his personal notes. However, there is a substantial difference between not making statements that the status of Taiwan was undetermined and stating that Taiwan’s status was determined … These differences are not likely to have escaped Nixon’s legally trained mind’. See Goh, Constructing, footnote 67, pp. 201–2. NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 848, memcons RN–Zhou, 24 February 1972. According to a briefing paper prior to Kissinger’s secret visit in July 1971, the US had about 9100 men on the island, 2250 were concerned primarily with the defence of Taiwan. Thus Nixon and Kissinger therefore proposed to withdraw 6850 men as ‘tensions in the era diminish’ linking this aspect to the war in Indochina. See NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files – China, Box 1032, HAK ‘Briefing Paper – Reduction of US forces’, July 1971. NPM NSC Files, W. Lord Files, Box 848, memcons RN–Zhou, 24 February 1972. The details of the phased redeployment and withdrawal of US forces on Taiwan can be found in NSSM 171. See NPM NSC Files, Institutional Files, Box H 196, NSSM 171, ‘NSSM 171 follow-on study of redeployment of U.S. forces from Taiwan’, 8 November 1973. NPM HAK Telecons, Box 12, 25 January – 30 April, HAK conversation with RN, 15 January 1972. NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 848, ‘Department of State Background Paper for RN’, 14 February 1972. NPM, President’s Personal File, Box 7, ‘China Notes and China Trip Announcement’, February 1972. NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 848, memcons RN–Zhou, 22 February 1972, 2.10–6.00 p.m. Nixon told Zhou that ‘two thirds of our present forces on Taiwan … removed as the situation in Southeast Asia is resolved … And the reduction of the remaining third of our military presence on Taiwan will go forward as progress is made on the peaceful resolution of the problem …’ The details of the phased redeployment and withdrawal of US forces on Taiwan can be found in NSSM 171. See NPM NSC Files, Institutional Files, Box H 196, NSSM 171, ‘NSSM 171 Follow-On Study of Redeployment of U.S. Forces From Taiwan’, 8 November 1973. Kissinger went to considerable length to secure cooperation with the PRC during the Indo-Pakistani crisis of 1971 and disclosed sensitive intelligence reports to the Chinese in order to convince them about the Soviet threat and the need for closer ties between Washington and Beijing. See Goh, Constructing, pp. 185–92, 222–56 and Goh, ‘Nixon, Kissinger’, pp. 475–502. NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 848, memcons RN–Zhou, 24 February 1974. RG 59, DOS 1970–1973, Box 2202, Carl F. Salana to Charles W. Freeman, ‘1954 US–ROC Mutual Defense Treaty and the Status of Taiwan’, 7 September 1971 and RG 59, DOS 1970–1973, Box 2202, Robert I. Starr to Marshall Green, ‘EA’s January 4, 1972 Paper on the Future of Taiwan’, 18 January 1972. RG 59, DOS 1970–1973, Box 2190, John R. Stevenson to Marshall Green, ‘Legal Aspects of Normalization of Relations With China’, 12 November 1971.

Notes

151

148 NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Box 848, memcons RN–Zhou, 22 February 1972, 2.10–6.00 p.m. 149 NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, China Folder, Box 90, memcons 26 October 1971, 5.30–8.10 a.m. 150 NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files, Box 1036, HAK to RN, ‘Your Meetings Monday and Tuesday With the Congressional Leadership and the Cabinet on China’, 17 July 1971; NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, China Folder, Box 90, HAK to RN ‘Your Meeting With the Congressional Leaders on Your China Trip’, 28 February 1972; NPM NSC Files, President’s Trip Files, Box 499, memorandum Patrick Buchanan to RN, 16 July 1971. 151 NPM NSC Files, Presidential/HAK memcons, Box 1026, ‘What the Administration See in the China Trip’, HAK briefing for staff, the family theatre of the White House, 7 March 1972. 152 NPM NSC Files, Presidential Trips Files, Box 502, ‘The Shanghai Communiqué’, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 28 February 1972, p. 475, my emphasis. For insight on the assiduous process of drafting the Shanghai Communiqué see NPM NSC Files, HAK Office Files, China Folder, Boxes 90–2, NPM NSC Files, President’s Trips Files, Box 501, NPM NSC Files, For the President’s Files (W. Lord) – China Trip, Boxes 846–7. 153 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theories of International Politics, New York: Random House, 1979 and Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 163–94. 154 DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item no. CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62. 155 Dean, ‘Commentary’, p. 619. 156 Goh, Constructing, p. 256. 157 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 299. 158 Foot, The Practice, pp. 47–8. 159 Wæver, ‘European Integration’, p. 36. 160 Dean, ‘Commentary’, p. 618. 4 Contemporary challenges in US Taiwan policy 1 Tucker, Taiwan, pp. 239–40; Nancy B. Tucker, ‘Strategic Ambiguity or Strategic Clarity?’ in Nancy B. Tucker (ed.), Dangerous Strait, The U.S.–Taiwan–China Crisis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 186–211; Dennis Van Vranken Hickey, ‘Continuity and Change: the Administration of George W. Bush and US Policy Toward Taiwan’, Journal of Contemporary China, 13 (40), 2004, pp. 461– 78, 462; Robert Kagan, ‘Bush’s Straight Talk on China’, Washington Post, 30 April 2001. 2 Michael O’Hanlon ‘A Need For Ambiguity’, New York Times, 27 April 2001; Robert Sutter, ‘Bush Administration Policy Toward Beijing and Taipei’, Journal of Contemporary China, 12 (36), August 2003, pp. 477–92, 482; Tucker, ‘Strategic Ambiguity’, pp. 186–211, 202; Michael S. Chase ‘U.S.–Taiwan Security Cooperation: Enhancing an Unofficial Relationship’, in Tucker (ed.), Dangerous Strait, pp. 162– 85, 168. House Representative Gary L. Ackerman (D–New York) recently argued that ‘[t]hree years ago, March 2001, when the President of the US said he will do ‘whatever it takes’ to defend Taiwan, he undermined in a single breath 25 years of carefully constructed peace and stability …’ US House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next TwentyFive Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Gary L. Ackerman, 21 April 2004, p. 9. See also US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs, Hearing on Where are U.S.–China Relations Headed? S. Hrg, 107-45, statement by Craig Thomas (R- Wyoming) Chairman of the Subcommittee, 1 May 2001, p. 1.

152

Notes

3 Ellen Bork ‘Challenging the Establishment Image of China’, China in the American Political Imagination, Centre for Strategic & International Studies, Washington DC, 10 December 2002; Kagan, ‘Bush’s Straight Talk’; US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs, Hearing on Where are U.S.–China Relations Headed? S. Hrg, 107-45, statement of Douglas H. Paal, 1 May 2001, pp. 25–8 and US House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by William Kristol, 21 April 2004, pp. 42–7, 45. 4 Tucker, ‘Strategic Ambiguity’, pp. 203–4; George W. Bush, ‘Bush Reaffirms U.S. Commitment to One-China Policy’, Remarks by President Bush and Premier Wen Jiabao in Photo Opportunity, Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, Washington DC, 9 December 2003. (accessed 14 April 2005), and Richard L. Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State, ‘US Opposes Unilateral Actions That Might Change Taiwan Situation’, Media Round Table Remarks, Beijing, China, 30 January 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). 5 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, testimony by James A. Kelly, 21 April 2004, pp. 12–21, 29. See also US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, testimony by Peter W. Rodman, Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, US Department of Defense, 21 April 2004, p. 22 and US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, testimony by Randall G. Schriver, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Department of State, 19 March 2003, pp. 4–9, 7. 6 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Grace F. Napolitano and James A. Kelly, p. 32. 7 The Communiqués are found in Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, pp. 263–75. 8 Costigolia, ‘Reading for Meaning’, pp. 288–9. 9 Goh, Constructing, p. 8. 10 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 309; Weldes, Constructing, p. 10; Campbell, Writing Security. 11 Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, appendix B, pp. 269–75. 12 David Shambaugh, ‘Patterns of Interaction’, p. 203. 13 Tucker, Taiwan, p. 159. 14 Colin Mackerras, Pradeep Taneja, and Graham Young, China Since 1978, Reform, Modernisation and Socialism With Chinese Characteristics’, 2nd edition, Melbourne: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. 15 Rosemary Foot, ‘The Place of Human Rights in US Foreign Policy’, Adelphi Papers, 363 (1), 2004, pp. 5–93, 16–19. 16 Roberta Cohen, ‘People’s Republic of China: The Human Rights Exception’, Human Rights Quarterly, 9 (4), 1987, pp. 447–549 and Ann Kent, ‘States Monitoring States: the US, Australia, and China’s Human Rights, 1990–2001’, Human Rights Quarterly 23 (3), 2001, pp. 583–624, 590. 17 US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, statement by Robert A. Kapp, 19 March 2003, pp. 24–41, 33; US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Michael D. Swaine, 21 April 2004, pp. 61–6, 62; Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen,

Notes

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

153

pp. 415, 434; Frank Langdon ‘American Northeast Asian Strategy’, Pacific Affairs, 74 (2) 2001, pp. 167–84; Lampton, Same Bed. Yitan Li and Cooper A. Drury, ‘Threatening Sanctions When Engagement Would Be More Effective: Attaining Better Human Rights in China’, International Studies Perspectives 5 (4), 2004, pp. 378–94. Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Sutton Publishing, 2002, p. xiii. See also, David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul, Human Rights and International Intervention, London: Pluto Press, 2002. Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 170–1. Campbell, Writing Security, p. 136. Tucker, China Confidential, pp. 437–72. Clinton is cited in Chandler, From Kosovo, p. 6. See further Rosemary Foot, Rights Beyond Boarders, The Global Community and the Struggle Over Human Rights in China, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, and Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Quote taken from Julie Mertus, ‘The New U.S. Human Rights Policy: A Radical Departure’, International Studies Perspective, 4 (4), 2003, pp. 371–84, 373. Quote taken from Foot, ‘The Place’, p. 5. Lorne W. Craner, ‘The Role of Human Rights in Foreign Policy’, 31 October 2001. (accessed 14 April 2005). George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by President Bush at Tsinghua University’, 22 February 2002. (accessed 14 April 2005). US National Security Strategy Report, 17 September 2002, p. 28. (accessed 14 April 2005). Rosemary Foot, ‘Bush, China and Human Rights’, Survival, 45 (2), 2003, pp. 167–86, 169. Lorne W. Craner, ‘Hopes of Tiananmen Square Still Not Realized in China’, 23 April 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). The US Department of State’s report Supporting Human Rights and Democracy released on 17 May 2004 concluded that ‘China’s authoritarian government continues to suppress political, religious and social groups, as well as individuals … The Government’s human rights record remains poor, and the Government continues to commit numerous and serious abuses’. US Department of State, Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The U.S. Record 2003–2004, 17 May 2004, p. 86. (accessed 14 April 2005). The Department of State’s Country Report on human rights released on 25 February 2004 argued that there had been a backsliding on key human rights issues in China during 2003 and the United States had therefore decided to introduce a UN resolution on China’s human rights practices during the 60th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights in March 2004. US Department of State, Annual Country Report on Human Rights Practice in China, 25 February 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). George W. Bush, ‘State of the Union Address’, 2 February 2005, (accessed 14 April 2005). The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington DC, March 2006. Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, pp. 274–5. Tucker, Taiwan, p. 159. Michael D. Ward and Kristian S. Gleditsch, ‘Democratizing for Peace’, American Political Science Review, 92 (1), 1998, pp. 51–62.

154

Notes

36 Eric Teo Cho Cheow, ‘Give Taiwan International Cultural Space’, Pacific Forum, CSIS, Honolulu, HI, 25 June 2004, (accessed 14 April 2005). 37 Bruce J. Dickson, Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 251. The 28 February incident refers to the massacre of more than 10,000 native Taiwanese who protested against the corruption and repression of the Kuomintang regime. The event is now, in the aftermath of former President Lee Teng-hui’s official apology, commemorated in Taiwan as peace memorial day. The Kaohsiung incident is regarded as a turning point in Taiwan’s democratisation process. It was sparked by a police crack-down on Formoza Magazine, an illegal publication designed to undermine the KMT’s monopolisation of power in Taiwan, and resulted in an anti-government protest in commemoration of the international human right day on 10 December 1979. The event turned into a violent confrontation between demonstrators and police. The brutal and oppressive methods of the police and the government were reviled in the trial of eight leaders of the protest. Several of those accused and the members of the defence team in the Kaohsiung incident later became leaders of the Democratic Progressive Party, including the current president Chen Shui-bian. 38 Chen Jian, ‘China’s Policy Towards Taipei and Washington’, in Chien-min Chao and Cal Clark (eds), The ROC and the Threshold of the 21st Century: A Paradigm Reexamined, Occasional Papers/Reprints Series in Contemporary Asian Studies, 1999, pp. 141–50 and Andrew J. Nathan and Chou Yangsun, Democratizing Transition in Taiwan, Occasional Papers/Reprints Series in Contemporary Asian Studies, 1987. 39 Tucker, Taiwan, p. 160. 40 Chen Shui-bian, ‘President Chen Shui-bian Inaugural Speech’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China, 20 May 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). 41 Wu Rwei-Ren, ‘Toward a Pragmatic Nationalism: Democratization and Taiwan’s Passive Revolution’, in Stéphane Corcuff (ed.), Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan, New York: M.E.Sharp, 2002, pp. 196–219, 212–13. 42 According to John Fuh-Sheng Hsieh, the majority of Taiwanese support the status quo and he therefore finds it hard to believe ‘that any Taiwanese leaders would risk losing popular support by changing the status quo’. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next TwentyFive Years, Serial No. 108-107, testimony of John Fuh-Sheng Hsieh, 21 April 2004, pp. 48, 74. On the other hand, Andrew Peterson finds that ‘support for independence now consistently outpolls support for reunification’. Andrew Peterson, ‘Dangerous Games Across the Taiwan Strait’, The Washington Quarterly, 27 (2), 2004, pp. 23–41, 30. See also Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 183–4, 212; Nancy B. Tucker, ‘If Taiwan Chooses Unification, Should the United States Care?’ The Washington Quarterly, 25 (3), 2002, 15–28, 17; Andrew J. Nathan, ‘What’s Wrong With American Taiwan Policy’, The Washington Quarterly, 23 (2), 2000, 93–106, 103; and Shelly Rigger, ‘The Unfinished Business of Taiwan’s Democratization’, in Tucker (ed.), Dangerous Strait, pp. 16–43. 43 Bush, Untying the Knot, pp. 152–5. 44 Bush, Untying the Knot, pp. 153–4. 45 Phillip P. Pan, ‘Interview with Chen Shui-bian’, Washington Post, 29 March 2004. See also John Pomfret, ‘Taiwan’s Chen Backs Vote on Independence’, Washington Post, 4 August 2002 and David G. Brown, ‘Democratization and Cross-Strait Relations’, The Atlantic Council paper, 2003, p. 4. (accessed 14 April 2005).

Notes

155

46 US Department of State, Press Statement by Sean McCormack, Taiwan–Chen ShuiBian’s Statement on Cross-Strait Issues, Washington DC, 8 June 2006. (accessed 20 June 2006). 47 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000, pp. 219– 20. 48 Jonathan D. Pollack, ‘The United States and Asia in 2003: All Quiet on the Eastern Front?’ Asian Survey, 44 (1), 2004, pp. 1–13. 49 Peterson, ‘Dangerous Games’, p. 26 and Glenn Kessler, ‘U.S. Cautions Taiwan on Independence’, Washington Post, 22 April 2004. 50 Kathrin Hille, ‘Taipei to snub US and China on UN plan’, Financial Times, 21 June 2007. 51 Mackerras et al., China Since 1978. 52 John R. Faust and Judith F. Kornberg, China in World Politics, London: Lynne Reinner, 1995, p. 73. 53 Aaron L. Friedberg, ‘The Future of US–China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?’ International Security, 30 (2), 2005, pp. 7–45, p. 14. See also Ann Kent, ‘China, International Organization and Regimes: The ILO as a case study in Organizational learning’, Pacific Affairs, 70 (4), 1997, p. 517, and Economy and Oksenberg, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth Economy and Michael Oksenberg (eds), China Joins the World: Progress and Prospect, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999, pp. 1– 42, footnote 1, p. 41. 54 See the text of the communiqué in the Beijing Review, 32 (27), 3–9 July, 1989, pp. 9– 10. 55 US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, June 2004, pp. 104–5. 56 Statistic from the Embassy of the PRC in the US (accessed 2 July 2007). 57 ‘Chinese premier says China–South Korea trade cooperation brings about tangible benefits’, People’s Daily Online. (accessed 2 July 2007). 58 David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale, ‘China Takes Off’, Foreign Affairs, 82 (6), 2003, pp. 36–67, and Christopher Findlay and Andrew Watson, ‘Economic Growth and Trade Dependency in China’, in David Goodman and Gerald Segal (eds), China Rising: Nationalism and Interdependence, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 107–33, 115. See also Nicholas R. Lardy, ‘China and the International Financial System’, in Economy and Oksenberg (eds), China Joins the World, pp. 206–30, and Nicholas R. Lardy, China and the World Economy, Institute for International Economics, Washington DC, 1994. 59 US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, November 2005, p. 149. As a warning, it remains to be seen if China can sustain its economic growth in the years to come. The CCP needs to find the appropriate economic mechanisms to ensure a ‘soft landing’ for the Chinese economy which has risen at nearly 10 percent during the last decade. China still faces enormous hurdles in its economic transition to a market economy on issues such as restructuring its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), reforming the banking sector and controlling inflation. China also confronts a number of challenges including: widespread official corruption, labour unrest, urban–rural and regional inequality, a HIV/AIDS epidemic, a worsening water shortage and severe environmental degradation, which can all disrupt China’s economic future. See Nicholas R. Lardy, China’s Unfinished Economic Revolution, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998, and US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, responses of Randal G. Schriver, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State

156

60 61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75 76

77

Notes for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to Additional Questions for the Record Submitted by Senator Russell D. Feingold, 19 March 2003, p. 68. USINFO, ‘China Overtakes U.S. as Largest Investment Recipient, OECD says’, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State (accessed 10 January 2006). Jason T. Shaplen and James Laney, ‘China Trades Its Way to Power’, New York Times, 12 July 2004. Øystein Tunsjø, ‘The Constructive Mediator? China, the US and the Six Party Talks’, Aberystwyth Journal of World Affairs, 2, 2004, pp. 58–66. USINFO, ‘Bush Endorses Observer Status for Taiwan at World Health Assembly’, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 14 June 2004, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State (accessed 10 January 2006). RG 59, DOS 1970–1973, Box 2190, Memo, Rogers to the President, ‘US Strategy in Current Sino-US talks’, January 1970. DNSA, Collection: China and the US, Item number: CH 00202, ‘NSSM 106: United States China Policy’, 16 February 1971, pp. 1–62, 39. Much of the material used below is accessible online through the Governmental Printing Office http://www.access.gpo.gov, the Digital National Security Library http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/, the US Department of State web site http://usinfo. state.gov, the Whitehouse web site http://www.whitehouse.gov, the US Department of Defense http://www.defenselink.mil/, and the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 9, 31 respectively. Frank Ninkovich, ‘No Post-Mortems for Postmodernism, Please’, Diplomatic History 22 (3), 1998, pp. 451–66, 456. Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 28 and Ninkovich, ‘No Post-Mortems’, p. 456. Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 137–8. Tucker, Taiwan, p. 6. US Department of State, Press Statement by Adam Ereli, Deputy Spokesman, U.S. Reiterates Support for Taiwan Democracy, One-China Policy, Washington DC, 18 October 2003. (accessed 14 April 2005). US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Markup On: H. Con. Res. 292 (Congratulating President-elect Chen Shui-bian and Vice Presidentelect Annett Lu of Taiwan and reaffirming United States policy toward Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China), Serial No. 106-123, statement by Doug Bereuter (R–Nebraska), 23 March 2000, p. 8. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, testimony of John J. Tkacik, 6 April 2005, p 41. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Radio Address of the President to the Nation, Washington DC, 16 February 2002. (accessed 17 May 2005). US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, statement by James A. Leach (R–Iowa, Chairman of the Subcommittee), p. 2 and US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, prepared statement, by James A. Leach, p. 75. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio), p. 78.

Notes

157

78 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, statement by James A. Leach, pp. 2, 5. 79 Tucker, Taiwan, pp. 239–40. 80 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Markup On: H. Con. Res. 292 (Congratulating President-elect Chen Shui-bian and Vice Presidentelect Annett Lu of Taiwan and reaffirming United States policy toward Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China), Serial No. 106-123, statement by Tom Lantos (D– California), 23 March 2000, p. 3. 81 US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, testimony of Randall G. Schriver, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Department of State, 19 March 2003, p. 7. 82 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Sherrod Brown, 21 April 2004, p. 77. 83 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R–Illinois), 21 April 2004, p. 3. 84 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alanh Bass, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida suggests that hierarchical oppositions, which have structured Western thought, can be deconstructed to show that the opposition is not natural and inevitable, but rather problematic. A kind of deconstructive strategy, therefore, ‘is to avoid both simply neutralising the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it’. Derrida, Positions, p. 41. See also Costigliola ‘Reading for Meaning’, pp. 284, 300–2; Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 65–6; and Nick Vaughan-Williams, ‘International Relations and the ‘Problem of History’,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34 (1), 2005, pp. 115–36, 125–6. 85 Costigliola, ‘Reading for Meaning’, p. 301. 86 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Steven Chabot (R–Ohio), 21 April 2004, p. 33. 87 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 312. 88 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Dan Burton (R–Indiana), 21 April 2004, p. 11, and US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, statement by Dana Rohrabacher (R–California), 6 April 2005, p. 20. 89 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Dana Rohrabacher, 21 April 2004, pp. 72–3. 90 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Dan Burton, 21 April 2004, p. 10; Statement by James A. Kelly, p. 13, and US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, statement by Gery L. Ackerman, 6 April 2005, p. 8. 91 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Dana Rohrabacher, 21 April 2004, p. 11; US House of Representatives Committee

158

92 93

94 95

96

97 98

99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106

Notes on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next TwentyFive Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by James A. Leach, p. 7; US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Markup On: H. Con. Res. 292 (Congratulating President-elect Chen Shui-bian and Vice President-elect Annett Lu of Taiwan and reaffirming United States policy toward Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China), Serial No. 106-123, statement by Tom Lantos, 23 March 2000, p. 3. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Tom Lantos, 21 April 2004, p. 27. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, statement by Dana Rohrabacher, 6 April 2005, p. 45. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Dana Rohrabacher, 21 April 2004, p. 72. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Markup On: H. Con. Res. 292 (Congratulating President-elect Chen Shui-bian and Vice Presidentelect Annett Lu of Taiwan and reaffirming United States policy toward Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China), Serial No. 106-123, statement by Paul E. Gillmor (R–Ohio), 23 March 2000, p. 4. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Markup On: H. Con. Res. 292 (Congratulating President-elect Chen Shui-bian and Vice Presidentelect Annett Lu of Taiwan and reaffirming United States policy toward Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China), Serial No. 106-123, statement by Tom Lantos, 23 March 2000, p. 3. Campbell, Writing Security, p. 88. Robert G. Sutter, ‘The Congress: Personal, Partisan, Political’, in Ramon H. Myers, Michel C. Oksenberg and David Shambaugh (eds), Making China Policy, Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 79–111, 79. See also Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen, pp. 425–6. Sam Brownback, ‘The Taiwan Relations Act at 25’, Heritage Foundation Keynote Address, 31 March 2004 (accessed 14 April 2004). US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Chairman Henry J. Hyde, 21 April 2004, p. 3. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Sherrod Brown, 21 April 2004, p. 77. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Dana Rohrabacher, 21 April 2004, p. 11. David Pilling, ‘Issue of Taiwan Raises Stakes Between Tokyo and Beijing’, Financial Times, 25 February 2005; US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on China as an Emerging Regional and Technology Power: Implications for US Economic and Security Interests, 108th Congress, statement by Susan L. Shirk, 12–13 February 2004, p. 197; and Tucker, China Confidential, p. 439. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Peter W. Rodman, 21 April 2004, p. 23. US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, November 2005, p. 118. Kagan, ‘Bush’s Straight Talk’.

Notes

159

107 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by William Kristol, 21 April 2004, p. 45. 108 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, prepared statement by Dan Burton, 6 April 2005, p. 50. 109 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Robert Menendez, 21 April 2004, p. 77. 110 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Sherrod Brown, 21 April 2004, p. 77. 111 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Tom Lantos, 21 April 2004, p. 26. 112 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, testimony of William Kristol, 21 April 2004, p. 42. 113 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Steven Chabot, 21 April 2004, p. 34. 114 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Tom Lantos, 21 April 2004, p. 27. 115 Peterson, ‘Dangerous Games’. 116 Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler, ‘Bush Carries to China a Delicate Diplomacy’, Washington Post, 13 November 2005. 117 The White House, U.S. National Security Strategy, Report, Washington DC, 17 September 2002. (accessed 27 January 2004). See also Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, ‘Rice Describes Plans to Spread Democracy’, Washington Post, 26 March 2005. 118 Chen Shui-bian, ‘President Chen’s New Years Message’, Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan) (accessed 10 January 2006). Philip. p. Pan, ‘Chinese Premier Pledges to Hold on to Taiwan’, Washington Post, 6 March 2005, and CNN.com, ‘Study: China Ready for Conflict’, 31 May 2004. (accessed 13 June 2005). See also US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Ming Wan, 21 April 2004, pp. 56–61, 60. 119 John King, ‘Blunt Bush Message for Taiwan’, CNN.com, 9 December 2003. (accessed 20 December 2005); USINFO, ‘U.S. Reiterates Firm Commitment to One-China Policy’, US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, Washington DC, 10 November 2005, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State (accessed 10 January 2006). USINFO, ‘Bush, Hu Continue U.S.–China Dialogue at United Nations’, Remarks by President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao in Photo Opportunity, The White House Office of the Press Secretary, 13 September 2005, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State (accessed 10 January 2006). 120 Kerry Dumbaugh, ‘Taiwan: Recent Developments and U.S. Policy Choices’, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 9 October 2006.

160

Notes

121 Robert Sutter, ‘China’s Rise: Implications for US Leadership in Asia’, Policy Studies 21, East–West Center, Washington, 2006, pp. 1–77, 35. 122 Quote taken from Bush, Untying the Knot, p. 248. 123 Quote taken from Dumbaugh, ‘Taiwan: Recent Developments’, p. 14. 124 As of June 2006, the House’s Congressional Taiwan Caucus had 152 members and the Senate Taiwan Caucus had 25. See Kerry Dumbaugh, ‘Underlying Strains in Taiwan– U.S. Political Relations’, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 20 April 2007, p. 21. 125 Dumbaugh, ‘Underlying Strains’, p. 22. 126 Dumbaugh, ‘Underlying Strains’, p. 22. 127 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on East Asia in Transition: Opportunities and Challenges for the United States, statement by Christopher R. Hill, 8 March 2006, p. 27. 128 President Bush approved for sale to Taiwan in 2001: ‘Patriot PAC-3 air defense systems, P-3C Orion anti-submarine aircraft, and diesel electric submarines’. See Department of Defense (DoD), Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, 2007, p. 30. 129 Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, 2007, p. 30. 130 Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, 2006, p. 37. 131 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on East Asia in Transition: Opportunities and Challenges for the United States, statement by Steve Chabot, 8 March 2006, p. 6. 132 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on East Asia in Transition: Opportunities and Challenges for the United States, statement by Christopher R. Hill, 8 March 2006, p. 27, and Bush, Untying the Knot, p. 134. 133 Kathrin Hille, ‘Taiwan passes funding for US weapons’, Financial Times, 17 June 2007. 134 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on America and Asia in a Changing World, statement by Aaron L. Friedberg, 21 September 2006, p. 8. 135 David Shambaugh and Karl F. Inderfurth, YaleGlobal, 11 April 2007. 136 Dumbaugh, ‘Underlying Strains’, p. 23. 137 Dumbaugh, ‘Underlying Strains’; Dumbaugh, ‘Taiwan: Recent Development’; and Bush, Untying the Knot, p. 133. 138 Quote taken from Bush, Untying the Knot, p. 128. 139 See Dumbaugh, ‘Underlying Strains’, pp. 9–10. 140 Sutter, ‘China’s Rise’, pp. 1–77, 52. 141 Dumbaugh, ‘Underlying Strains’, p. 11. 142 USINFO, ‘One China Policy Stabilizes Asia-Pacific Region, Powell Says’, Interview with Anthony Yuen of Phoenix TV, China World Hotel, US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, 25 October 2004, and USINFO ‘U.S.–China Relationship Comprehensive and Complex, Powell Says’, Press Briefing, China World Hotel, US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, 25 October 2004. Both distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State (accessed 14 April 2005). 143 USINFO, ‘One China Policy Stabilizes Asia-Pacific Region, Powell Says’, Interview with Anthony Yuen of Phoenix TV, China World Hotel, US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, 25 October 2004. See also remarks made by Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, during President Bush’s visit to China in November 2005. USINFO, ‘Bush, Chinese President Discuss Trade Issues at Beijing Meeting Other Topics Include Religious Freedom, Taiwan, Proliferation Concerns’, by Peggy B. Hu, Washington File Staff Writer, 20 November 2005, distributed by the Bureau of

Notes

144

145 146 147 148

149

150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158

161

International Information Programs, US Department of State (accessed 10 January 2006). George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by President Bush and President Hu of People’s Republic of China in Arrival Ceremony’, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 20 April 2006. (accessed 25 April 2006), and US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on East Asia in Transition: Opportunities and Challenges for the United States, statement by Christopher R. Hill, 8 March 2006, p. 19. Weldes, Constructing, p. 218. Quote taken from Campbell, Writing Security, p. 199. Nathan, ‘What’s Wrong’, pp. 99–100. Nathan, ‘What’s Wrong’, p. 101; US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by James A. Kelly, 21 April 2004, p. 39; US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Richard C. Bush, p. 67 and US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, July 2002, chapter 8; ‘Cross-Strait Security Issues’. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by Peter W. Rodman, Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, US Department of Defense, 21 April 2004, p. 25. Bush, Untying the Knot, p. 263. Nancy B. Tucker, ‘America First’, China in the American Political Imagination (Prepublication Version), Centre for Strategic & International Studies, Washington DC, 10 December 2002, and Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 30–3. Sutter, ‘China’s Rise’, p. 30. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defence Review Report, 30 September 2001, quotes taken from pp. 1 and 11 respectively. See also the U.S. National Security Strategy, 17 September 2002. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defence Review Report, 30 September 2001, p. 67. Weldes, Constructing, pp. 215–18. The White House, U.S. National Security Strategy, Washington DC, 17 September 2002. Chengxin Pan, ‘The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics’, Alternatives, 29, 2004, p. 318. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, prepared statement by Dan Burton, 6 April 2005, p. 50.

5 Debating US strategy towards China 1 See among others: David M. Lampton ‘Small Mercies: China and America after 9/11’, The National Interest, 66 Winter 2001/2002, pp. 106–13; Langdon, ‘American Northeast Asian Strategy’; Daniel Byman, Roger Cliff and Philip Saunders, ‘US Policy Options Towards an Emerging China’, Pacific Review, 12 (3), 1999, pp. 421–51; and David Shambaugh, ‘Containment or Engagement of China? Calculating Beijing’s Responses’, International Security, 21 (2), 1996, pp. 180–209. 2 Alistair I. Johnston and Robert S. Ross (eds), Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power, New York: Routledge, 1999. See also; Michael E. Brown, Owen R. Cote Jr., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds), The Rise of

162

3

4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

Notes China, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000; Peter J. Gries, and Thomas J. Christensen, ‘Correspondence: Power and Resolve in U.S. China Policy’, International Security, 26 (2), 2001, pp. 155–65; Owen Harris, ‘A Year of Debating China’, The National Interest 58, 1999/2000, pp. 141–7; James Morris, ‘Containment or Engagement: America’s Choice’, Pacific Review, 12 (2), 2000, pp. 197–201. Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen, p. 419; Robert S. Ross, ‘Managing the Rise of China: Engagement in U.S. China Policy’, in Johnston and Ross (eds), Engaging China, pp. 176–206; Robert S. Ross, ‘The Origins of Engagement: The Bush Administration and China’, in Meyers et al. (eds), Making China Policy, pp. 21–44; US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, statement by James A. Leach, 6 April 2005, p. 2. Evan S. Medeiros and Taylor M. Fravel, ‘China’s New Diplomacy’, Foreign Affairs, November/December, 82 (6), 2003, pp. 22–35; Peter H. Koehn and Joseph Y.S. Cheng (eds), The Outlook for U.S.–China Relations: Following the 1997–1998 Summits: Chinese and American Perspectives on Security, Trade, and Cultural Exchange, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999; Samuel R. Berger, ‘Don’t Antagonize China’, Washington Post, 14 October 2003; Jane Perlez, ‘Asian Leaders Find China a More Cordial Neighbour’, New York Times, 18 October 2003; New York Times, China’s More Nuanced Diplomacy, editorial, 14 October 2003. William Clinton, ‘Remarks by the President on US–China relations in the 21st Century’, National Geographic Society, Washington DC, 11 June 1998 (accessed 20 February 2005). Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Power in Transition, 2nd edition, Harper Collins, 1989. Among others, Senator Craig Thomas, the former Chairman of the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate, argues that ‘I for one don’t believe that seeking to isolate China will lead us to where we want to go’. ‘Where Are U.S.–China Relations Headed?’ Hearing before the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, 107 Congress, First Session, 1 May 2001. US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, testimony of David M. Lampton, 19 March 2003, pp. 56–62, 57, and US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on China as an Emerging Regional and Technology Power: Implications for US Economic and Security Interests, testimony of David Lampton, 13 February 2004, pp. 184–90. Niall Ferguson, Colossus, The Price of America’s Empire, Allen Lane, 2004, pp. 279– 85. US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, statement by David Lampton, p. 57. US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, statement by Larry M. Wortzel, pp. 49–56, 54. US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on China as an Emerging Regional and Technology Power: Implications for US Economic and Security Interests, testimony of David Lampton, 13 February 2004, p. 190. Medeiros and Fravel, ‘China’s New Diplomacy’, p. 23. Evidently, China has become more willing, in the past few years, to participate actively in multilateral economic and security organisations – such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Plus Three and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). See also

Notes

14 15 16

17 18

19

20

21

22 23 24

163

Alastair I. Johnston, ‘Socialization in International Institutions: The ASEAN Way and International Relations Theory’, in John G. Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno (eds), International Relations Theory and the Asian Pacific, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 107–62. US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on China as an Emerging Regional and Technology Power: Implications for U.S. Economic and Security Interests, statement by Susan L. Shirk, 13 February 2004, pp. 169–72. (accessed 5 July 2007). Tucker, ‘If Taiwan’, p. 16. Cross-Strait economic relations have increased substantially for the last 15 years and according to China’s Ministry of Commerce totalled $78.3 billion in 2004 with a heavy tilt in Taiwan’s favour with the island’s export to China totalling nearly $65 billion against imports from China of $13.5 billion. See US– China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, November 2005, p. 132. Tucker, ‘If Taiwan’, pp. 15–28, 15 and Pilling, ‘Issue of Taiwan’. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy; Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, The Coming Conflict With China, New York: Knopf, 1997 and Thomas J. Christensen, ‘Posing problems without catching up, China’s rise and challenges for U.S. security policy’, International Security, 25 (4), 2001, pp. 5–41. Adam Ward, ‘China and America’; Friedberg, ‘11 September and the Future’; US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2003; US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2005 and US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, Washington DC, 30 September 2001. These reports unmistakably see China as a threat to Taiwan and a potential military threat to US interests in Asia. Quoted in Pan, ‘The ‘China Threat’,’ p. 310. For the German analogy, see also Edward Friedman, ‘The Challenge of a Rising China: Another Germany?’ in Robert J. Lieber (ed.), Eagle Adrift: American Foreign Policy at the End of the Century, New York: Longmans, 1997, pp. 215–45. For an excellent analysis of the ‘Sinocentric’ world order, see Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order and John King Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, New Impressions, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. The century of National Humiliation where China fell victim to Western and Japanese imperialism began with the Opium War against Britain in 1839 and lasted until the Chinese Communists established the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. According to John W. Garver, it can be termed a myth, but not because the history did not occur, ‘[i]t is mythic, rather, in the sense that the fact of belief is more important than what actually occurred’. John W. Garver, Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993, p. 9. See also Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics, p. 72 and Mao Zedong, ‘The Chinese People Have Stood Up’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol. 5, Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1977. What Alastair I. Johnston calls a parabellum or hard realpolitik strategic culture, reflects an argument ‘that the best way of dealing with security threats is to eliminate them through the use of force. This preference is tempered by an explicit sensitivity to one’s relative capacity to do this’. See Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995. Lucian W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics, p. 72. Mao Zedong, ‘The Chinese People’, pp. 16–17. US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations United States, Hearing on Where Are U.S. –China Relations Headed? statement by David Shambaugh, 1 May 2001, pp. 28–33, 33 and US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign

164

25

26

27

28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36

37 38

Notes Relations, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, statement by Larry M. Wortzel, p. 51. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China (pursuant to the FY 2000 National Defense Authorization Act), Washington DC, July 2003, see in particular ‘Section II: Goals and trends in Chinese strategy’, pp. 10–16. See also US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2005. Additionally, Johnston maintains that the influence of traditional Chinese military strategists such as Sun Zi, are of great importance as source of how to obtain state security. Johnston, ‘Cultural Realism’, pp. 249–58. Mark A. Stokes and Carlisle Barracks, China’s Strategic Modernization: Implications for the United States, US Army Strategic Studies Institute, 1999; Bernard D. Cole, The Great Wall at Sea: China’s Navy Enters the Twenty-First Century, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2001, and Thomas J. Christensen ‘Posing Problems’, pp. 5– 40. US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, statement by Randall G. Schriver, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Department of State, 19 March 2003, p. 22. US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, November 2005, see in particular pp. 115–41, 121. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2005. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2003. Stephen Fidler, ‘China explains 17.8 % rise in defence budget’, Financial Times, 3 June 2007. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2005, p. 22. See for instance, Thomas J. Christensen ‘Chinese Realpolitik’, Foreign Affairs, 75 (5), 1996, pp. 37–45; Bruce Cumings, ‘The World Shakes China’, The National Interest, 43, Spring 1996, pp. 28–40, and Avery Goldstein ‘Great Expectations: Interpreting China’s Arrival’, International Security, 22 (3), 1997–1998, pp. 36–73. Wen Jiabao, ‘Interview with Wen Jiabao’, Washington Post, 21 November 2003. Jim Yardley, ‘China Denies ‘Taiwan’ Law is a ‘War Bill’’, New York Times, 14 March 2005; Phillip P. Pan, ‘China Puts Threat to Taiwan Into Law’, Washington Post, 14 March 2005 and Bush, Untying the Knot, p. 121. US Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Division, Data Dissemination Branch, Washington DC. (accessed 5 July 2007). US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, 2005, pp. 2, 22, 25–83. According to the USCC report ‘the trends in the U.S.–China relationship have negative implications for our long-term national economic and security interests’, pp. 1, 19. Alastair I. Johnston, ‘Learning Versus Adaptation: Explaining Change in Chinese Arms Control Policy in the 1980s and 1990s’, The China Journal, No. 35, January 1996, pp. 27–62, and Michael Yahuda, ‘Chinese Dilemmas in Thinking About Regional Security Architecture’, The Pacific Review, 16 (2), 2003, pp. 189–206. David Shambaugh ‘China or America: Which is the Revisionist Power?’ Survival, 43 (3), 2001, pp. 25–30. Samuel S. Kim, China In and Out of the Changing World Order, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 25–7.

Notes

165

39 Michael Yahuda, ‘Chinese Dilemmas’, p. 191. According to Yahuda, China’s ‘cooperative security’ faces three dilemmas. First, the approach could be seen as an additional layer of security to promote Chinese interests, rather than an alternative to the traditional security arrangements embodied in American preponderance. Second, it is questionable whether the Chinese government is able to introduce the degree of transparency in the political domain that is needed to cultivate cooperation with neighbouring democracies. Third, despite China’s reassurance and cooperative behaviour, China’s path toward a new order fundamentally threatens the interests of the United States. Hence the implications of these factors require a more sober assessment of China’s role in post cold war security arrangements. 40 John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy, p. 402. 41 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy, p. 401. See also Mark A. Stokes and Carlisle Barracks, China’s Strategic Modernization; Bernard D. Cole, The Great Wall at Sea; and Christensen ‘Posing Problems’. 42 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy, p. 42. The realist assumption is also adopted by the US Department of Defense. See for instance the US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2003, in particular ‘Section II: Goals and trends in Chinese strategy’, pp. 10– 16. See also US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2005. The argument that the Chinese concept of national interest is state centric, and that international politics is essentially a struggle for power and the pursuit of comprehensive power as part of a global race for economic and technological development is widespread in the literature. See among others, Gilbert Rozman, ‘China’s Quest for Great Power Identity’, Orbis, 43 (3), 1999, pp. 383–402; Michael Yahuda, ‘China’s Foreign Relations: The Long March, Future Uncertain’, China Quarterly, 159, September 1999, pp. 650–9; Yong Deng, ‘The Chinese Conception of National Interest in International Relations’, China Quarterly, 154, June 1998, pp. 308–29; and Samuel S. Kim (ed.), China and the World, Chinese Foreign Policy Faces the New Millennium, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1998. 43 Ward ‘China and America’, p. 53; Lampton ‘Small Mercies’; Byman et al. ‘US policy options’, pp. 421–51; and Gries and Christensen: ‘Correspondence’. 44 US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, November 2005. 45 Friedberg, ‘11 September and the Future’, p. 45. 46 Tucker, ‘Strategic Ambiguity’, p. 211; US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Far Eastern and Pacific Affairs, Hearing on Where are U.S.–China Relations Headed? S. Hrg. 107-45, Statement of former Ambassador to the PRC James R. Lilley, 1 May 2001, p. 19; US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, statement by James A. Leach, 6 April 2005, p. 2. 47 US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2005; US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2003; and US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, Washington DC, 30 September 2001. 48 Pan, ‘The ‘China Threat’’, pp. 305–31. 49 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, statement by John J. Tkacik, 6 April 2005, pp. 33–43, 43; John J. Tkacik, ‘Changing America’s China Policy’, Asian Wall Street Journal, 16 July 2002; Kagan, ‘Bush’s Straight Talk’.

166

Notes

50 Peter Rudolf, ‘China’s Rise and the United States: Perception and Strategy’, in Gudrun Wacker (ed.), China’s Rise: The Return of Geopolitics? Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin, February 2006, pp. 61–7, 63. 51 Zalmay Khalilzad, ‘Congage China’, Issue Paper, RAND, Project Air Force, 1999, and Rudolf, ‘China’s Rise’. 52 Rudolf, ‘China’s Rise’, p. 63. 53 Khalilzad, ‘Congage China’, and Zalmay Khalilzad, ‘Sweet and Sour, Recipe for a New China Policy’, RAND, 2000. (accessed 5 July 2007). 54 Robert B. Zoellick, ‘Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility’, speech at the National Committee on US–China Relations, New York, 21 September 2005. 55 Zoellick, ‘Whither China’. 56 Randall L. Schweller, ‘Managing the rise of great powers: history and theory’ in Ross and Johnston (eds), Engaging China, pp. 1–31, 19. 57 Schweller, ‘Managing the rise’, p. 19. 58 Zoellick, ‘Whither China’. 59 Author’s correspondence with Harry Harding, May 2007. 60 US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, Washington DC, 6 February 2006, pp. 28–9. 61 The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington DC, March 2006, pp. 41–2. 62 US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, 2007, executive summary. 63 Robert Sutter, ‘Why Rising China Can’t Dominate Asia’, Commentary, Glocom Platform, 11 September 2006. 64 John J. Tkacik, Jr. ‘Panda Hedging: Pentagon Urges New Strategy for China’, Web Memo, the Heritage Foundation, no. 1093, 24 May 2006; Tkacik, ‘Hedging Against China’, Backgrounder, the Heritage Foundation, no. 1925, 17 April 2006; Evelyn Goh, ‘Understanding ‘hedging’ in Asia-Pacific security’, Pacific Forum CSIS, 31 August 2006; Carin Zissis, ‘Crafting a U.S. Policy on Asia’, Council on Foreign Relations, 10 April 2007; David Shambaugh and Karl F. Inderfurth, Yale Global 11 April 2007; Sharman Katz and David Stewart, ‘Hedging China with FTAs’, Asia Times, 1 October 2005; and Graeme Dobell, ‘Correspondent report – US details its hedging policy towards China’, ABS Online, 1 April 2007. 65 Evelyn Goh, ‘Meeting the China Challenge: The U.S. in Southeast Asian Regional Security Strategies’, Policy Studies 16, East–West Centre, Washington, 2005, pp. 1– 57, 3; and Sutter, ‘China’s Rise’, p. 24. 66 US Department of Defense, QDR, p. 30. 67 US Department of Defense, QDR, p. 30. 68 Tkacik, ‘Hedging Against China’, pp. 7–8. 69 Goh, ‘Meeting the China Challenge’, pp. 2–3. For other approaches that draw on hedging see Robert J. Art, ‘Europe Hedges Its Security Bets’, in T.V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortman (eds), Balance of Power, Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 179–213; and Evan S. Medeiros, ‘Strategic Hedging and the Future of Asia-Pacific Stability’, The Washington Quarterly, 29 (1), 2005–2006, pp. 145–67. 70 Goh, ‘Meeting the China Challenge’, and Goh, ‘Understanding ‘hedging’ in AsiaPacific Security’. 71 Goh, ‘Understanding ‘hedging’ in Asia-Pacific Security’. 72 Foot, ‘Chinese strategies’, pp. 77–94, 88. 73 Foot, ‘Chinese strategies’, p. 88. 74 Darrell Duffie, Future Markets, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989, p. 205. 75 Duffie, Future Markets, p. 201.

Notes

167

76 Joseph Nocera, ‘The Quantitative, Data-Based, Risk-Massaging Road to Riches’, New York Times Magazine, 5 June 2005. 77 James Dow, ‘Arbitrage, Hedging, and Financial Innovation’, Review of Financial Studies, Winter 1998, 11 (4), pp. 739–55, 740; and Richard A. Brealey and Stewart C. Myers, Financing and Risk Management, New York: McGraw Hill, 2003, p. 319. 78 Brealey and Stewart, Financing and Risk Management, pp. 320–5. 79 Chand Sooran, ‘What is hedging? Why do companies hedge?’ Victory Risk Management Consulting (accessed 5 July 2007). 80 Quoted in Dobell, ‘Correspondent report’. 81 Author’s correspondence with Harry Harding, May 2007. 82 T.V. Paul, ‘Introduction: The Enduring Axioms of Balance of Power Theory and Their Contemporary Relevance’, in Paul et al. (eds), Balance of Power, p. 14. 83 Author’s correspondence with Harry Harding, May 2007. 84 Robert S. Ross, ‘Bipolarity and Balancing in East Asia’, in Paul et al. (eds), Balance of Power, pp. 267–304, 280–3. 85 Medeiros, ‘Strategic Hedging’, pp. 149–50. 86 Art, ‘Europe Hedges’, p. 179; Goh, ‘Understanding ‘hedging’ in Asia-Pacific Security’, and Goh, ‘Meeting the China Challenge’. 87 Schweller, ‘Managing the Rise’, p. 25. 88 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy, p. 42. 89 Schweller, ‘Managing the Rise’, p. 25. 90 Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998. 91 Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, ‘Reflexive Security: NATO and International Risk Society’, Millennium, 30 (2), 2001, pp. 285–309, 286–7. 92 Foot, ‘Chinese strategies’, pp. 88–9, and Kier A. Lieber and Gerard Alexander ‘Waiting for Balancing. Why the World Is Not Pushing Back’, International Security, 30 (1), 2005, pp. 109–39, 109. See also other contributions to International Security 30 (1), 2005 exploring the concept of ‘soft balancing’. 93 Michel Fortmann, T.V. Paul, and James J. Wirtz, ‘Conclusion: Balance of Power at the turn of the New Century’, in T.V. Paul et al. (eds), Balance of Power, pp. 360–74, 369–70. 94 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Hard Times for Soft Balancing’, International Security 30 (1), 2005, pp. 72–108, 107, and Robert A. Pape, ‘Soft Balancing against the United States’, International Security 30 (1), 2005, pp. 7–45. 95 T.V. Paul ‘Introduction’, in Paul et al. (eds), Balance of Power, pp. 1–25, 14. 96 Fortmann et al. ‘Conclusion’, in Paul et al. (eds), Balance of Power, p. 371. 97 Mathias Albert, ‘From Defending Border towards Managing Geographical Risks? Security in a Globalised World’, Geopolitics, 5 (1), Summer 2000, pp. 57–80, 70–1. 98 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Hard Times’. 99 Schweller, ‘Managing the Rise’, p. 25, my emphasis. 100 Goh, ‘Understanding ‘hedging’ in Asia-Pacific Security’. 101 Goh, ‘Meeting the China Challenge’. 102 Goh, ‘Understanding ‘hedging’ in Asia-Pacific Security’. 103 Sutter, ‘China’s Rise’, p. 29. 104 Medeiros, ‘Strategic Hedging’, p. 147. 105 Medeiros, ‘Strategic Hedging’, pp. 147–8. 106 Medeiros, ‘Strategic Hedging’, p. 161. 107 US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, 2006, executive summary. 108 Yee-Kuang Heng, War as Risk Management, Strategy and Conflict in an Age of Globalised Risks, London: Routledge, 2006, and Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. See also Christopher Coker, ‘Globalisation and

168

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132

Notes Insecurity in the Twenty-First Century: NATO and the Management of Risk’, Adelphi Paper 345, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, and Christopher Coker, The Future of War: The Re-Enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Rens van Munster, ‘Logics of Security: The Copenhagen School, Risk Management and the War on Terror’, Political Science Publications 10, University of Southern Denmark, 2005, pp. 1–14, 3–4. van Munster, ‘Logics of Security’, pp. 7–8. Schweller, ‘Managing the Rise’, p. 25. Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 115. Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 115. Heng, War as Risk Management, p. 10. Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, pp. 1–2, and Heng, War as Risk Management, p. 49. Taken from Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 38. Heng, War as Risk Management, p. 32. Heng, War as Risk Management, p. 32. Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 4. Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 115. Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War. CASE Collective, ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’, Security Dialogue 37 (4), pp. 443–87, 468, and Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 35. Albert, ‘From Defending Border’, p. 64. Taken from Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 41. Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 35. David Denney, Risk and Society, London: Sage Publications, 2005, p. 9. Rasmussen, ‘Reflexive Security’, pp. 291–2. Albert, ‘From Defending Border’, p. 77. Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 37. Quote taken from Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, p. 37. Deborah Lupton, Risk, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 30. Robert S. Ross, ‘Navigating the Taiwan Strait: Deterrence, Escalation Dominance, and U.S.–China Relations’, International Security 27 (2) Fall 2002, pp. 48–85; Robert S. Ross, ‘Comparative Deterrence: The Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula’, in Robert S. Ross and Alastair I. Johnston (eds), New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 13–49; and Thomas J. Christensen, ‘The Contemporary Security Dilemma: Deterring a Taiwan Conflict’, Washington Quarterly, 25 (4), 2002, pp. 7–21.

6 Understanding US Taiwan policy 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Ninkovich, ‘No Post-Mortems’, p. 466. Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, pp. 298–9. Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction’, p. 159. Weldes, Constructing, p. 7. Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, p. 398. Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, p. 2. Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction’. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Taking Stock: The constructivist research program in international relations and comparative politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, 4, 2001, pp. 391–416, 397. 9 Hopf, Social Construction, p. 279.

Notes

169

10 NPM HAK Telecons, Box 12, 25 Jan – 30 April, HAK conversation with RN, 15 January 1972; and NPM, President’s Personal File, Box 7, ‘China Notes and China Trip Announcement’, February 1972. 11 Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, ‘Knowing Encounters: Beyond Parochialism in International Relations Theory’, in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (eds), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1996, pp. 65–84, 73. 12 Zehfuss, Constructivism. 13 Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 222–3. 14 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 223. 15 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 223. 16 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 223. 17 Doty, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 304. 18 Weldes, Constructing, p. 13. 19 George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by President Bush and President Hu of People’s Republic of China in Arrival Ceremony’, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 20 April 2006. 20 US House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, statement by James A. Kelly, p. 32.

Bibliography

Archival sources Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO Papers of Harry S. Truman Papers of Dean Acheson Dean Acheson Princeton Seminar papers Papers of George M. Elsey Papers of Theodore Tannenwald Papers of Matthew J. Connelly Papers of Francis P. Matthews

Nixon Presidential Materials, National Archives II, College Park, MD Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversations Transcripts (Telcons) White House Central Files, Countries Category, CO-34, China White House Central Files, Foreign Affairs Category, FO 5 and FO 5-2 President’s Personal Files President’s Office Files White House Special Files White House Subject Files: Confidential Files White House Subject Files: Staff Member Office Files: Special Staff Files Bob Haldeman Files National Security Council Files, Henry A. Kissinger (HAK) Office Files, China Folder National Security Council Files, President’s Trips Files National Security Council Files, Presidential Correspondence 1969–1974 National Security Council Files, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files National Security Council Files, Henry A. Kissinger Administrative and Staff files National Security Council Files, For the President’s Files (Winston Lord) – China Trip National Security Council Files, Subject Files National Security Council Files, Institutional Files, National Security Study Memorandums

Bibliography 171 National Archives II, College Park, MD Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State Central Foreign Policy Files 1967–1969 Subject Numeric Files 1970–1973, Political and Defense Policy Planning Council, Policy Planning Staff, Director’s Files (W. Lord), 1969–77

Published documentary sources US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) Washington DC: US Government Printing Office (GPO) 1947, vol. I, General; The United Nations (1973) 1947, vol. VII, The Far East: China (1972) 1948, vol. VII, The Far East: China (1973) 1948, vol. VIII, The Far East: China (1973) 1949, vol. VII, The Far East and Australasia (1977) 1949, vol. VIII, The Far East: China (1978) 1949, vol. IX, The Far East: China (1974) 1950, vol. VI, East Asia and the Pacific (1976) 1950, vol. VII, Korea (1976) 1969–1976, vol. I, Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1969–1972 (2003) US Department of State, Department of State Bulletin, 1969–1972, Washington DC: GPO. US Foreign Policy for the 1970’s: A New Strategy for Peace, A Report to the Congress by Richard Nixon, 18 February 1970. US Foreign Policy for the 1970’s: Building For Peace, A Report to the Congress by Richard Nixon, 25 February 1971. US Foreign Policy for the 1970’s: The Emerging Structure of Peace: A Report to the Congress by Richard Nixon, 9 February 1972. US Foreign Policy for the 1970’s: Shaping a Durable Peace, A Report to the Congress by Richard Nixon, 3 May 1973. US National Archives and Records Administration, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, Washington DC: GPO. The White House, U. S. National Security Strategy, Report, Washington DC, 17 September 2002. (accessed 27 January 2004). US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, Washington DC, 30 September 2001. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, (pursuant to the FY 2000 National Defense Authorization Act), Washington DC, July 2003. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2005. US Department of State, Annual Country Report on Human Rights Practice in China, 25 February 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). US Department of State, Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The U. S. Record 2003–2004, 17 May 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005).

172

Bibliography

Secondary sources Aalberts, Tanja E. and Rens V. Munster, ‘Taking the Middle Ground Seriously: Towards a Communicative Approach to Social Inquiry’, forthcoming International Politics, 2008. Accinelli, Robert, Crisis and Commitment: United States Policy Toward Taiwan, 1950– 1955, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Accinelli, Robert, ‘ “A Thorn in the Side of Peace”: The Eisenhower Administration and the 1958 Offshore Island Crisis’, in Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin (eds), Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.–China Diplomacy, 1954–1973, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 106–40. Adler, Emanuel, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 3 (3), 1997, pp. 319–63. Adler, Emanuel, ‘Constructivism and International Relations’, in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth Simmons (eds), Handbook of International Relations, London: Sage Publication, 2002, pp. 95–118. Albert, Mathias, ‘From Defending Borders Towards Managing Geographical Risks? Security in a Globalised World’, Geopolitics, 5 (1), Summer 2000, pp. 57–80. Aldridge, A. Owen, The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Armitage, Richard L., ‘US Opposes Unilateral Actions That Might Change Taiwan Situation’, Media Round Table Remarks, Beijing, China, 30 January 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). Art, Robert J., ‘Europe Hedges Its Security Bets’, in Paul, T.V., James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortman (eds), Balance of Power, Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 179–213. Ashley, Richard K., and R.B.J. Walker, ‘Introduction: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 34 (3), 1990, pp. 259–68. Ba, Alice, and Matthew J. Hoffman, ‘Making and Remaking the World for IR 101: A Resource for Teaching Social Constructivism in Introductory Classes’, International Studies Perspectives, 2003, pp. 15–33. Baker, Peter, and Glenn Kessler, ‘Bush carries to China a delicate diplomacy’, Washington Post, 13 November 2005. Barnett, Michael, and Martha Finnemore, ‘The Politics, Power and Pathologies of International Organizations”, International Organizations, 53 (4), 1999, pp. 705–32. Beijing Review, 32 (27), 3–9 July 1989, pp. 9–10. Berger, Samuel R., ‘Don’t Antagonize China’, Washington Post, 14 October 2003. Bernstein, Richard, and Ross Munro, The Coming Conflict With China, New York: Knopf, 1997. Blum, Robert M., Drawing the Line: The Origin of the American Containment Policy in East Asia, W.W. Norton, New York, 1982. Borg, Dorthy, and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years, Chinese–American Relations, 1947–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Bork, Ellen, ‘Challenging the Establishment Image of China’, China in the American Political Imagination, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, 10 December 2002. Brealey, Richard A., and Stewart C. Myers, Financing and Risk Management, New York: McGraw Hill, 2003.

Bibliography 173 Brooks, Stephen G., and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Hard Times for Soft Balancing’, International Security 30 (1), 2005, pp. 72–108. Brown, David G., ‘Democratization and Cross-Strait Relations’, The Atlantic Council paper, 2003. (accessed 14 April 2005). Brown, Michael E., Owen R. Cote Jr., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds), The Rise of China, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Brownback, Sam, ‘The Taiwan Relations Act at 25’, Heritage Foundation Keynote Address, 31 March 2004. (accessed 14 April 2004). Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Power and Principle, New York: Farrar Straus, Giroux, 1985. Burr, William (ed.), The Kissinger Transcripts, The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow, New York: The New Press, 1998. Bush, George W., ‘Remarks by President Bush at Tsinghua University”, 22 February 2002. (accessed 14 April 2005). Bush, George W., ‘Bush Reaffirms U. S. Commitment to One-China Policy’, Remarks by President Bush and Premier Wen Jiabao in Photo Opportunity, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Washington DC, 9 December 2003. (accessed 14 April 2005). Bush, George W., ‘State of the Union Address’, 2 February 2005. (accessed 14 April 2005). Bush, George W., ‘Remarks by President Bush and President Hu of People’s Republic of China in Arrival Ceremony’, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 20 April 2006. (accessed 25 April 2006). Bush, Richard C., At Cross Purposes, US–Taiwan Relations Since 1942, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2004. Bush, Richard C., Untying the Knot, Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998. Byman, Daniel, Roger Cliff and Philip Saunders, ‘US policy options towards an emerging China’, The Pacific Review, 12 (3), 1999, pp. 421–51. Campbell, David, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1998. Campbell, David, Writing Security, United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, 2nd edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. CASE Collective, ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’, Security Dialogue 37 (4), pp. 443–87. Cederman, Lars-Erik, and Christopher Daase, ‘Endogenizing Corporate Identities: The Next Step in Constructivist IR Theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 9 (1), 2003, pp. 5–35. Chandler, David, From Kosovo to Kabul, Human Rights and International Intervention, London: Pluto Press, 2002. Chase, Michael S., ‘U.S.–Taiwan Security Cooperation: Enhancing an Unofficial relationship’, in Tucker (ed.), Dangerous Strait, The U.S.–Taiwan–China Crisis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 162–85.

174

Bibliography

Checkel, Jeffrey T., ‘International Norms and Domestic Politics: Bridging the RationalistConstructivist Divide’, European Journal of International Relations, 1997, 3 (4), pp. 473–95. Checkel, Jeffrey T., ‘The Constructivist Turn In International Relation’, World Politics, 50 (2), 1998, pp. 324–48. Checkel, Jeffrey T., ‘Norms, Institutions, and National Identity in Contemporary Europe’, International Studies Quarterly, 43 (1), 1999, pp. 83–114. Checkel, Jeffrey T., ‘Social Constructivisms in Global and European Politics (A Review Essay)’, Review of International Studies, 30 (2), 2004, pp. 229–44. Checkel, Jeffrey T., and Andrew Moravcsik, ‘A Constructivist Research Program in EU Studies?” European Union Politics, 2 (2), 2001, pp. 219–49. Chen, Jian, ‘China’s policy towards Taipei and Washington’, in Chien-min Chao and Cal Clark (eds), The ROC and the Threshold of the 21st Century: A Paradigm Reexamined, Occasional Papers/Reprints Series in Contemporary Asian Studies, 1999, pp. 141–50. Chen, Shui-bian, ‘President Chen Shui-bian Inaugural Speech”, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China, 20 May 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). Chen, Shui-bian, ‘President Chen’s New Years Message’, Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan). (accessed 10 January 2006). Cheow, Eric Teo Cho, ‘Give Taiwan International Cultural Space” Pacific Forum, CSIS, Honolulu, HI, 25 June 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). Christensen, Thomas J., Useful Adversaries, Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996. Christensen, Thomas J., ‘Chinese Realpolitik’, Foreign Affairs, 75 (5), 1996, pp. 37–45. Christensen, Thomas J., ‘Posing Problems Without Catching Up, China’s Rise and Challenges for U.S. Security Policy’, International Security, 25 (4), 2001, pp. 5–41. Christensen, Thomas J., ‘The Contemporary Security Dilemma: Deterring a Taiwan Conflict’, Washington Quarterly, 25 (4), 2002, pp. 7–21. Clinton, William, ‘Remarks by the President on US–China relations in the 21st Century’, National Geographic Society, Washington DC, 11 June 1998. (accessed 20 February 2005). Clough, Ralph N., Island China, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. Clough, Ralph N., Cooperation or Conflict in the Taiwan Strait?, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. CNN.com, ‘Study: China Ready for Conflict’, 31 May 2004. (accessed 13 June 2004). Cohen, Roberta, ‘People’s Republic of China: The Human Rights Exception’, Human Rights Quarterly, 9 (4), 1987, pp. 447–549. Cohen, Warren I., ‘Acheson, His Advisers, and China, 1949–1950’, in Dorthy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years Chinese–American Relations, 1947–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 13–52. Cohen, Warren I., America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations, 4th edition, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Coker, Christopher, Reflections on American Foreign Policy Since 1949, London: Pinter, 1989.

Bibliography 175 Coker, Christopher, ‘Globalisation and Insecurity in the Twenty-First Century: NATO and the Management of Risk’, Adelphi Papers 345, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Coker, Christopher, The Future of War: The Re-Enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Cole, Bernard D., The Great Wall at Sea: China’s Navy Enters the Twenty-First Century, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2001. Costigolia, Frank, ‘Reading for Meaning: Theory, Language, and Metaphor’, in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Patterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 279–303. Craner, Lorne W., ‘The Role of Human Rights in Foreign Policy”, 31 October 2001. (accessed 14 April 2005). Craner, Lorne W., ‘Hopes of Tiananmen Square Still Not Realized in China’, 23 April 2004. (accessed 14 April 2005). Cumings, Bruce, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947– 1950, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Cumings, Bruce, ‘The World Shakes China’, The National Interest, 43, Spring 1996, pp. 28–40. Dean, Robert, ‘Commentary, Tradition, Cause and Effect, and the Cultural History of International Relations’, Diplomatic History 24 (4), 2000, pp. 615–22. Delanty, Gerard, Social Science, Beyond Constructivism and Realism, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002. Deng, Yong, ‘The Chinese Conception of National Interest in International Relations’, China Quarterly, 154, June 1998, pp. 308–29. Denney, David, Risk and Society, London: Sage Publications, 2005. Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, London: Routledge, 1978. Derrida, Jacques, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Dessler, David, ‘Constructivism Within a Positivist Social Science’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1), 1999, pp. 123–37. Dickson, Bruce J., Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Dobell, Graeme, ‘Correspondent Report – US details its hedging policy towards China’, ABS Online, 1 April 2007. Doty, Roxanne L., ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A post-positivist analysis of U.S. counterinsurgency in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly, 37 (3), 1993, pp. 297–320. Doty, Roxanne L., Imperial Encounters, The Politics of Representation in North–South Relations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Doty, Roxanne L., ‘Desire all the way down’, in ‘Forum on Social Theory of International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 137–9. Dow, James, ‘Arbitrage, Hedging, and Financial Innovation’, Review of Financial Studies, Winter 1998, 11 (4), pp. 739–55. Duffie, Darrell, Future Markets, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989. Dumbaugh, Kerry, ‘Taiwan: Recent Developments and U.S. Policy Choices’, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 9 October 2006. Dumbaugh, Kerry, ‘Underlying Strains in Taiwan–U.S. Political Relations’, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 20 April 2007.

176

Bibliography

Economy, Elizabeth, and Michael Oksenberg, ‘Introduction” in Elizabeth Economy and Michael Oksenberg (eds), China Joins the World: Progress and Prospect, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999, pp. 1–42. Edkins, Jenny, Poststructuralism & International Relations, Bringing the Political Back In, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996. Etzold, Thomas H., and John L. Gaddis (eds), Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Fairbank, John King (ed.), The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. Fairbank, John King, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, New Impressions, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Fairclough, Norman, Analysing Discourse, Textual Analysis for Social Research, London: Routledge, 2003. Faust, John R., and Judith F. Kornberg, China in World Politics, London: Lynne Reinner, 1995. Fearon, James, and Alexander Wendt, ‘Rationalism v. Constructivism: A Sceptical View’, in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth Simmons (eds), Handbook of International Relations, London: Sage Publications, 2002, pp. 52–72. Ferguson, Niall, Colossus, The Price of America’s Empire, Allen Lane, 2004. Fidler, Stephen, ‘China explains 17.8% rise in defence budget’, Financial Times, 3 June 2007. Fierke, Karin, Changing Games, Changing Strategies: Critical Investigation in Security, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Fierke, Karin M., ‘Critical Methodology and Constructivism’, in Kaerin Fierke and Knud Jørgensen (eds), Constructing International Relations, the Next Generation, London: M.E. Sharpe, 2001, pp. 115–36. Fierke, Karin M., ‘Links Across the Abyss: Language and Logic in International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 46 (3), 2002, pp. 331–54. Fierke, Karin, and Knud Jørgensen ‘Introduction” in Karin Fierke and Knud Jørgensen (eds), Constructing International Relations, the Next Generation, London: M.E.Sharpe, 2001, pp. 3–12. Findlay, Christopher, and Andrew Watson, ‘Economic Growth and Trade Dependency in China’, in David Goodman and Gerald Segal (eds), China Rising: Nationalism and Interdependence, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 107–33. Finkelstein, David M., From Abandonment to Salvation: Washington’s Taiwan Dilemma, Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1993. Finnemore, Martha, National Interest in International Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, International Organization, 52 (4),1998, pp. 887–917. Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, 4, 2001, pp. 391–416. Finney, Patrick, ‘Still ‘Marking Time’? Text, Discourse and Truth in International History’, Review of International Studies, 27 (3), 2001, pp. 291–308. Finney, Patrick, ‘Introduction: What is International History?” in Finney (ed.) Palgrave Advances in International History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 1–36. Foot, Rosemary, The Wrong War, American Policy and the Dimension of the Korean Conflict, 1950–1953, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Bibliography 177 Foot, Rosemary, The Practice of Power, US Relations with China Since 1949, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Foot, Rosemary, Rights Beyond Borders, The Global Community and the Struggle Over Human Rights in China, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Foot, Rosemary, ‘Bush, China and Human Rights’, Survival, 45 (2), 2003, pp. 167–86. Foot, Rosemary, ‘The Place of Human Rights in US Foreign Policy’, Adelphi Papers, 363 (1), 2004, pp. 5–93. Foot, Rosemary, ‘Chinese Strategies in a US-hegemonic Global Order: Accommodating and Hedging’, International Affairs 82 (1), 2006, pp. 77–94. Fortmann, Michel, T.V. Paul, and James J. Wirtz, ‘Conclusion: Balance of Power at the Turn of the New Century’, in T.V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michael Fortman (eds), Balance of Power, Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 360–74. Foucault, Michael, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock, 1972. Foucault, Michael, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, Brighton: Harvester, 1980. Friedberg, Aaron L., ‘11 September and the Future of Sino-American Relations’, Survival, 44 (1), 2002, pp. 33–50. Friedberg, Aaron L., ‘The Future of US–China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?” International Security, 30 (2), 2005, pp. 7–45. Friedman, Edward, ‘The Challenge of a Rising China: Another Germany?” in Robert J. Lieber (ed.), Eagle Adrift: American Foreign Policy at the End of the Century, New York: Longman, 1997, pp. 215–45. Gaddis, John L., ‘The Strategic Perspective: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Defensive Perimeter’ Concept, 1947–1951’, in Dorthy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years Chinese–American Relations, 1947–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 61–118. Gaddis, John L., Strategies of Containment, A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gaddis, John L., Strategies of Containment, A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War, revised and expanded edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Garver, John W., Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,1993. Garver, John, The Sino-American Alliance: Nationalist China and American Cold War Strategy in Asia, New York: M.E.Sharpe, 1997. George, Jim, Discourses of Global Politics, A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994. George, Jim, and David Campbell, ‘Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 34 (3), 1990, pp. 269–93. Gibert, Stephen P., and William M. Carpenter, (eds), America and Island China: A Documentary History, Lanham Md: University Press of America, 1989. Gittings, John, The World and China, 1922–1972, New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Goh, Evelyn, ‘Nixon, Kissinger, and the ‘Soviet Card’ in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971– 1974’, Diplomatic History, 29 (3), 2005, pp. 475–502. Goh, Evelyn, Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974, From Red Menace to Tacit Ally, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

178

Bibliography

Goh, Evelyn, ‘Meeting the China Challenge: The U.S. in Southeast Asian Regional Security Strategies’, Policy Studies 16, East-West Centre, Washington, 2005, pp. 1–57. Goh, Evelyn, ‘Understanding ‘hedging’ in Asia-Pacific security’, Pacific Forum CSIS, 31 August 2006. Goh, Evelyn, and Rosemary Foot, ‘From Containment to Containment? Understanding US Relations with China since 1949’, in Robert D. Schulzinger (ed.), A Companion to American Foreign Relations, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 255–74. Goldstein, Avery, ‘Great Expectations: Interpreting China’s Arrival’, International Security, 22 (3), 1997–1998, pp. 36–73. Goldstein, Judith, and Robert O. Keohane (eds), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Goldstein, Steven M., ‘Chinese Communist Policy Toward the United States: Opportunities and Constraints, 1944–1950’, in Dorthy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years Chinese–American Relations, 1947–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 235–78. Grasso, June M., Truman’s Two-China Policy, 1948–1950, Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 1987. Gries, Peter J., and Thomas J. Christensen, ‘Correspondence: Power and Resolve in U.S. China Policy’, International Security, 26 (2), 2001, pp. 155–65. Guzzini, Stefano, ‘A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 6 (2), 2000, pp. 147–82. Hale, David, and Lyric Hughes Hale, ‘China Takes Off’, Foreign Affairs, 82 (6), 2003, pp. 36–67. Hansen, Lene, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War, London: Routledge, 2006. Harding, Harry, A Fragile Relationship: US–Chinese Relations since 1972, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1992. Harding, Harry and Yuan Ming, Sino-American Relations, 1945–1955: A joint reassessment of a critical decade, Wilmington: SR Books, 1989. Harris, Owen, ‘A Year of Debating China’, The National Interest, 58, 1999/2000, pp. 141–7. Heng, Yee-Kuang, War as Risk Management, Strategy and Conflict in an Age of Globalised Risks, London: Routledge, 2006. Hickey, Dennis Van Vranken, ‘Continuity and Change: the Administration of George W. Bush and US Policy Toward Taiwan’, Journal of Contemporary China, 13 (40), 2004, pp. 461–78. Hille, Kathrin, ‘Taiwan passes funding for US weapons’, Financial Times, 17 June 2007. Hille, Kathrin, ‘Taipei to snub US and China on UN plan’, Financial Times, 21 June 2007. Hogan, Michael J., and Thomas G. Patterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Holdridge, John H., Crossing the Divide, An Insider’s Account of the Normalization of US–China Relations, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Hollis, Martin, and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Hopf, Ted, ‘The Promise of Constructivism in International Theory’, International Security, 23 (1), 1998, pp. 171–200. Hopf, Ted, Social Construction of International Politics, Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Howarth, David, Discourse, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000.

Bibliography 179 Hunt, Michael H., Ideology and US Foreign Policy, Yale: Yale University Press, 1987. Inayatullah, Naeem, and David L. Blaney, ‘Knowing Encounters: Beyond Parochialism in International Relations Theory’, in Lapid and Kratochwil (eds), Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1996, pp. 65–84. Jepperson, Ronald L., Alexander Wendt and Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security” in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 33–75. Jervis, Robert, Perceptions and Misperceptions in International Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Johnston, Alastair I., Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995. Johnston, Alastair I., ‘Learning Versus Adaptation: Explaining Change in Chinese Arms Control Policy in the 1980s and 1990s’, The China Journal, No. 35, January 1996, pp. 27–62. Johnston, Alastair I., ‘Socialization in International Institutions: The ASEAN Way and International Relations Theory’, in John G. Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno (eds), International Relations Theory and the Asian Pacific, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 107–62. Johnston, Alastair I., ‘Is China a Status Quo Power?” International Security, 27 (4), 2003, pp. 5–56. Johnston, Alistair I., and Robert S. Ross (eds), Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power, New York: Routledge, 1999. Jones, Adrian, ‘Word and Deed: Why a post-poststructural history is needed, and how it might look’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2), 2000, pp. 517–41. Kagan, Robert, ‘Bush’s Straight Talk on China’, Washington Post, 30 April 2001. Katz, Sharman and David Stewart, ‘Hedging China with FTAs” Asia Times, 1 Oct. 2005. Katzenstein, Peter J. (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Katzenstein, Peter J., Robert O. Keohane, and Stephen Krasner, ‘International Organization and the study of World Politics’, International Organization, 52 (4), 1998, pp. 645–85. Kent, Ann, ‘China, International Organization and Regimes: The ILO as a Case Study in Organizational Learning’, Pacific Affairs, 70 (4), 1997, pp. 517–32. Kent, Ann, ‘States Monitoring States: the US, Australia, and China’s Human Rights, 1990– 2001’, Human Rights Quarterly 23 (3), 2001, 583–624. Keohane, Robert, ‘International Institutions: Two Approaches’, International Studies Quarterly, 32 (4), 1988, pp. 379–96. Keohane, Robert O., ‘Ideas part-way down’, in ‘Forum on Social Theory of International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 125–30. Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Power in Transition, 2nd edition, Harper Collins, 1989. Kessler, Glenn, ‘U.S. Cautions Taiwan on Independence’, Washington Post, 22 April 2004. Kessler, Glenn, and Robin Wright, ‘Rice describes plans to spread democracy’, Washington Post, 26 March 2005. Khalilzad, Zalmay, ‘Congage China’, Issue Paper, RAND, Project Air Force, 1999. Khalilzad, Zalmay, ‘Sweet and Sour, Recipe for a New China Policy’, RAND, 2000. (accessed 5 July 2007).

180

Bibliography

Kim, Samuel S., China In and Out of the Changing World Order, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Kim, Samuel S. (ed.), China and the World, Chinese Foreign Policy Faces the New Millennium, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. King, John, ‘Blunt Bush message for Taiwan’, CNN.com, 9 December 2003. (accessed 20 December 2003). Kissinger, Henry, White House Years, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979. Klotz, Audie, ‘Norms Reconstituting Interests: Global Racial Equality and US Sanctions Against South Africa’, International Organization, 49 (3), 1995, pp. 451–78. Klotz, Audie, ‘Can We Speak a Common Constructivist Language?” in Karin M. Fierke and Knut E. Jorgensen (eds), Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation, London: M.E.Sharp, 2001, pp. 223–35. Koehn, Peter H., and Joseph Y.S. Cheng (eds), The Outlook for U.S.–China Relations: Following the 1997–1998 Summits: Chinese and American Perspectives on Security, Trade, and Cultural Exchange, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1999. Krasner, Stephen D., ‘Wars, hotel fires, and plane crashes’, in ‘Forum on Social Theory of International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 131–6. Kratochwil, Friedrich, ‘Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt’s ‘Social Theory of International Politics’ and the Constructivist Challenge’, Millennium, 29 (1), 2000, pp. 73–101. Kratochwil, Friedrich, ‘The Monologue of Science’, International Studies Review, 5 (1), 2003, pp. 124–8. Kratochwil, Friedrich, and John G. Ruggie, ‘International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State’, International Organization, 40 (4), 1986, pp. 753–75. Kristeva Julia, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Kuklick, Bruce, ‘US Intellectual History’, in Ernest R. May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy, Interpreting NSC 68, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993, pp. 156–60. Laclau, Ernesto, New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time, London: Verso, 1990. Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edition, London: Verso, 2001. Laffey, Mark, and Jutta Weldes, ‘Beyond Beliefs: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 3 (2), 1997, pp. 193–237. Lampton, David, Same Bed Different Dreams: Managing U. S.–China Relations, 1989– 2000, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001. Lampton, David M., ‘Small Mercies: China and America after 9/11’, The National Interest, 66 Winter 2001/2002, pp. 106–13. Langdon, Frank, ‘American Northeast Asian Strategy’, Pacific Affairs, 74 (2), 2001, pp. 167–84. Lapid, Yosef, ‘The Third Debate: On the Prospect of International Theory in a Post Positivist Era’, International Studies Quarterly, 33 (3), 1989, pp. 235–54. Lapid, Yosef, ‘Culture’s Ship: Returns and Departures in International Relations Theory’, in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (eds,), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1996, pp. 3–20. Lardy, Nicholas R., China and the World Economy, Institute for International Economics, Washington DC, 1994.

Bibliography 181 Lardy, Nicholas R., China’s Unfinished Economic Revolution, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998. Lardy, Nicholas R., ‘China and the International Financial System’, in Elizabeth Economy and Michael Oksenberg (eds), China Joins the World: Progress and Prospect, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999, pp. 206–30. Lasater, Martin L., The Taiwan Conundrum in U.S. China Policy, Westview Press, 2000. Leffler, Melvyn, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Levine, Steven I., ‘Perceptions and Ideology in Chinese Foreign Policy’, in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh (eds), Chinese Foreign Policy, Theory and Practice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 30–47. Li, Yitan, and Cooper A. Drury, ‘Threatening sanctions when engagement would be more effective: Attaining better human rights in China’, International Studies Perspectives, 5 (4), 2004, pp. 378–94. Lieber, Kier A., and Gerard Alexander ‘Waiting for Balancing. Why the World Is Not Pushing Back’, International Security, 30 (1), 2005, pp. 109–39. Liu Yongtao, ‘Norms, Identity, and Prospects of Sino-American Security Cooperation’, in Peter H. Kohen and Joseph Y.S. Cheng (eds), The Outlook for U.S.–China Relations: Following the 1997–1998 Summits: Chinese and American Perspectives on Security, Trade, and Cultural Exchange, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1999, pp. 127– 38. Lupton, Deborah, Risk, London: Routledge, 1999. Lynch, March, ‘Why Engage? China and the Logic of Communicative Engagement’, European Journal of International Relations, 8 (2), 2002, pp. 187–230. Mackerras, Colin, Pradeep Taneja, and Graham Young, China Since 1978, Reform, Modernisation and ‘Socialism With Chinese Characteristics’, 2nd edition, Melbourne: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. Madsen, Richard, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Mancall, Mark, China at the Centre, 300 Years of Foreign Policy, New York: The Free Press, 1984. Mann, James, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, From Nixon to Clinton, New York: Knopf, 1999. Mao Zedong, ‘The Chinese People Have Stood Up’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol. 5, Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1977. Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte, New York: International, 1963. May, Ernest R. (ed.), American Cold War Strategy, Interpreting NSC 68, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993. McLean, David, ‘American Nationalism, the China Myth, and the Truman Doctrine: The Question of Accommodation with Peking, 1949–1950’, Diplomatic History 10, 1986, pp. 25–42. Mearsheimer, John, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Medeiros, Evan S., ‘Strategic Hedging and the Future of Asia-Pacific Stability’, The Washington Quarterly, 29 (1), 2005–2006, pp. 145–67. Medeiros, Evan S., and Taylor M. Fravel, ‘China’s New Diplomacy’, Foreign Affairs, 82 (6), 2003, pp. 22–35. Mertus, Julie, ‘The New U.S. Human Rights Policy: A Radical Departure’, International Studies Perspective, 4 (4), 2003, pp. 371–84.

182

Bibliography

Milliken, Jennifer, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5 (2), 1999, pp. 225–54. Milliken, Jennifer, The Social Construction of the Korean War: Conflict and its Possibilities, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th edition, New York: Knopf, 1978. Morris, James, ‘Containment or Engagement: America’s Choice’, Pacific Review, 12 (2), 2000, pp. 197–201. Myers, Ramon, Michel C. Oksenberg and David Shambaugh (eds), Making China Policy: Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Nathan, Andrew J., ‘What’s Wrong with American Taiwan Policy’, The Washington Quarterly, 23 (2), 2000, pp. 93–106. Nathan, Andrew J., and Chou Yangsun, Democratizing Transition in Taiwan, Occasional Papers/Reprints Series in Contemporary Asian Studies, 1987. Nathan, Andrew J., and Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, China’s Search For Security, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: ‘The East” in European Identity Formation, Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999. New York Times, China’s More Nuanced Diplomacy, editorial, 14 October 2003. Ninkovich, Frank, ‘No Post-Mortems for Postmodernism, Please’, Diplomatic History 22 (3), 1998, pp. 451–66. Ninkovich, Frank, The Wilsonian Century, U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ninkovich, Frank, ‘Feature Review, Where Have All the Realist Gone?” Diplomatic History, 26 (1), 2002, pp. 137–42. Nixon, Richard, ‘Asia After Vietnam’, Foreign Affairs 46 (1), 1967, pp. 111–25. Nixon, Richard, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1978. Nocera, Joseph, ‘The Quantitative, Data-Based, Risk-Massaging Road to Riches’, New York Times Magazine, 5 June 2005. O’Hanlon, Michael, ‘A Need For Ambiguity’, New York Times, 27 April 2001. Onuf, Nicholas, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations, University of South Carolina Press, 1989. Pan, Chengxin, ‘The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics’, Alternatives, 29, 2004, pp. 305–31. Pan, Phillip P., ‘Interview with Chen Shui-bian’, Washington Post, 29 March 2004. Pan, Philip. P., ‘Chinese Premier Pledges to Hold on to Taiwan’, Washington Post, 6 March 2005. Pan, Phillip P., ‘China Puts Threat to Taiwan Into Law’, Washington Post, 14 March 2005. Pape, Robert A., ‘Soft Balancing Against the United States’, International Security 30 (1), 2005, pp. 7–45. Paul, T.V., ‘Introduction: The Enduring Axioms of Balance of Power Theory and Their Contemporary Relevance’, in Paul, T.V., James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortman (eds), Balance of Power, Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 1–25. Paul, T.V., James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortman (eds), Balance of Power, Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Bibliography 183 Perlez, Jane, ‘Asian Leaders Find China a More Cordial Neighbour’, New York Times, 18 October 2003, Peterson, Andrew, ‘Dangerous Games Across the Taiwan Strait’, The Washington Quarterly 27 (2), 2004, pp. 23–41. Pilling, David, ‘Issue of Taiwan raises stakes between Tokyo and Beijing’, Financial Times, 25 February 2005. Pollack, Jonathan D., ‘The Opening to America, 1968–1982’, in John King Fairbank and Roderick MacFarquar (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 402–72. Pollack, Jonathan D., ‘China and the United States Post- 9/11’, Orbis, 47 (4), 2003, pp. 617–27. Pollack, Jonathan D., ‘The United States and Asia in 2003: All Quiet on the Eastern Front?” Asian Survey, 44 (1), 2004, pp. 1–13. Pomfret, John, ‘Taiwan’s Chen Backs Vote on Independence’, Washington Post, 4 August 2002. Price, Richard, ‘Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines’, International Organization, 52 (3), 1998, pp. 613–44. Price, Richard, and Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Dangerous Liaisons? Critical International Theory and Constructivism’, European Journal of International Relations, 4 (3), 1998, pp. 259–94. Pruessen, Ronald W., ‘Over the Volcano: The United States and the Taiwan Strait Crisis, 1954–1955” in Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin (eds), Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.–China Diplomacy, 1954–1973, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 77–105. Pye, Lucian W., The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study of the Authority Crisis in Political Development, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. Rasmussen, Mikkel Vedby, ‘Reflexive Security: NATO and International Risk Society’, Millennium 30 (2), 2001, pp. 285–309. Rasmussen, Mikkel Vedby, The Risk Society at War, Technology and Strategy in the TwentyFirst Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Reischauer, Edwin O., ‘Transpacific relations’, in Kermit Gordon (ed.), Agenda for the Nation, Washington: Brookings Institution, 1968, pp. 421–4. Reus-Smit, Christian, ‘Constructivism’, in Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater with Richard Devetak, Matthew Patterson and Jacqui True (eds), Theories of International Relations, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, pp. 209–31. Rigger, Shelly, ‘The Unfinished Business of Taiwan’s Democratization’, in Tucker (ed.), Dangerous Strait, The U.S.–Taiwan–China Crisis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 16–43. Romberg, Alan D., Rein In at the Brink of the Precipice, American Policy Toward Taiwan and US–PRC Relations, Washington: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2003. Rosenberg, Emily S., ‘US Cultural History’, in Ernest R. May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy, Interpreting NSC 68, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993, pp. 160–4. Ross, Robert S., Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969–1989, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Ross, Robert S., ‘Engagement in US China Policy’, in Alastair I. Johnston and Robert S. Ross (eds), Engaging China, The Management of a Rising Power, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 176–206.

184

Bibliography

Ross, Robert S., ‘The Bush Administration: The Origins of Engagement’, in Ramon H. Meyers, Michael C. Oksenberg, and David Shambaugh (eds), Making China Policy, Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 21–44. Ross, Robert S., ‘Navigating the Taiwan Strait: Deterrence, Escalation Dominance, and U.S.–China relations’, International Security 27 (2), Fall 2002, pp. 48–85. Ross, Robert S., ‘Bipolarity and Balancing in East Asia’, in T.V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortman (eds), Balance of Power, Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 267–304. Ross, Robert S., ‘Comparative Deterrence: The Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula’, in Alastair I. Johnston and Robert S. Ross (eds), New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 13–49. Roy, Denny, ‘Rising China and U.S. Interests: Inevitable vs. Contingent Hazard’, Orbis, 47 (1), 2003, pp. 125–34. Roy, Denny, Taiwan: A Political History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Rozman, Gilbert, ‘China’s Quest for Great Power Identity’, Orbis, 43 (3), 1999, pp. 383– 402. Rudolf, Peter, ‘China’s Rise and the United States: Perception and Strategy’, in Gudrun Wacker (ed.), China’s Rise: The Return of Geopolitics? Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin, February 2006, pp. 61–7. Ruggie, John G., ‘What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge’. International Organization, 52 (4) 1998, pp. 855–85. Ruggie, John G., Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization, London: Routledge, 1998. Schweller, Randall L., ‘Managing the Rise of Great Powers: History and Theory” in Alistair I. Johnston and Robert S. Ross (eds), Engaging China, The Management of an Emerging Power, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 1–31. Searle, John R., The Construction of Social Reality, New York: Free Press, 1995. Sellars, Kirsten, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Sutton Publishing, 2002. Shambaugh, David, Beautiful Imperialist, China Perceives America, 1972–1990, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Shambaugh, David, ‘Patterns of Interaction in Sino-American Relations’, in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh (eds), Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 197–224. Shambaugh, David, ‘Containment or Engagement of China? Calculating Beijing’s Responses’, International Security, 21 (2), 1996, pp. 180–209. Shambaugh, David, ‘China or America: Which is the Revisionist Power?” Survival, 43 (3), 2001, pp. 25–30. Shambaugh, David and Karl F. Inderfurth, YaleGlobal, 11 April 2007. Shapiro, Michael, Language and Political Understanding: The Politics of Discursive Practices, New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1981. Shapiro, Michael, The Politics of Representation – Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Political Analysis, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Shaplen, Jason T., and Laney James, ‘China Trades Its Way to Power’, New York Times, 12 July 2004. Sheng, Michael, ‘The Triumph of Internationalism; CCP–Moscow Relations before 1949’, Diplomatic History, 21 (1), 1997, pp. 95–104. Singer, John D., ‘The Level of Analysis Problem in International Relations”, in James N. Rosenau (ed.), International Politics and Foreign Policy, New York: Free Press, 1986.

Bibliography 185 Smith, Steve, ‘Positivism and Beyond’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 11–44. Smith, Steve, ‘Wendt’s world’, in ‘Forum on Social Theory of International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 151–63. Smith, Steve, ‘Reflectivist and Constructivist Approaches to International Theory” in Smith (ed.) The Globalization of World Politics: an Introduction to International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 224–48. Sooran, Chand, ‘What is hedging? Why do companies hedge?” Victory Risk Management Consulting (accessed 5 July 2007). Stokes, Mark A., and Carlisle Barracks, China’s Strategic Modernization: Implications for the United States, US Army Strategic Studies Institute, 1999. Suettinger, Robert L., Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S.–China Relations, 1989– 2000, Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2003. Sutter, Robert, ‘The Congress: Personal, Partisan, Political’, in Ramon H. Myers, Michael C. Oksenberg, and David Shambaugh (eds), Making China Policy, Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 79–111. Sutter, Robert, ‘Bush Administration Policy Toward Beijing and Taipei’, Journal of Contemporary China, 12 (36), August 2003, pp. 477–92. Sutter, Robert, ‘China’s Rise: Implications for US Leadership in Asia’, Policy Studies 21, East-West Center, Washington, 2006, pp. 1–77. Sutter, Robert, ‘Why Rising China Can’t Dominate Asia’, Commentary, Glocom Platform, 11 September 2006. Tannenwald Nina, ‘The Nuclear Taboo: The US and the Normative Basis of Nuclear NonUse’, International Organization, 53 (3), 1999, pp. 433–68. The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington DC, 2002. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Radio Address of the President to the Nation, Washington DC, 16 February 2002. (accessed 17 May 2005). The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington DC, 2006. Tkacik, Jr., John J., ‘Changing America’s China Policy’, Asian Wall Street Journal, 16 July 2002. Tkacik, Jr., John J., ‘Hedging Against China’, Backgrounder, Heritage Foundation, no. 1925, 17 April 2006. Tkacik, Jr., John J., ‘Panda Hedging: Pentagon Urges New Strategy for China’, Web Memo, Heritage Foundation, no. 1093, 24 May 2006. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. Torfing, Jacob, New Theories of Discourses, Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Torfing, Jacob, ‘Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges’, in David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds), Discourse Theory in European Politics, Identity, Policy and Governance, London: Palgrave, 2005, pp. 1–32. Truman, Harry S., Memoirs, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955. Tucker, Nancy B., Patterns in the Dust, Chinese–American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

186

Bibliography

Tucker, Nancy B., Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, New York: Twayne, 1994. Tucker, Nancy B., ‘Continuing Controversies in the Literature on US–China Relations since 1945’, in Warren I. Cohen (ed.), Pacific Passage: The Study of American–East Asian Relations on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 213–46. Tucker, Nancy B., China Confidential: American Diplomats and Sino-American Relations, 1945–1996, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Tucker, Nancy B., ‘America First’, China in the American Political Imagination (Prepublication Version), Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, 10 December 2002. Tucker, Nancy B., ‘If Taiwan Chooses Unification, Should the United States Care?” The Washington Quarterly, 25 (3), 2002, pp. 15–28. Tucker, Nancy B., ‘Strategic Ambiguity or Strategic Clarity?” in Nancy B. Tucker (ed.), Dangerous Strait, The U.S.–Taiwan–China Crisis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 186–211. Tunsjø, Øystein, ‘The Constructive Mediator? China, the US and the Six Party Talks’, Aberystwyth Journal of World Affairs, 2, 2004, pp. 58–66. Tyler, Patrick, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History, New York: Century Foundation, 1999. US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, June 2004. US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on China as an Emerging Regional and Technology Power: Implications for US Economic and Security Interests, 108th Congress, 12–13 February 2004. US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Report to Congress, Washington DC, November 2005. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2003. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2005. US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, Washington DC, 6 February 2006. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, July 2006. US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, 2007. US Department of State, Press Statement by Adam Ereli, Deputy Spokesman, U.S. Reiterates Support for Taiwan Democracy, One-China Policy, Washington DC, 18 October 2003. (accessed 14 April 2005). US Department of State, Press Statement by Sean McCormack, Taiwan – Chen Shui-Bian’s Statement on Cross-Strait Issues, Washington DC, 8 June 2006. (accessed 20 June 2006). US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Markup On: H. Con. Res. 292 (Congratulating President-elect Chen Shui-bian and Vice President-elect Annett Lu of Taiwan and reaffirming United States policy toward Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China), Serial No. 106123, March 2000.

Bibliography 187 US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on The Taiwan Relations Act: The Next Twenty-Five Years, Serial No. 108-107, April 2004. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on China’s Anti-Secession Law and Developments Across the Taiwan Strait, Serial No. 109-30, April 2005. US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Hearing on East Asia in Transition: Opportunities and Challenges for the United States, statement by Christopher R. Hill, 8 March 2006 US Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Session, Review of the World Situation, 10 January 1950. US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Far Eastern and Pacific Affairs, Hearing on Where are U.S.–China Relations Headed? S. Hrg. 107-45, May 2001. US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Where Are U.S. –China Relations Headed? 107 Congress, First Session, 1 May 2001. US Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearing on Examining the Effects and Consequences of an Emerging China, S. Hrg. 108-58, March 2003. USINFO, Bush endorses observer status for Taiwan at World Health Assembly, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 14 June 2004, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State. (accessed 10 January 2006). USINFO, U.S.–China relationship comprehensive and complex, Powell says, Press Briefing, China World Hotel, US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, 25 October 2004, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State. (accessed 14 April 2004). USINFO, One China policy stabilizes Asia-Pacific region, Powell says, Interview with Anthony Yuen of Phoenix TV, China World Hotel, US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, 25 October 2004, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State. (accessed 14 April 2005). USINFO, Bush, Hu continue U.S.–China dialogue at United Nations, Remarks by President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao in Photo Opportunity, The White House Office of the Press Secretary, 13 September 2005, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State. (accessed 10 January 2006). USINFO, U.S. reiterates firm commitment to one-China policy, US Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, Washington DC, 10 November 2005, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State. (accessed 10 January 2006). USINFO, Bush, Chinese President discuss trade issues at Beijing meeting other topics include religious freedom, Taiwan, proliferation concerns, by Peggy B. Hu, Washington File Staff Writer, 20 November 2005, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State. (accessed 10 January 2006). USINFO, China overtakes U.S. as largest investment recipient, OECD says, distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State. (accessed 10 January 2006).

188

Bibliography

van Munster, Rens, ‘Logics of Security: The Copenhagen School, Risk Management and the War on Terror’, Political Science Publications 10, University of Southern Denmark, 2005, pp. 1–14. Vaughan-Williams, Nick, ‘International Relations and the ‘Problem of History,’” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34 (1), 2005, pp. 115–36. Wæver, Ole, ‘The rise and fall of the inter-paradigm debate’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 148–85. Wæver, Ole, ‘European Integration and Security: Analysing French and German Discourses on State, Nation and Europe’, in David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds), Discourse Theory In European Politics, Identity, Policy and Governance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 33–68. Walker, Rob B.J., Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Waltz, Kenneth, Man, the State and War, New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. Waltz, Kenneth N., Theories of International Politics, New York: Random House, 1979. Waltz, Kenneth N., ‘Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics’, in Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 322–45. Wang, Edward Q., ‘Images, Perceptions and Foreign Policy: New Directions in the Study of Sino-American Relations’, Journal of Contemporary China, 6 (15), 1997, pp. 389– 402. Ward, Adam, ‘China and America: Trouble Ahead?” Survival, 45 (3), 2003, pp. 35–56. Ward, Michael D., and Kristian S. Gleditsch, ‘Democratizing for Peace’, American Political Science Review, 92 (1), 1998, pp. 51–62. Weldes, Jutta, Constructing National Interest, The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall (eds), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall, ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’, in Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall (eds), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp. 1–33. Wen, Jiabao, ‘Interview with Wen Jiabao’, The Washington Post, 21 November 2003. Wendt, Alexander, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization, 41 (3), 1987, pp. 335–70. Wendt, Alexander, ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It’, International Organization, 46 (2), 1992, pp. 335–70. Wendt, Alexander, ‘Collective Identity Formation and the International State’, American Political Science Review, 88 (2), 1994, pp. 384–96. Wendt, Alexander, ‘Constructing International Politics’, International Security, 20 (1), 1995, pp. 71–81. Wendt, Alexander, ‘Identity and Structural Change in International Politics’, in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (eds,) The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1996, pp. 47–64. Wendt, Alexander, ‘On Constitution and Causation in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 24 (5), 1998, pp. 101–17.

Bibliography 189 Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Wendt, Alexander ‘On the Via Media: a Response to the Critics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 165–80. Westad, Odd Arne, ‘Losses, Chances, and Myths: The United States and the Creation of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1950’, Diplomatic History 21 (1), 1997, pp. 105–15. Wheeler, Nicholas, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wodak, Ruth, Disorders of Discourse, London: Longman, 1996. Wu, Rwei-Ren, ‘Toward a Pragmatic Nationalism: Democratization and Taiwan’s Passive Revolution’, in Stéphane Corcuff (ed.), Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan, New York: M.E.Sharp, 2002, pp. 196–219. Xiang, Lanxin, ‘Washington’s Misguided Policy’, Survival, 43 (3), 2001, pp. 7–23. Yahuda, Michael, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 1945–1995, London: Routledge, 1996. Yahuda, Michael, ‘China’s Foreign Relations: The Long March, Future Uncertain’, China Quarterly, 159, September 1999, pp. 650–9. Yahuda, Michael, ‘Chinese Dilemmas in Thinking About Regional Security Architecture’, The Pacific Review, 16 (2), 2003, pp. 189–206. Yardley, Jim, ‘China Denies ‘Taiwan’ Law is a ‘War Bill’’, New York Times, 14 March 2005. Zehfuss, Maja, Constructivism in International Relations: the Politics of Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Zissis, Carin, ‘Crafting a U.S. Policy on Asia’, Council on Foreign Relations, 10 April 2007. Zoellick, Robert B., ‘Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility’, speech at the National Committee on US–China Relations, New York, 21 September 2005.

Index

A Fragile Relationship (Harding) 3 Acheson, Dean 20, 22, 127; China strategy 23–7; decision to intervene in Korea 40–1; ‘determined’ discourse 32–5, 40–1, 47; protection of freedom 44; ‘undetermined’ discourse 36–8 Adler, Emmanuel 14 Agnew, Spiro 69 Albert, Mathias 117, 118 American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) 79 analytical principles 11 Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 105 anti-secession law 1 appeasement 45–6 archive materials 16–18 articulations 14–15, 60 ASEAN Plus Three 103 ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) 103 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC) 103 assumptions, theoretical and methodological 7–16 August Communiqué 79 back channels 57 Baker, Peter 93 balance of power logic 4 balance of power theory 112 balancing 112 bandwagoning 112, 113 Barbour, Walworth 41 Beautiful Imperialist, China perceives America, 1972–1990 (Shambaugh) 4 Beck, Ulrich 115, 117, 118 Betts, Richard K. 104 Bevin, Ernest 44, 48 binary constructions, of meaning 44 binary framework 39 binary oppositions 89–91, 96, 106, 116, 127 bipartisanship 28 Blair House 41 Blum, Robert M. 25, 26, 31 Bogdan, Corneliu 57–8

Borg, Dorothy 28 Bradley, General Omar 22, 26 Brealey, Richard A. 111 Brooks, Stephen G. 114 Brown, Sherrod 89 Brownback, Sam 91–2 Burr, William 17 Burton, Dan 92, 99 Bush, George H. 69, 81 Bush, George W. 76, 127 Bush, Richard 97 Cairo Declaration 4, 34, 36 Campbell, David 80, 88, 125 Ceausescu, Nicolae 57 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 29, 36 Chabot, Steve 95 Chamberlain, Sharon 70 Chen Shui-bian 83, 84–5 Cheney, Dick 94 Chiang Kai-Shek 4–5, 85, 99 China 66, see also People’s Republic of China (PRC) competing discourses 61–8; diplomacy 86, 103; diplomatic relations with US 79, 82; as distinct from other Communist powers 67; economic interdependence 103, 106; international status 99; international trade 86; investment in 86; as Middle Kingdom 104; military expenditure 104–5; modernisation 85–6; relations with Soviet Union 33, 40, 41; role in world affairs 85–7; threat of force against Taiwan 105; trade relationship with US 105; as transgressive 64; US indebtedness 102; US praise for 64; US representation 78; view of Taiwan 1; view of US intervention 47 China and the United States: From Hostility to Engagement, 1960–1998 17 Chinese Communist Party 24 Christensen, Thomas J. 28, 29, 104, 119 Clinton, Bill 81, 102 Cohen, Roberta 28, 79 Cohen–Tucker thesis 28

Index commitments, as basis of action 43 Communism: attributes 42; hostility 43–4; polycentrism 67; representations by US 65 ‘congagement’ 107–9 Congress, role in US-China policy 91–5 Congressional Research Service (CRS) 94 Congressional Taiwan Caucasus (CTC) 94 constructivist perspective 1, 5–6; in international relations 8, 124; ontology and epistemology 9–10; reconstruction 9; variants 9 containment discourse 106 containment/engagement debate 101–7, 115–16 Coordination Council for North American Affairs 79 Copenhagen School 113 Costigliola, Frank 7, 89 Craner, Lorne W. 81 critical constructivism 2–3, 7, 23, 120–1, 122–3; as approach to study of US foreign policy 7–16 critical scholarship 121 Cumings, Bruce 29 de Toqueville, Alexis 84 Dean, Robert 73–4 defence spending, Taiwan 95 democracy, as opposite of authoritarianism 90 Democracy in America (de Toqueville) 84 Democratic Progressive Party 84 Deng Xiaoping 85–6 Derrida, Jacques 89 ‘determined’ discourse 21, 22–3, 32–5, 40–5, 49, 53, 127, 128 deterrence theory 119 Dewey, Thomas E. 44 diplomacy, China 86 discourse 12, 13 discourse analysis 12, 13; approach to documents 18 discourse theory 8, 13 discourses: China 61–8; competing 49, 60, 61–8, 126, 128; differing 13, 21, 22; overlapping 128; revisionist 64–5; US Taiwan policy 31–40 discursive 12 discursive representations 1–2 discursive space 59 Doty, Roxanne L. 14, 15, 21, 31, 47–8, 53, 59, 65, 68, 74, 90, 125 Dow, James 111 Dulles, John F. 27, 43 Dusk, Dean 27 Eagleburger, Lawrence 81 economic interdependence 103 Edgar, Donald, D. 24, 25 Edkins, Jenny 13 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 54 engagement/containment debate 101–7, 115–16 engagement, plus hedging 118

191

Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (Johnston and Ross) 102 epistemology 9 European Recovery Program 27 Ferguson, Neill 102 Fierke, Karin 52 Finkelstein David M. 30 five principles 51 Foot, Rosemary 3, 31, 82, 110 Foreign Affairs 54–5 Foreign Relations of the United States 17 Formosa Resolution 54 Foucault, Michel 115, 118 Fravel, Taylor M. 103 freedom 43–4 Freeman, Chas. W. 96 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 17 Gaddis, John L. 4, 14, 29, 30 General Order no. 1 36, 37 Giddens, Anthony 115, 117 Goh, Evelyn 7, 58–9, 61, 74, 109–10, 114 Goldstein, Steven M. 28–9 good and evil 90 governmentality 118 Grasso, June 29 Guzzini, Stefano 9 Hainan Islands 29 Haraway, Donna 16 Harding, Harry 3, 112 Harriman, Averell 43 hedge funds 111 hedging 107–15; as active strategy 109–10; and engagement 109; as insurance 110–11; and risk strategies 116–18; as strategic concept 110; as visible and personal 112 hegemony 106 Heinrichs, Waldo 28 Hill, Christopher R. 95, 96 history, and theory 120–5 history, appeal to 39 Hopf, Ted 10, 17 House of Representatives 17 ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions 121–2 ‘how possible’ questions 6–7, 21, 122 Howarth, Peter 12 human rights 78, 80–2 Hunt, Michael H. 4 Hyde, Henry J. 92 identities: construction 31, 124; construction through predicates 44; contingent 116; and credibility 97–8; as derivation of interests 20–1, 31, 73; and foreign policy 48; formation 10; and neutralisation of Taiwan strait 40–8; re-representation 68; shaping 2–3; and state’s vision 52; Taiwanese national 78, 84, 87–93; threatened 123;

192

Index

United States 2, 87; as unstable 88; US, post-Cold War 6, 96–7, 99, 127 ideology 4 Ideology and US Foreign Policy (Hunt) 4 Ignatieff, Michael 81 implied narrative 39 independent discourse 53 interests, construction 124 Interim Aid 27 international relations (IR) theory: constructivist perspective 8; constructivist theory 2; and history 120–5; systemic theory 10 international trade, China 86 interpellation 15 investment, in China 86 Japanese Peace Treaty 34–5, 36, 54 Johnson, Louis 25 Johnston, Alistair Iain 102 Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) 23–7, 41 Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the US and the PRC 77 Jones, Alfred W. 111 Kagan, Robert 92 Katzenstein, Peter J. 9 Kelly, James A. 77, 128 Kennan, George 25, 27, 43, 46 Kennedy, John F. 54 Keohane, Robert 9 Kessler, Glenn 93 Khalilzad, Zalmay 107 Khan, Yahya 57 Kim, Samuel 105 Kirk, Alan G. 41 Kissinger, Henry 5, 122, 127; policy memorandum to Agnew 69; policy review 55; view of Communism 67; view of Nixon’s attitude to China 56; visit to Beijing, 1971 52, 57–8, 68 Knowland, William F. 34 knowledge, social construction 124 Korean War 5, 18, 20, 40–1, 45, 123 Krasner, Stephen 9 Kristol, William 92, 93 Kuklick, Bruce 39–40 Kuomintang (KMT) 4–5, 22, 82–3, 85, 99 Laclau, Ernesto 14 Lampton, David 102 Lantos, Tom 91, 93 legitimation: Taiwanese democracy 84; US Taiwan policy 46–7 linguistics 13 ‘lost chance’ thesis 28 Lupton, Deborah 118 Lynch, March 7 MacArthur, General Douglas 27, 36

Madsen, Richard 4 Mao Zedong 57–8 ‘maxi-mini approach’ 105 McCarthyism 27 McConaughy, Walter 25 meaning 20–1; assigned by actors 78; partial fixation 60; renegotiation 44; shared 53 Mearsheimer, John 105–6 Medeiros, Evan S. 103, 112, 114–15 Menendez, Robert 93 metatheory 8 methodological assumptions 7–16 middle ground 107–9 Middle Kingdom 104 Military Assistance Act 25 Military Assistance Program 27 military occupation 37 Milliken, Jennifer 14 Moriarty, James 96 Mouffe, Chantal 14 Mutual Defense Treaty 72, 79 ‘myth of national humiliation’ 104 Napolitano, Grace F. 77 Nathan, Andrew J. 97 National Archives and Records Administration 17 National Archives, Maryland 17 national interest, defining 97 National Press Club, Acheson’s speech 33 National Security Archive 17 National Security Council (NSC) 24, 25 National Security Strategy 82, 93, 109 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 106 62, 63, 73 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 14 55 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 80 65 naturalisation 15 Negotiating Cooperation (Ross) 59 neorealism 52 neutralisation of Taiwan strait 20–1, 22, 40–8, 49–50 Ninkovich, Frank 5, 88, 121, 123 Nixon Doctrine 65–6 Nixon, Richard 5, 18–19, 122, 126–7; attitude to China 54–5; changing relationship with China 54–7; domestic considerations 72; Inaugural Address 56, 68; interaction with Taiwan 52; ‘red menace’ discourse unacceptable 74; visit to Beijing, 1972 51, 54 normative constructionism 9–10 non-linguistic analysis 68 norms 10 NSC 48 25, 27, 33, 37 NSC 68 14, 39 NSC 7 39

Index one-China principle 2, 19, 76–8, 83, 84, 87, 127; consolidation 94–100; predicaments and challenges 91–3; one-way billiard ball model 114; ontology 9 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 86 otherness 89–91, 127 Pan, Phillip P. 99 parent–child analogy 44–5 Paul, T.V. 113–14 People’s Republic of China (PRC) see also China; admitted to UN 5; changing relationship with US 70–1; establishment 4 Persram, Nalini 8–9 polling data 83–4 positivism 7 poststructuralism 124–5 postwar security, discursive strategies 39–40 Potsdam Proclamation 34, 36 Powell, Colin 94, 96 predicates 60, 126; and construction of identity 44; construction of social reality 42–4 predication 14 presupposition(s) 14, 15, 44, 60 public statements 14 Quadrennial Defence Review Report (QDR) 98, 108–9 questions: ‘how’ and ‘why’ 121–2; ‘how possible’ 122; ‘what matters more’ 53; ‘why’ and ‘how possible’ 6–7, 21; ‘why’ questions 53 rapprochement 22, 54–9, 79–87 Rasmussen, Mikel Vedby 115, 116, 117, 118 rationalism 5–6, 7, 18, 121, 122 reality: creation 59; as socially constructed 11–12 realpolitik 58–9 Red Army 24 ‘red menace’ discourse 21, 22–3, 38–40, 45, 49, 53, 61, 74, 126–7, 128 reflexivity 121 representations 2–3, 68 research questions 6 responsibility, sharing 65–6 reunification 86–7 rhetoric 13–14 Rice, Condoleezza 81 rising powers 104, 115–19 risk management 111, 115–19 risks 116–18 Rodman, Peter W. 92, 97 Rogers, William 55, 57, 64, 69 Rohrabacher, Dana 92 Rosenberg, Emily 39–40 Ross, Robert 58, 59, 102, 119 Rudolf, Peter 107 Ruggie, John G. 9

193

scepticism 7 Schmitt, Carl 115–16 Schweller, Randall 108, 112–13, 114, 116 Scowcroft, Brent 81 securitisation theory 113 Sellars, Kirsten 80 September 11, 2001 81 Shambaugh, David 3–4 Shanghai Communiqué 77, 79 Shanghai Cooperation Organization 103 Shapiro, Michael 59 Shelton, Henry H. 98 Sheng, Michael 29 Sino-Soviet war 58–9 Smith, Margaret Chase 34 Smith, Steve 8, 10 social facts 121 Social Theory of International Politics 10 soft balancing 112, 113–14 Sooran, Chand 111 Souers, Sidney 37 source materials 16–18 South China Sea, code of conduct 103 sovereignty 84, 89, 127 Soviet Union: collapse 80; invasion of Afghanistan 79; relations with China 33, 41; as threat 32, 38–9, 41 State Department Records 17 State Department, relations with China 57 states, as unitary actors 10–11 status, constructing 53 Stewart, David 111 Stoessel, Walter J., Jr 57 strategic ambiguity 76 strategic discourse 109 strategy, US foreign policy 4 Strong, Robert C. 25 structural idealism 8 subject positioning 14, 15 survey research 83–4 Sutter, Robert 91, 109, 114 systemic constructionism 9–10 Taipei, declared capital of ROC 5 Taiwan: attitude to Sino-US diplomatic relations 82; changing discursive representations 53–4; competing discourses 60; defence spending 95; defined within Cold war 61; democratisation 76, 88; discursive representations of 1–2; domestic politics 85; international status 99; justification for intervention 42; links with US prestige 61; principled approach 71; problem of identity 87–93; representations by US 2–3, 6; sovereignty 83–4; status 126; threat of force from China 105; transition to democracy 1, 82–5; ‘undetermined’ status 36, 54, 61–2; US economic assistance 54; US foreign policy options 36–7 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) 79

194

Index

Taiwan Strait: fighting 5; US intervention 20–1, 22, 40–8, 49–50 Taiwanisation 82–3 terrorism 94 The Kissinger Transcripts, The Top Secret talks with Beijing and Moscow 17 The Practice of Power (Foot) 3 The Risk Society at War (Rasmussen) 115 The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Mearsheimer) 105–6 theoretical assumptions 7–16 theory, and history 120–5 Third Debate 8 threats 116 Tiananmen Square massacre 79 Tkacik, John J., Jr. 109–10 Truman, Harry S. 127; conversations with Attlee 30; exchange with Dewey 44; Inaugural Address 38; intervention in Taiwan Strait 41; reasons for intervention 22; US Taiwan policy 47 Truman Presidential Library 17 Tucker, Nancy B. 4, 26–7, 28, 29, 30–1, 59, 76, 82, 88, 89 ‘undetermined’ discourse 21, 22–3, 36–8, 45, 46, 49, 53, 61–2, 63, 73, 127, 128 United Kingdom, attitude to US intervention in Taiwan 48 United Nations (UN): admission of PRC 5; change in voting behaviour 69–70 United States: altruism 42–3; battle with Communism 61; changing relationship with China 62–8; changing representation of China 70–1; characterisation of China 112; commitment to peace 66; commitment to Taiwan 88–9; commitments as basis of action 43; conflicting principles 89; credibility 97–8; debt to China 102; definition of Soviet Union 43; diplomatic relations with China 79, 82; identity 2; leadership role 45; middle ground policy 107–9; military interests in Taiwan 71; neutralisation of Taiwan strait 20–1, 22, 40–8, 49–50; policy view of Taiwan 1; post-Cold War identity 6, 96–7, 99, 127; proeoccupation with Communist aggression 46; representations of Taiwan 2–3, 6;

responsibility to respond to Communist aggression 45; role in the world 65, 98; Taiwan policy 1949–50 23–7; Taiwan policy 1949–50, evaluation by scholars 28–31; trade relationship with China 105; unique position and identity 63 US-China Economic and Security Review Commission 18, 92 US–China relations, as crucial 1 US Department of Defense 17 US foreign policy, strategy 4 US-ROC Mutual Defense Treaty 54 US Senate 17 US Taiwan policy; complexity 127; contradictions 96–9; ‘determined’ discourse 32–5, 49; discourses 31–40; evaluation by scholars 28–31; policy 1949–50 36–8; practice 125–8; ‘red menace’ discourse 38–40, 45, 49; redefinition 122; ‘undetermined’ discourse 36–8, 45, 46, 49–50 Vandenburg, Arthur 28, 37–8 via media (Wendt) 8 Vietnam 79 Vietnam War 54 Wæver, Ole 74 War as Risk Management (Yee-Kuang) 115 Weldes, Jutta 11–12, 14–15, 42, 47, 52, 98 Wen Jiabao 76–7, 105 Wendt, Alexander 8–11, 123, 124 Westad, Odd Arne 29 ‘what matters more’ question 53 White House 17 White House Years (Kissinger) 58 ‘why’ questions 6–7, 21, 53 Wohlforth, William C. 114 Wu Rwei-Ren 83 Yahuda, Michael 105 Yang Shangkun 85 Yee-Kuang Heng 115, 116 Zehfuss, Maja 9 Zhao Ziyang 85 Zhou Enlai 57–8, 71 Zoellick, Robert B. 108