Even as China’s global influence increases, it is bedeviled to an unusual degree for a major power by what political scientists call “problems of stateness.” In Tibet and Xinjiang—vast inland territories in the west and northwest that account for almost one-third of the PRC’s area—non-Han ethnic groups have long resisted Beijing’s control. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, smaller but strategic territories off the southern coast, the residents belong to the Han ethnic group but have separate political systems and in Taiwan’s case, for many residents, a separate national identity. In contrast to the other security problems in the First Ring, resistance to Beijing’s rule in these four territories presents a threat not only to the regime (because loss of these lands might trigger popular opposition to the leaders who let it happen), but also to the state itself, as defined by its current boundaries and its multiethnic conception of citizenship.
Not all of China’s territory has been nonnegotiable. Over the years, Beijing has yielded 1.3 million square miles of claims to North Korea, Laos, Burma, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and other states in order to settle territorial disputes.1 But Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are different. Each is populated by citizens whom the Chinese government and the states with whom it has diplomatic relations define as Chinese citizens, even if some of them do not accept that identity. No other country either claims these territories or says they should be independent. The territories are economically valuable. And from a strategic point of view, they all are crucial to China’s security. Any one of them that escaped Chinese control might serve as a base for an outside power to threaten China. They are the key pieces of a geographically deep, politically unstable hinterland that Beijing must control in order to assure the security of the Han heartland. Resistance to Chinese rule in these four territories is the legacy of two kinds of imperialism, one committed by China and one against it. First, the entity now known as China is the product of centuries of demographic and political expansion that reached something close to its current shape in the latter part of the last dynasty, the Qing, at the turn of the nineteenth century. As in other traditional empires, this process brought many different ethnic groups under various more or less direct forms of rule. In 1912, China changed from an empire to a nation-state, although a weak one. Its first president, Sun Yat-sen, declared the Republic of China to be a multiethnic state that included a main population group, which he labeled the “Han,” and four main ethnic minorities, which he identified as the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Hui (the latter an inclusive term for Chinese Muslims that is today used more narrowly for a specific subgroup of Muslims). Mao Zedong’s regime retained Sun’s concept of a multiethnic state but expanded the list of recognized national minorities to fifty-five. Among those that were added were the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.
In this modern concept of citizenship, Chinese are considered to have diverse ethnic identities along with an overarching loyalty to the state. The leaders borrowed from theories of race and nation that were then prevalent in the West—in Mao’s case, particularly from Stalin—to argue that ethnic identities are backward, often connected with religious superstitions, and will be dissolved by modernization, leaving civic identity victorious.
Over time, this theory has succeeded to some extent with many of China’s minorities—those that are assimilated, isolated, or small. The country’s largest officially designated minority are the Zhuang—actually a congeries of previously existing cultural groups—who live mostly in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region bordering on Vietnam and the Tonkin Gulf. They are linguistically and often culturally assimilated and generally accept Chinese civic identity.2 The Koreans in the Northeast, the Dai in Yunnan Province near Thailand, and some other groups appear to resent Chinese rule but are too small to present any threat to it. Ethnic minority citizens who have moved to the cities are often assimilated and content with Chinese rule.
There is greater dissatisfaction with Chinese rule in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, a grassland region along the northern border that used to be inhabited mainly by Mongols. Starting in the 1950s, an influx of Han settlers reduced the Mongol proportion of the population to what is now less than 20 percent. During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the regime violently suppressed expressions of local identity. In the reform era, modernization has damaged the environment and undermined the Mongolians’ traditional way of life, leading to occasional outbreaks of protest. Chinese Mongols might expect some support from fellow ethnics across the border in Mongolia, a country that has been independent since 1924 and democratic since 1990, but fear of China’s military and economic power has kept the Mongolian government from challenging Beijing. Mongolia is one of the world’s poorest countries and used to depend economically on the Soviet Union. Now it trades heavily with China and sends much of the rest of its foreign trade through the port of Tianjin. As a result, it sees little benefit in encouraging discontent across the border. Chinese rule in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region is thus secure.3
The situation is different in Tibet and Xinjiang. There, ethnic relations have grown worse instead of better in recent decades. Indeed, the more money Beijing has poured into these regions in the post-Mao period to develop their economies, the greater the scale of local resistance, because local people see Han-sponsored modernization as an attack on their culture, whose benefits go not to them, but to Han people who are flooding into their regions from the outside.
China’s problems of stateness also derive from imperialism in a second way: the regions of doubtful loyalty were among those occupied or influenced by foreign powers during the age of imperialism. In the nineteenth century, the British created a colony in Hong Kong and expanded it. Britain also moved from its base in India to secure dominance in Tibet and help Lhasa establish autonomy from Beijing. Russia intermittently occupied parts of Xinjiang and supported an independence movement there. It helped outer Mongolia declare independence from China. The Japanese took over Taiwan as a colony, and after they lost World War II, the U.S. intervened to protect Taiwan from a mainland Chinese takeover. Even though in time the PRC reestablished control over these areas—with the exceptions of outer Mongolia, which remains an independent state, and Taiwan, which remains separate from China without having declared independence—the memory of separation continues to shape the identities of the people living in these places. Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang have diasporas that cultivate distinct identities and draw support from foreign societies. (Hong Kong does not.) In different ways, foreign governments have guaranteed Hong Kong’s semiautonomous status and prevented China from taking control of Taiwan. Some foreigners see many problems in these regions that Beijing would like to define as purely domestic as involving issues of principle, such as self-determination and human rights. Even though the age of imperialism is over, it is easy for Chinese leaders to believe that the problems they face in exerting control in these territories are sustained at least in part by foreign interests who want to constrain China’s rise.
Perhaps no other major state faces as much external involvement with its internal territorial issues. In Russia, for example, minority populations constitute 20 percent of the population, compared to only about 8 percent for China, but Russian minorities are concentrated in only about 30 percent of the national territory, compared to the spread of minorities over about two-thirds of China’s land area. Most of the Russian autonomous republics lack the strategic locations and the extensive foreign economic ties and cross-border coethnic populations that might motivate foreign interest. Only in the Caucasus—in Chechnya and nearby regions—do Russia’s internal minorities attract significant foreign attention.
For China, establishing and maintaining control of its strategic hinterland therefore remains a major task. Domestic strategies of exerting control must go hand in hand with diplomatic strategies to cut off support for those who resist. The diplomatic effort required to manage the international aspects of these problems subtracts from the power China has available to use on other issues. Whether China likes it or not, its internal problems of stateness are also issues of external relations.
THE THREAT IN TIBET
China’s security interest in Tibet is obvious from any map. At stake is not just the 471,700-square-mile Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), but the entire Tibetan-populated area Cholka-Sum, which extends beyond the TAR to large parts of the four adjoining provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan. This region, from which Beijing carved out the TAR, is about twice the size of the TAR, covers about one-quarter of the territory of the PRC, and reaches to within 800 miles of Beijing. Most of it consists of high plateau and mountains at elevations higher than nine thousand feet, thinly populated and difficult to garrison and supply.
If China were to lose control of Tibet, its security would be greatly diminished. It would lose most of its border with India as well as borders with Nepal, Bhutan, and part of Burma; its ability to influence these countries would diminish, whereas India and other rival powers would gain a new opportunity to constrain or threaten China. Water resources for the parched Chinese heartland might be compromised because the Yangtze, Yellow, and many other rivers flow out of the Tibetan plateau. China would lose access to Tibet’s hydroelectric potential as well as to gold, copper, and other mineral resources it has recently started to develop there.4 China’s resolution in opposing separatist movements in Xinjiang and Taiwan would come into question. And the loss of national territory might spark a nationalist reaction among the Han.
Tibet was originally not a single political unit, but a collection of chiefdoms and principalities that shared a commitment to lamaist (or Yellow Sect) Buddhism, with Chinese dynasties exercising greater or lesser influence over different parts at different times. In the seventeenth century, Tibet came together as a theocracy under the Dalai Lama, who emerged as the highest in a hierarchy of lamas, and who recognized a special relationship with the emperor of China. In 1904, the British invaded and established a direct relationship with the Tibetan government, offsetting Chinese military and political power. Tibet functioned as a de facto autonomous state from 1913 to 1951, although its independent sovereignty was not internationally recognized. This complex history gave rise to the opposing legal claims that figure in Beijing’s arguments with Tibet independence advocates today. Both views are founded on historical fact: on the one hand, Tibet has long been subordinate to China; on the other, it long operated independently from Chinese rule.5
In 1950, the army of the newly established PRC entered Tibet, and in 1951 the Dalai Lama’s delegates in Beijing signed an agreement that Tibet belonged to China while enjoying autonomy within China. This seventeen-point agreement (Agreement of the Central People’s Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet) committed Beijing to allow religious freedom, recognized the role of the Dalai Lama, promised that the central authorities would not alter the existing local political system, and gave Beijing control of the territory’s external relations. But the Chinese sent to govern Tibet undermined the positions of Tibetan Buddhism and local elites, sparking resistance in various places. In 1959, protests broke out in Lhasa, which the PLA put down. The Dalai Lama fled to northern India and established a government in exile in Dharamsala. From this base, he built up international pressure on China to give Tibetans political and religious freedom.
To control Tibet, China over the years has employed a combination of methods. It has maintained a large military garrison and in 1959, 1989, and 2008 used its armed forces to put down unrest. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese authorities closed the monasteries and destroyed many of them. Under Deng Xiaoping, Beijing allowed the practice of Tibetan Buddhism to resume but controlled the monasteries’ personnel, finances, and teaching and forbade monks from displaying pictures of the Dalai Lama. As part of Deng’s economic reforms, China tried to win over the Tibetans by developing transport, tourism, construction, mining, and other industries.
Yet resistance to Chinese rule did not weaken; indeed, it seemed to strengthen. Most Tibetans consider reverence of the Dalai Lama central to their faith. Although living standards had improved, many local people claimed they were being pushed to the economic margins and overwhelmed by Han immigration as Chinese traders and workers flooded the territory, dominating the modern sectors of the economy. They feared that the Chinese intended to solve the Tibet problem by eliminating their culture. Everyday forms of resistance continued, and protests and disturbances erupted periodically, notably in 1989 and 2008, with the latter constituting the largest and most widespread unrest on the Tibetan Plateau since 1959. A wave of self-immolations by Tibetans, mostly monks and nuns living in the Tibetan areas outside the TAR, began in 2011 in protest of Chinese rule.
In the 1980s, the Dalai Lama rejected the advice of some of his followers to authorize the use of violence to struggle for independence and decided instead to pursue a strategy of internationalization of the Tibet problem. On the one hand, he abandoned the goal of full Tibetan statehood in the international system and offered to accept an “association with China” under which Tibet would maintain no military forces and would accept Chinese control of its foreign affairs.6 On the other, he began to travel around the world to generate foreign pressure on Beijing to negotiate with him. He visited heads of state, spoke to parliaments, and gave speeches. His government in exile established offices in Washington, D.C., Geneva, Taipei, and other cities. He became a global celebrity, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, and made the fate of Tibet a major issue between the PRC and the Western democracies.
But Beijing saw more risk than gain in negotiating. First, the scope of the autonomy that the Dalai Lama sought was far beyond what China was willing to grant. To be sure, Beijing already classified Tibet as an autonomous region, but this meant little more than allowing ethnic Tibetans to occupy some government posts, to use the local language in some educational settings and some media, and to practice their religion within official restrictions, as well as granting minority women more generous reproductive rights than Han women. By contrast, the Dalai Lama defined autonomy in a way that would have excluded real Chinese influence. In a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 1988,7 he described China’s relationship to Tibet as an “invasion” and “neocolonialism” and said, “Every Tibetan hopes and prays for the full restoration of our nation’s independence.” He argued that Tibet should enjoy democratic self-government with “the rights to decide on all affairs relating to Tibet and the Tibetans”; full freedom to exercise Tibetan religion (which because of the wide-ranging authority of lamas in Tibetan Buddhism would convey great policy authority on religious leaders); conversion of Tibet into a zone of peace via “a regional peace conference” in which neighboring states would serve as guarantors; the right for the Tibetan government to maintain relations with other countries in fields such as commerce, culture, religion, and tourism; and a halt to Han immigration. And the Dalai Lama asked for these concessions across “the whole of Tibet,” meaning not only the TAR but also the Tibetan areas of neighboring provinces. Such arrangements would mean the departure of Chinese troops, religious officials, and government administrators as well as of Han workers from the whole Tibetan plateau. In effect, Tibet would revert to where it was before 1951, with a nominal special position for Beijing akin to what diplomats used to call “suzerainty,” but not full sovereignty. This was far more autonomy than the PRC’s framework for minority autonomy ever contemplated. The Dalai Lama’s negotiating position remained in place until 2008, when his envoys presented Beijing with a “Memorandum on Genuine Autonomy for the Tibetan People.”8 This document abandoned the language that Beijing found most objectionable but not the core idea of a scope of autonomy far greater than Chinese policymakers were willing to consider.
Second, the Dalai Lama’s mobilization of foreign influence over the years made Beijing mistrust his intentions. Instead of working within the provisions of the 1951 agreement, he had fled to a rival power, India. From 1956 to 1972, the Tibetan resistance movement accepted training and other assistance from the CIA and the governments of India, Nepal, and (to a minor extent) Taiwan. Between 1979 and 1985, Beijing allowed the Dalai Lama to send four fact-finding delegations and two political delegations to China to see the situation in Tibet and discuss a way for the Dalai Lama to return to an honorific position in China, although he would not be allowed to live in Tibet.9 From 2003 to 2006, Chinese authorities conducted eight more rounds of talks with the Dalai Lama’s representatives. But the Dalai Lama continued to refuse China’s terms, which fell far short of meeting his goals, and kept up his international campaign to force Beijing to negotiate over a wider form of Tibetan autonomy. Instead of recognizing Tibet’s status as “an inseparable part of China,” as Beijing demanded, the Dalai Lama argued to foreign audiences that the Chinese presence violated Tibetans’ political, religious, cultural, and environmental rights. In 1989, both the Nobel Peace Prize Committee and the Dalai Lama in his acceptance speech referred to Tibet as an occupied country. UN human rights bodies criticized China for its Tibet policies. In 1993, President Bill Clinton tried to condition U.S.–China trade relations on progress in “protecting Tibet’s distinctive religious and cultural heritage.”10 Chinese leaders perceived these and numerous other events as a signal that outside actors were willing to cooperate with the Dalai Lama to use Tibet as a tool to place pressure on Beijing.
Third, Beijing apparently feared that the Dalai Lama was so popular that his return to Tibet could lead to a runaway mass movement that he could not control among the more than 5 million ethnic Tibetans. (That was why Beijing’s offer to let him return included the proviso that he could not live in Tibet.) Alternatively, if China’s forces were removed, more radical independence advocates might take power in the Tibetan community and raise even greater demands. In the worst case, such events might lead to a loss of Chinese control.
Beijing’s strategy in Tibet has therefore been to wait out the Dalai Lama, who in 2012 was seventy-seven years old and in uncertain health.11 By tradition, the ability mystically to recognize the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, who is his successor, belongs to the second most important leader in Tibetan Buddhism, the Panchen Lama. Likewise, a reincarnated Panchen Lama is identified by the Dalai Lama. After the tenth Panchen Lama died in 1989, the Dalai Lama identified a young boy from a family loyal to him as the eleventh Panchen Lama. The Chinese authorities responded by taking the boy into custody. His whereabouts remain unknown. Beijing named another child as Panchen Lama and has supervised his education in the expectation that he will follow Beijing’s preferences when the time comes to recognize a new Dalai Lama. In 2007, the CCP strengthened its grip on the succession by decreeing that no incarnation of any lama would be valid in future without government approval. The Dalai Lama developed the beginnings of a counterstrategy. In 2011, he yielded his duties as political leader of the Tibetan community in exile to an elected prime minister and spoke about the possibility of being reincarnated in a location outside Tibet.
Meanwhile, Beijing continues to promote the region’s economic development—for example, by opening the 1,200-mile Qinghai–Tibet railway in 2006—and the Han in-migration that goes with it, creating an apparently irreversible demographic and economic transformation that Tibetan advocates call “cultural genocide.” A series of government-run “patriotic education campaigns” have required monks and nuns to thank the motherland (meaning China) for the gift of modernization and to denounce the Dalai Lama for “splittism.” In 2008, when young monks and citizens mounted street demonstrations that turned violent, Beijing blamed the Dalai Lama for instigating the riots from abroad. The TAR party secretary, a Han, declared (without using the usual honorific “Lama”), “The Dalai is a wolf in a monk’s robe, a monster with a human face and a beast’s heart; we are in a sharp battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique, a life and death battle between us and the enemy.”12
Beijing has not had much success in discrediting the Dalai Lama personally either in Tibet or abroad, but it has leveraged its role as a rising power to convince other governments to give him less support. At the start of the Sino–Indian thaw in 1988, Delhi made its clearest statement up to that time recognizing Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. As the Sino–Indian thaw advanced, in 2003 New Delhi undertook not to “allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in India.”13 The Indian government implemented this promise by, for example, restricting Tibetan demonstrations against the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2009 Lhasa crackdown. In the U.S., presidents and other administration officials began to meet the Dalai Lama “privately” rather than publicly. In 2008, Britain switched from recognizing Chinese suzerainty in Tibet to recognizing Chinese sovereignty. A year later France announced its opposition to “any form of Tibet independence.” For each of these countries—and others—smooth relations with Beijing had become more important than showing support for the Tibetan cause.
Thanks to his personal prestige and a broad-based international movement dedicated to his cause, the Dalai Lama has been able to create inconvenience for PRC diplomacy in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, but he has not been able to make Beijing negotiate. Although the situation in Tibet continues to cause trouble for Beijing, the latter sees little reason to change its strategy. From the Chinese government’s point of view, no alternative holds more promise of eventual success.
GRASPING XINJIANG
The strategic importance of Xinjiang for China is similar to that of Tibet. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is China’s largest provincial-level unit. It covers about one-sixth of the country’s territory; shares borders with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India; and can be used as a base either by China to influence neighbors or by outside powers to threaten China. Like Tibet, Xinjiang has economic value for its oil and gas resources and as a pass-through for energy resources from Kazakhstan. It is also the site of China’s nuclear weapons and missile testing.14
The region has been possessed or claimed by different forces through history. Over the centuries, Xinjiang’s deserts and mountains were crisscrossed by merchants, migrants, and armies, who sometimes allied themselves with the rulers in power in Beijing and sometimes broke free. The few Chinese who went there before the nineteenth century encountered diverse Islamic populations, with mostly Turkic or Persian languages and cultures, who saw the Chinese as infidels. The region was fully incorporated into the Chinese administrative system only in 1884, when it was made a province and given the name “Xinjiang,” or New Frontier. But Chinese control was still fragile. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China and Russia competed for influence, and when the Chinese presence was weakest in 1944, local people declared the short-lived Eastern Turkestan Republic, supported by Moscow, which lasted until the newly established PRC reasserted control in 1949.15
To consolidate its control, China used the same methods as elsewhere around its periphery: colonization, trade, cultural assimilation, administrative integration, and international isolation, backed when necessary by the use of police and military force. As early as the mid–eighteenth century, the Qing government established Han-populated state farms near Urumqi. Han traders came in force during the nineteenth century. After 1949, the PRC brought the region under state planning and directed its trade entirely to the domestic Chinese economy, closing off the trade and migration that had been common across the region’s ill-defined and ill-maintained borders. In 1954, Beijing established the quasi-military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps to settle demobilized soldiers and other Han migrants in farms, mines, and enterprises. More Han came with the establishment of prison labor camps, whose inmates were kept in the province when released from custody. During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of middle school graduates from the cities, especially Shanghai, were “sent down” to Xinjiang, mostly to live on the production and construction farms. In 2007, Han officially constituted approximately 8.2 million of the region’s approximately 20 million people, with the real number probably higher; the Uyghurs, the largest of several recognized minority groups, stood at 9.6 million.
For decades before 1980, development was slow because of the region’s ruggedness and distance from the rest of China as well as its exposure to the then-hostile Soviet Union. But under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s, the coastal development policy discussed in chapter 10 created a need for Xinjiang’s coal, oil, and gas reserves, which make it one of China’s largest fossil fuel producers. In the 1990s, China started building pipelines to bring far western oil to interior markets. In 2001, Beijing announced a “develop the West” policy aimed at more fully exploiting Xinjiang’s resources. The central government invested billions of dollars to build infrastructure and created policy incentives to bring in Chinese and foreign businesses.
Beijing expected Chinese civic identity to grow stronger as local populations became more prosperous, educated, and modern. Indeed, some Uyghurs did well. Yet, as in Tibet, Beijing encountered what it viewed as a paradoxical response from local populations: resistance to Chinese civic identity. During much of the Mao period, the Uyghurs as well as the smaller local minorities of Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and others had been pressured to abandon Islam, learn Chinese, and give up their traditional customs.16 The Chinese garrison suppressed occasional revolts. The largest occurred in 1962. After it was crushed, tens of thousands of Kazakhs and Uyghurs fled to the Soviet side of the border. After Mao’s passing, religious practice was allowed again, but only under close supervision. Uyghur and other local languages were phased out as languages of instruction and increasingly taught only as second languages, if at all.17 Uyghurs had to learn Chinese to get ahead in business or government. Many Uyghurs remained poor, whereas newly arrived Han prospered. Class differences thus reinforced ethnic antagonism.
As in Tibet, many Uyghurs believed that their land was being inundated by Han migrants and overtaken by an unwelcome, externally imposed way of life.18 With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Uyghur communities in the three neighboring Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan saw cultural and religious revivals, creating a new sense of hope and entitlement among Uyghurs in Xinjiang. For some Uyghurs—because of Chinese government information control, it is impossible to know how many—the alienation went so far as to support the idea of an independent “East Turkestan.”
Demonstrations, riots, and occasional assassinations and terror bombings occurred with increasing frequency from the 1980s to 2001. The government claimed that the perpetrators’ goal was to separate Xinjiang from China, that Uyghur separatists were terrorists, and that Uyghur separatism was linked to al-Qaeda. All these claims were controversial because most Uyghurs are either secular or practice a moderate form of Sunni Islam, the resistance does not seem to be organized, and the community has not coalesced around specific demands. Many incidents reported by Chinese authorities as part of a terrorist, separatist movement seem to have had diverse and sometimes personal causes and often to have resulted in low casualties.19 In any case, the authorities mounted a series of “strike hard” campaigns that resulted in widespread arrests, imprisonments, and executions. After 2001, the provincial authorities intensified repression, and the frequency of open resistance decreased, but by all signs the Uyghur community was as resentful as ever of Chinese rule.20 In July 2009, Xinjiang witnessed the most serious unrest in China since 1989 with an official death toll of 197.
China tried to cut off what it claimed was support for separatism and terrorism from Uyghur diasporic communities overseas. It received strong cooperation from the potentially most threatening neighbors, those right across the border. During the Sino–Soviet dispute, the USSR had supported resistance to Chinese rule, in part through a clandestine “Eastern Turkestan People’s Party” based in Kazakhstan.21 But with the end of the dispute, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the formation of the SCO in 2001 (chapter 3), the neighboring governments declared their opposition to what China called the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism and agreed to extradition of one another’s terror suspects (chapter 6). Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan placed new restrictions on the activities of Uyghur exile organizations. Pakistan, which became an SCO observer, arrested and extradited some Uyghurs wanted by China, although some Uyghurs continued to attend Pakistani madrassas. Countries farther away cooperated less fully. Turkey reduced support for Uyghur activists after a state visit by Chinese president Jiang Zemin in 2000 but continued from time to time to protest against Chinese repression in Xinjiang. Germany allowed the formation of the World Uyghur Congress in 2004, rejecting Chinese charges that it is a terrorist organization.
U.S. policy has been ambivalent. In 2002, a U.S. Presidential Executive Order designated an obscure Uyghur organization, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, as a terrorist organization but refused Chinese demands to add other Uyghur organizations to the list. (In fact, most exile Uyghur organizations forswear violence.22) U.S. forces in Afghanistan picked up about two dozen Uyghurs and interned them at Guantanamo but refused to extradite them to China. Washington granted political asylum to a leading Uyghur activist, Rebiya Kadeer, even though China called her a separatist and blamed her for instigating riots in Urumqi, and the independent but congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy gave funding to organizations that she headed. The U.S. government–funded Radio Free Asia makes Uyghur-language broadcasts to Xinjiang, reporting information that is censored in China; the Chinese government normally jams the broadcasts.
The international Uyghur movement remains far weaker than the international movement in support of Tibet. Although China portrays Rebiya Kadeer, like the Dalai Lama, as a powerful outside instigator of troubles within, in fact her influence is less extensive than his, even among her own ethnic group, not to mention among foreign governments and publics, and the Uyghur community remains internally divided. Despite rising international criticism of Chinese human rights violations in Xinjiang, no outside government supports the idea of an independent Uyghur state. The exile community’s main achievement has been to keep Uyghur identity alive.
Hong Kong: SMALL BUT IMPORTANT
In contrast to China’s Inner Asian regions, Hong Kong and nearby Macao are tiny territories populated mostly by Han. For the most part, their residents comfortably inhabit dual identities as citizens of both the PRC and distinctive local systems. They are economically and culturally tied to the mainland yet enjoy institutions and ways of life rooted in their histories as colonies of Britain and Portugal, respectively. The two territories were successfully reintegrated into the PRC as Special Administrative Regions—Hong Kong in 1997 and Macao in 1999. But in the process of regaining control, Beijing embraced treaty obligations and broader political commitments to allow more freedoms in the returned colonies than it allows elsewhere. Loss of control could lead to a challenge to the regime’s ability to rule on the mainland. That possibility is not imminent, but it is real, particularly in Hong Kong, thanks to the legacies of the takeover: independent local institutions that have the capability to challenge Beijing; local dissatisfaction that flares up from time to time; and treaty-based rights for foreign countries to protest if China should violate the special rights of the Hong Kong people. A further constraint is the possibility that a mishandled crisis in Beijing’s relations with Hong Kong will alienate the public in Taiwan.
Hong Kong Island and the small peninsula of Kowloon were ceded to Britain as colonies in two nineteenth-century treaties. The other 90 percent of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region consists of the New Territories, an area that Britain leased in 1898 for a period of ninety-nine years. Neither Hong Kong nor the nearby enclave of Macao was ever considered viable as an independent state. Perhaps for this reason, Beijing for years gave little urgency to their recovery. Even though Britain legally held Hong Kong Island and Kowloon in perpetuity, it would have made no sense to keep them without the New Territories, whose lease was due to run out in 1997. So in 1982 the British raised the possibility of extending the lease. Deng Xiaoping, however, insisted on the return of sovereignty to China.
Beijing had economic and political interests in a smooth transition. Hong Kong was a regional financial center and entrepôt, with a GDP at the time worth 20 percent of the mainland’s. Hong Kong capitalists were the largest foreign investors in China, employing an estimated 3 million mainlanders in factories whose products were trucked to Hong Kong’s state-of-the-art container terminals for transshipment to U.S. and other markets. Multinational corporations used the territory as their base for mainland business activities. (Hong Kong has continued to be economically crucial: as of 2009, for example, it was China’s third-largest trading partner after the U.S. and Japan and was still China’s top source of foreign direct investment inflows.) The spread of mainland corruption to Hong Kong or disruption of Hong Kong’s sophisticated financial, communications, transportation, and legal infrastructures or political instability there might have driven the lucrative foreign presence to another regional center, such as Singapore, Tokyo, or even Taipei, and undercut efforts to liberalize the economy at home.
For all these reasons, Deng offered the formula of “one country, two systems,” which was formalized in the Sino–British Joint Declaration of 1984. Beijing promised that Hong Kong would “enjoy a high degree of autonomy” for at least fifty years after retrocession in 1997. It would be governed by Hong Kong people and preserve its social and economic systems unchanged. A Basic Law, or miniconstitution, adopted by China’s national legislature in 1990, provided for the former colony’s further evolution toward fully democratic direct election of the chief executive and legislature at an unspecified time in the future. Meanwhile, it set up complex electoral arrangements that guaranteed Beijing’s control over the choice of chief executive and a majority of the legislature. A separate, similar Chinese agreement with Portugal provided for the return of Macao.
Between the agreement and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997, events in Hong Kong began to create challenges for Beijing. The Chinese understood the Joint Declaration to imply that they would inherit the executive-led structure that the British had found so workable in governing Hong Kong as a colony for 150 years. Because Beijing would appoint the chief executive, it could expect to dominate the local government as easily as London had done. Beijing also expected the Hong Kong people to be as pragmatic and apolitical as they had always been. But the 1989 Tiananmen incident unexpectedly sparked the development of a democratic movement in Hong Kong, which in turn motivated Britain to move Hong Kong as far toward democracy before retrocession as it could within the constraints of the Joint Declaration and Basic Law.
To serve as the territory’s last governor, the British government replaced a Foreign Office diplomat with a populist politician, Chris Patten, who proposed to empower all Hong Kong citizens older than eighteen with a direct vote for Legislative Council representatives and to create a Legislative Council majority of directly elected members. To Beijing, Patten’s reforms seemed a Trojan horse, designed to transfer to China a turbulent Hong Kong vulnerable to Western influence. In Beijing’s view, to tolerate dissent or disorder would have given encouragement to the democracy movement at home and to separatists in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. China chose to respond toughly, denouncing the reforms as they were carried out and then rolling them back by decree as soon as it took over the territory.
With the support of the local business community, China maintained the indirect election system that gave it the ultimate say over the choice of chief executive and the makeup of the Legislative Council majority and put off the promise of direct elections to the indefinite future. With nothing happening in electoral politics, Hong Kong citizens gradually returned to their pre-reform attitude of realistic apathy, and the democratic movement shriveled. At several crucial points, the NPC in Beijing exercised its constitutional prerogative to interpret the Basic Law, doing so in such a way as to prevent unwelcome assertions of Hong Kong’s autonomy. Although they valued their free way of life, Hong Kong people have also been proud of China’s prosperity and growing international stature and have increasingly accepted PRC rule.
Hong Kong still has the potential to challenge China politically. In 2002–2003, the local pro-democracy movement blocked an attempt by the chief executive to adopt an antisubversion law that Beijing wanted to have passed (referred to as “Article 23 legislation” because its adoption was mandated by that article of the Basic Law). Human rights groups maintain offices in Hong Kong; members of the banned Falungong spiritual movement conduct demonstrations there; the local Catholic Church maintains its official ties to the Vatican; and some of the local media publish sharp criticisms and sensitive leaks from China. Substantial groups of citizens come out every year on the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, killings in Beijing to memorialize this incident that Beijing prefers to forget. One wing of the pro-democracy movement uses street politics and new media to build pressure for faster progress toward democracy. Because elections have to be held for the Legislative Council every four years and for chief executive every five years, the question keeps coming up of when and how Beijing will make good on its commitment under the Basic Law to allow these elections to be direct and democratic.
Should a political crisis occur, China’s behavior in Hong Kong will fall under a brighter international spotlight than even in other parts of the country—in part because many foreign businesspeople live there, in part because under the Basic Law, Hong Kong is covered separately from the rest of China by certain human rights treaties that the United Kingdom had signed before sovereignty was returned to China, and in part because China’s promises to Hong Kong in the Joint Declaration are considered a treaty commitment to Britain under international law. Also, after retrocession, London gave some Hong Kong residents semirestricted British passports, and all others the right of visa-free entry to Britain, so political, economic, or administrative mismanagement of Hong Kong might lead to an exodus of Hong Kong residents to Britain and produce a political crisis. The Americans, too, asserted a special interest in Hong Kong’s political welfare in 1992 by adopting the McConnell bill (the U.S.–Hong Kong Policy Act), in which Congress asserted that the U.S. has an interest in Hong Kong’s economic autonomy, political stability, and human rights.
Beijing’s bruising conflicts with the last colonial governor and the Hong Kong democratic movement demonstrated China’s vulnerability in a world where economic interests and the power of ideas have become as important as military power. China could have taken Hong Kong long before it did just by turning off the water. It chose to negotiate a peaceful transfer because its interests in the territory were so heavily intertwined with foreign interests. It dealt carefully with challenges because a crackdown would have damaged relations with Britain and other powers. That gamble has paid off so far, thanks to China’s rise and Beijing’s skillful behind-the-scenes management of Hong Kong politics.23
CHINA’S TAIWAN PROBLEM
Of all the issues of territorial integrity, Taiwan carries the highest risk of failure for Beijing. It is the only part of the self-defined Chinese state that the PRC does not control and, because of its physical separation from the mainland, the only part that might be viable as an independent political entity without Beijing’s acquiescence. Moreover, in contrast to Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, Taiwan is more than just a problem of territorial integrity: it is the site of a rival Chinese government,24 the ROC, which has ruled its own territory and functioned as an autonomous international actor since the establishment of the PRC in 1949. Even though Taiwan is accepted in principle by all states as part of Chinese territory,25 the U.S. has committed itself—as it never did with regard to Tibet, Xinjiang, or Hong Kong—to use force if necessary to guarantee “peaceful resolution” of the issue of its relation to China, and a handful of countries continues to recognize the ROC as officially the government of all China. It is not surprising, then, that the Taiwan problem has been an obsessive focus of much of Chinese diplomacy, as we have seen in previous chapters, and that it has absorbed much of China’s military modernization effort, as we will show in chapter 11. We consider Taiwan’s foreign policy in chapter 9. Here we discuss the problem from the mainland’s point of view.
Beijing views control of Taiwan as crucial for defense of the mainland against external enemies. A little more than a hundred miles from the Chinese coast, the island is equipped with major air bases and ports. It sits astride China’s southeastern coastal shipping channels and overlooks the navigation routes from Europe and the Middle East to China, Korea, and Japan. Across from a coastal part of China that is difficult to defend and increasingly prosperous, Taiwan is always in a position to threaten the mainland, especially if it were to offer military, intelligence, or propaganda facilities to a great power. U.S. general Douglas MacArthur called Taiwan an “unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender.”26 For years after 1949, the island was used as a base from which to land amphibious KMT attack teams on the Chinese coast, to spy on China, to broadcast anti-Communist propaganda into China, and to support the American role in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Just as the U.S. is determined to prevent a rival’s military access to Cuba, Chinese leaders are determined to prevent Taiwan from once again becoming a rival power’s strategic asset.
Taiwan presents not only a potential military threat to the mainland, but a possible political threat. The government in Taiwan has avoided direct political provocations, such as a Taiwan-based seaborne radio station that pro-democracy Chinese wanted to establish to broadcast programs into the mainland, and has given only limited support to mainland Chinese dissidents. The larger subversive potential comes from Taiwan’s simply being what it is—a modern Chinese society that is economically prosperous and politically democratic. Furthermore, if China were to allow self-determination for one of its major territories on the grounds that its people see themselves as culturally distinct, it would set a precedent for other territories where populations feel estranged to claim the right to break away.
The Taiwan–China relationship differs from some other cases of divided nations in modern history, such as Germany and Korea. These countries were divided by the superpowers after World War II, but the division was considered temporary. Pending reunification, each of the two divided governments recognized the separate statehood of the other. No domestic force or foreign power challenged the ultimate goal of reunification. Taiwan’s case is different in two ways: first, the two sides of the strait do not recognize each other’s statehood, even on a temporary basis, each claiming to be the legitimate government of all China; second, a substantial political force in Taiwan wants to make it an independent state.
As elsewhere around the Chinese periphery, the sense of separateness is grounded in history. The island was sparsely populated by people of Malay stock (aborigines) until Han Chinese started arriving from southeastern China in the seventeenth century. China did not lay claim to the island of Taiwan until 1683 and did not make it a province until 1885. In 1895, China ceded Taiwan to Japan as a colony, and the residents were taught to speak Japanese and to think of themselves as subjects of the Japanese emperor. During World War II, the Allied leaders pledged the return of Taiwan to China in both the Cairo Declaration of 1943 and the Potsdam Proclamation of 1945. At the end of the war, the Chinese government took over Taiwan and reaffirmed that it was a Chinese province. Driven out of mainland China by Chinese Communists in 1949, the ROC government retreated to this last province. It refused to recognize the legitimacy of the authorities in Beijing, calling them “Communist bandits,” and expressed its determination to “recover the mainland.” Beijing denied the legitimacy of the government in Taipei, calling it the “Chiang Kai-shek clique.” The PRC prepared to invade Taiwan in 1950 to finish off the rival regime, but the U.S. intervened after the outbreak of the Korean War and remained involved afterward to prevent military conflict sparked by either side (chapter 3).
For decades, the ROC and PRC governments made common cause in insisting that Taiwan was a part of China. Until 1971, the ROC occupied the China seat in the UN and was recognized as the government of China by most countries. In 1971, the UN General Assembly voted to give the China seat to the PRC, and most governments subsequently switched their diplomatic recognition to Beijing. Both governments refused to accept recognition from any government that recognized the other.
The U.S., however, resisted pressure from both the mainland and Taiwan to express agreement with their common position on Taiwan’s status. After the Chinese Communists took control of the mainland, and the Korean War was under way, the U.S. backed away from its positions at Cairo and Potsdam. It arranged for Japan, in the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, to renounce its claims to Taiwan without saying to whom it ceded them. Over both PRC and ROC objections, the U.S. took the position that “sovereignty over Taiwan and the Pescadores [nearby smaller islands in the Taiwan Strait controlled by Taiwan] is an unsettled question subject to future international resolution.”27 When the question came up again during the process of U.S.–China rapprochement, the U.S. still refused fully to accept the Chinese position. In both the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué and the 1978 normalization communiqué, Washington “acknowledged” the Chinese claim to Taiwan without either endorsing or challenging it. Moreover, on both occasions the U.S. asserted an interest in the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue, in effect claiming a right to intervene in what the Chinese considered a domestic political issue (chapter 4).
Meanwhile, in 1954 the U.S. had signed a Mutual Defense Treaty with the ROC. Without that American defense commitment, Taiwan would likely have been integrated into the PRC long ago. This is why Beijing considers the heart of what it calls the “Taiwan problem” not to be Taiwan’s separation from the mainland, but the American role in perpetuating it. Many Chinese believe that the U.S. wants to separate Taiwan from China either permanently or, failing that, for as long as possible. Although separation is not the U.S. policy’s expressed intent, so far it has been the policy’s effect. The American commitment to the security of Taiwan has roots in both grand strategy and domestic politics (chapter 4). It has been maintained by Republican and Democratic administrations and supported by Congress for half a century and so is not likely to change.
China’s concerns about Taiwan separatism are not baseless. Most of the current population are descendants of immigrants from southeastern China who had a special local dialect and culture when they came over and whose sense of separateness in later generations was intensified by fifty years of Japanese rule. From colonial times onward, there has been an active Taiwan independence movement. When Taiwan returned to Chinese control in 1945, the demoralized KMT army that came over from the mainland repaid the initial welcome of Taiwan’s residents with repression and corruption. The mainlander ROC regime imposed martial law until the late 1980s. It outlawed the use of the Taiwanese dialect in media and education and forbade independent media and political parties.
Prosperity and generational change gradually eased conflicts between the mainlanders and the Taiwanese. The KMT began a process of “Taiwanization” in the 1970s on by recruiting and promoting Taiwanese party members and government officials. In 1986, President Chiang Ching-kuo initiated a democratic reform, which ten years later led to the first direct election of a president in Chinese history, Chiang’s successor as head of the KMT, Lee Teng-hui, himself a Taiwanese.
These developments ameliorated social tensions on the island, but they did not create enthusiasm for unification with mainland China. On the contrary, the more economic and cultural contacts occurred across the Taiwan Strait from the late 1980s on, the more Taiwan residents, both native Taiwanese and those of mainlander origin, valued Taiwan’s autonomy. They felt like strangers when they visited the mainland and were repelled by the backwardness and corruption that persisted there. The majority of Taiwan residents opposed any form of reunification under which the mainland authorities would exercise real power over them.
During the 1950s, PRC Taiwan policy focused on weakening Washington’s commitment to Taiwan. In 1954 and 1958, Beijing tried to deter American cooperation with Taiwan by creating military tension in the Taiwan Strait, but these efforts were counterproductive, instead strengthening the U.S. commitment to Taiwan (chapter 3). Only in the process of developing security cooperation with the U.S. in the 1970s did China succeed in creating some distance between the U.S. and Taiwan and begin the process of isolating Taiwan internationally. Other countries began to desert the ROC in 1971 as soon as Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to the PRC became public and the PRC gained the China seat in the UN.
The American transfer of recognition to the PRC in 1979 marked another victory for PRC strategy. The U.S. promised to withdraw military support from Taiwan, although linking this withdrawal to the expectation of peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue. The residual American defense commitment, as expressed in the TRA of that year, was vaguer and had less legal standing than the Mutual Defense Treaty that was canceled. Derecognition struck a blow to the prestige of the KMT government, which was also being tested by the rise of a large, pro-democracy Taiwanese middle class. The end of the year saw the worst episode of violent political repression in Taiwan since the 1940s, when police beat and arrested demonstrators in Kaohsiung. Eight were given long jail terms. Their cases became a rallying cry for further growth of the opposition movement and intensified international criticism of Taiwan’s human rights violations.
But the game was not yet won. Twenty-two governments still recognized the ROC as the government of China, and it enjoyed quasi-diplomatic relations with the U.S. and others. The U.S. continued to take steps to deter the forceful imposition of PRC rule. Although Taiwan still considered itself in principle part of China, it was not yet governed by Beijing.
AN OFFER TOO GOOD TO REFUSE
With the U.S. willing to accept reunification as long as it was peaceful, the time seemed ripe for Beijing to turn its attention to the leaders in Taipei and construct an offer at once too threatening and too appealing to refuse. Beijing’s policy targeted the mainlander KMT leaders still governing Taiwan, especially President Chiang Ching-kuo. With the withdrawal of American diplomatic recognition, the leaders’ claim to be the legitimate government of all China had lost credibility. At home, they faced a rising middle class and a pro-democracy movement (the so-called dangwai or nonparty movement) that demanded an end to authoritarian rule. Beijing crafted a new, four-pronged policy that sought to make reunification attractive while cutting off other options.
First, in a series of communications Beijing said that if Taiwan’s ruling party accepted mainland control, the mainland would license its leaders as local rulers, offering an escape from the twin dilemmas of isolation abroad and political challenges at home. On January 1, 1979, the date of establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with Beijing, China’s national legislature issued the “Letter to Taiwan Compatriots.” It called for an end to the state of enmity between the two sides and quick, peaceful reunification; announced the end of the light, symbolic bombardment of the ROC-controlled offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu that had been taking place since 1958; and called for “three contacts and four exchanges” (commercial, postal, and aviation contacts as well as cultural, art, sports, and science and technology exchanges). In 1981, PRC head of state Ye Jianying supplemented this proposal with the Nine Points, offering Taiwan a “high degree of autonomy” (a phrase later incorporated into the Sino–British agreement on Hong Kong). The 1982 PRC Constitution included a new provision for the establishment of Special Administrative Regions (also later used for Hong Kong), of which Taiwan could become one. In 1983, Deng Xiaoping stated that Taiwan’s high degree of autonomy would include the right to maintain its own defense forces and that the mainland would not send military or civilian officials there. Finally, in 1984, when Deng articulated the theory of “one country, two systems” as the principle for reincorporating Hong Kong into China, he added that the principle would also apply to Taiwan.
All this established a bottom-line offer: reunification would be a party-to-party deal between the two organizations that had fought the Chinese civil war in the 1940s, the CCP and the KMT. Beijing would take good care of KMT elites (for example, Chiang Ching-kuo could be appointed a vice president of the PRC, and his father’s body would be moved to his native county on the mainland for reinterment). Although the ROC would disappear as an entity in the international system, the KMT would continue to rule as it wished within Taiwan. China would not use Taiwan’s air and naval bases for power projection but would satisfy itself with exercising a veto over the island’s ties with outsiders, thus fulfilling its basic security need to prevent Taiwan from being used by others for hostile purposes.
Second, China narrowed Taipei’s alternatives through a strategy of diplomatic isolation. Under the “one-China principle” accepted at the time by both Beijing and Taipei, any country that recognized the PRC had to break diplomatic ties with Taiwan. On the eve of Sino–U.S. rapprochement, sixty-six countries recognized the ROC and fifty-one recognized the PRC. Within months after Nixon’s visit to China, the balance shifted to forty-two for the ROC versus eighty-six for the PRC. The break in relations with the U.S. accelerated Taiwan’s loss of diplomatic standing, so that on January 1, 1979, it was recognized by only twenty-two countries. In the 1990s, Taiwan lost the most important among its remaining diplomatic partners as China’s global influence grew. After some ups and downs, as of 2010 Taiwan had formal diplomatic relations with twenty-three states, all minor: the Holy See in Europe, six island nations in the Pacific (Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, the Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu), four states in West Africa (Burkina Faso, Gambia, San Tome and Principe, and Swaziland), and twelve countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean (Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Haiti, Dominican Republic, St. Christopher and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines). In international organizations as well, Beijing was vigilant against any rise in the ROC’s diplomatic status, insisting, for example, that Taiwan could not join the WTO until after the PRC had done so and then only as a “customs territory,” and blocking Taiwan’s participation in the WHO, until finally in 2009 allowing it to attend only as an observer.
Third, China reached out to the business community around Chiang to offer positive incentives for trading and investing on the mainland. Beijing promulgated a series of regulations and preferential policies for “Taiwan compatriots” to travel, invest, own houses, live, and do business in China. They were given investment and trade preferences, tax shelters, and special travel documents. By the early 2000s, China was Taiwan’s number one investment venue, absorbing more than half of Taiwan’s foreign direct investment, most of which was directed at creating manufacturing plants for exports to the West of products formerly produced in Taiwan. China was also Taiwan’s number one trading partner, with 28.9 percent of Taiwan’s foreign trade. China allowed Taiwan to maintain a large trade surplus, which became crucial to the island’s prosperity as its trade-dependent economy faced several global downturns in the 1990s and 2000s. An estimated one million Taiwan businesspeople, students, and family members took up residence in China.
The Taiwan government tried to slow the pace of economic integration without much success. It imposed financial caps, technical limits, and licensing requirements on investments in China and various barriers to trade, while promoting trade and investment in other parts of the world such as Vietnam. But the logic of comparative advantage was too strong. Taiwan was in the process of pricing itself out of its export markets with the rising cost of labor, but it still had outstanding technological capabilities, management expertise, manufacturing and packaging skills, and international marketing channels. China had a cost-efficient labor force in a policy environment that encouraged manufacturing for export. The two sides shared a language and a business culture. The two economies flowed together like water running downhill. As a political consequence, estrangement from China diminished among Taiwanese who worked or visited there or whose livelihoods depended on the growing relationship. Support for moderate cross-strait policies grew among the Taiwan electorate.
Fourth, “smiling diplomacy,” as some called it, was supplemented with a tough side. The threat of force had always been part of China’s Taiwan policy. In the 1950s, Beijing refused American demands to forswear the use of force, insisting that the right to use military power within one’s own territory was an inalienable attribute of sovereignty. When Taiwan’s opposition party adopted a platform calling for independence in 1991, President Yang Shangkun stated that “those who play with fire will perish by fire.”
At first, Beijing lacked a realistic capability to overcome the daunting problems of projecting military power across the Taiwan Strait in the face of probable American opposition. This status began to change in the 1990s. First, the defense budget ended a long period of stagnation and began to increase. Second, American victory in the 1990–1991 Gulf War impressed the Chinese leadership with the necessity of participating in the Revolution in Military Affairs or else accept a permanent position of military inferiority. Third, as detailed in chapter 9, the policies of Taiwan’s then president, Lee Teng-hui, seemed to be evolving in a pro-independence direction, causing China to begin a military buildup with several components: a missile capability aimed at coercing Taiwan; a combination of aircraft, amphibious, and joint-operations capabilities aimed at making it possible to cross the strait in force; and submarine, antisatellite, and other forces that could be used to prevent American access to the Taiwan theater by blinding American surveillance from space and fighting off American aircraft carrier strike groups at sea (for China’s possible military strategies toward Taiwan, see chapter 11).
To underscore the seriousness of the military option, in 2005 the NPC passed the Antisecession Law, which stated in Article 8, “In the event that the ‘Taiwan independence’ secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan’s secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan’s secession from China should occur, or that possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ nonpeaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” By putting China’s commitment to use force under certain conditions in the form of a statute, China signaled that its determination to defend its interests was just as strong as the commitment to defend Taiwan that the American Congress had expressed in the TRA.
Meanwhile, political infighting, economic troubles, and tensions with the U.S. prevented Taiwan from upgrading its own military equipment, training, and strategic doctrine. By the early 2000s, the once-even military balance across the Taiwan Strait had shifted in favor of the PRC. China could not stand as a military equal with the U.S., but it had established the ability to make the Americans think twice before risking lives in a crisis to defend an ally that seemed unwilling to pay the price of defending itself.
PERSISTING PROBLEMS
Despite the ingenuity and expense of Beijing’s efforts, its control over Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan remains incomplete and in varying ways internationally contested. None of these territories has a realistic chance of breaking away, but each in its own way represents a continuing challenge for China’s foreign policy agenda.
The most complex of the four issues in foreign policy terms is Taiwan because it continues to reside beyond Beijing’s control. China’s careful construction of an offer too good to refuse in the 1980s did not work. Chiang Ching-kuo decided to spurn Beijing’s offer to allow him stay in power as the mainland’s proconsul on the island and instead took the risky decision to strengthen his regime’s position through democratic reform at home. Over the course of a decade starting in 1986, he and his successor, Lee Teng-hui, lifted martial law, released political prisoners, ended controls on speech and the press, allowed the formation of opposition parties, and conducted full-scale elections for the National Assembly, the Legislative Yuan, the presidency, and all local offices. By restructuring its legitimacy on a democratic footing, the government created the domestic base to withstand the mainland diplomatic offensive and international isolation. In the newly democratic Taiwan, it was even made legal to advocate independence from China, and some politicians did.
The emergence within Taiwan of new political obstacles to unification was supplemented by a reverse course in America’s Taiwan policy. Growing U.S.–China discord in the 1990s increased sympathy in Washington for Taiwan’s defense and diplomatic needs. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush all but openly breached the 1982 U.S.–China arms reduction communiqué by agreeing to sell 150 F-16 fighter planes to Taiwan. In 1994, the Clinton administration modestly upgraded the protocol status of Taiwan officials in the U.S. Finally, under congressional pressure in 1995, the White House authorized a visit by President Lee Teng-hui to his alma mater, Cornell University, to receive an honorary degree, thus according him a higher level of protocol treatment than the U.S. had granted to any president of Taiwan since the break in formal relations.
These developments complicated Beijing’s task, above all by introducing a new actor into the picture, the Taiwan electorate, which possessed an effective veto over any outcome. Once democratization had started, no leader of Taiwan could reach any agreement with Beijing that the electorate did not support, but the Taiwan electorate did not want unification. Even as it was putting the last pieces of its four-pronged Taiwan policy in place, Beijing had to rethink it. The next chapter describes the new internal developments in Taiwan and Beijing’s response to them.