China-Taiwan: The Cross Straight Relationship

okay [Music] okay [Applause] um how are you i'm okay i haven't spent the last two days in new york one of them yeah but to be able to talk this i think has been renamed though the john kennedy jr forum foreign i think it is it is yeah i can hear you uh oops okay good afternoon uh my name is william kirby and on behalf of the harvard chinese student association uh the harvard asia center the harvard fairbank center and the institute of politics it's a real pleasure to welcome you to tonight's forum which is on china taiwan the cross-strait relationship before i begin i'd like to recognize the two individuals who have really made this forum happen sitting right in front of me uh john yusuda and nina need without you that we wouldn't be here so beijing this is a topic of seemingly permanent interest because the relationship between china and taiwan between the people's republic of china and taiwan has not been resolved in any fundamental way since the end of the chinese civil war and in a form in a military sense in 1949 so it's been with us for more than a half of a century it was this relationship was in some sense the last site of the civil war as a battlefield uh and the first site uh across the strait of uh of emergingly different china's in the 1950s 60s and 70s when taiwan became a model of ultimately what china might aspire to be in its economic miracle and in the 1980s and 1990s when taiwan became an arena of political experimentation yet to be emulated by its neighbor across the street arguably the success of the republic of china on taiwan is the greatest success story in all of its dimensions uh in the realm of greater china since 1949 and yet it is still the main source of tension uh in uh in the chinese speaking world and arguably one of the main greater sources of tension uh in east asia surely uh it is one of the few sources of potential war in east asia today we are speaking here today in an era at least in a moment of but in the last year of relative quiescence in cross-strait relationships at least in terms of the kind that regularly get into the news in terms of military strategic or political conflict a relatively uh calm time in chinese american relations over the issue of taiwan and a relatively calm time and cross straight political rhetoric and therefore perhaps a good time to step back and think more broadly and more quietly about the complex issues that affect the relations of chinese and taiwan of chinese on either side of the street or if you prefer other ethnic terms for uh the uh the peoples on either side of the strait we're in an era of incredibly rapid economic integration across the strait a time when whole parts of the city of shanghai seem to be turning into small and not so small thai bays a period of incredibly rapid social integration across the taiwan strait uh where individuals from either side of the strait are getting married sometimes more than once but we're not in an era of political integration and in fact in an era of still very cold political relations to begin our conversation on the multiple dimensions of the cross-strait relations i'd like to first turn uh to professor dwight perkins the director of harvard's asia center who has been at harvard since 1963 when relations between taiwan and the people's republic were simply non-existent and we wouldn't have had quite the same kind of panel as we're having today professor perkins has served as associate director of what was then the east asian and now fairbank research center chairman of the department of economics and director of the harvard institute for international development he served as advisor or consultant on economic policy and reform to the governments of korea china malaysia vietnam indonesia and papua new guinea and not taiwan which probably didn't need your advice and i think that's a safe statement yes and has served as a long-term consultant to the world bank and the ford foundation uh it's a pleasure to first turn matters over to professor okay my understanding is that we have a very brief time and so one needs to make some very simple straight statements that will come across as more blunt and less subtle than they should the first point when i think about the future of and i'm mostly concerned here about the future of mainland taiwan relations that that the i mean i start from the proposition that independence is completely unrealistic and it's unrealistic because in my view it will very likely or at least the probability of war resulting is sufficiently high to make it not a viable option we all have our stories uh many of you do as well about how one reaches that conclusion i've sat in meetings with mainland chinese generals we're not bragging at all in the context that we were talking about they say if this happens we will have to go to war they are not bragging because they these in this particular media conversation i remember vividly the the individual general basically said we know we're going to take a shellacking when we go into war because it'll be war with the united states uh but we're going to have to do it anyway so if you sort of eliminate uh independence as a viable option then one has to talk about uh uh what is it that could possibly uh either bring these countries over time to these eco these economies over time together and i'm an economist so i focus on the economic situation and the first point i think to to make about the economic situation is of course one of the barriers to getting together on any viable way in addition to the obvious political ones is that the per capita income of taiwan is around twenty thousand dollars in exchange rate terms now 13 000 exchange rate the mainland is a thousand dollars in purchasing power parity taiwan is i don't know exactly what because i haven't seen but say 20 000 and the mainland 2500 this is a huge gap in per capita income and obviously the whole standard of living makes the notion of sort of these two societies in some sense living in the same country however it was organized seemed quite unrealistic that said that figure is itself somewhat misleading because the shanghai is perhaps as probably has per half the per capita income of taiwan and one doesn't and so there are parts of china where the differences are not so great and of course large numbers of taiwanese uh businessmen as bill is saying are are living in shanghai and in the mainland the so that the differences are very real and they are they are a barrier to any any kind of settlement but they're also uh one of the forces that is driving the the change uh that is occurring as when you have a enormous disparity in per capita income of the kind you have between between the main chinese mainland and taiwan that is itself driving the the businessmen on taiwan to the mainland like their counterparts elsewhere in the world the manufacturing operations of taiwan have largely gone are are have gone or are in the process of going to the chinese mainland it began with shoes and it's going on uh in textiles and going on with computers now and so on uh we'll talk more about this in detail so i'm not going to dwell on it here so your there is this drive to move outside of of taiwan to move much of the low the areas where hot low labor costs are are critical to to the chinese mainland and also to southeast asia but southeast asia is quite a long way away now you know when you think about well okay they're these investors are doing that but what's the problem taiwan has had an enormously successful economic run now for uh ever since really 1960 and it's largely had that successful economic run without really any involvement with the mainland this involvement of the mainland is a fairly recent phenomenon mostly in the last decade and taiwan has in that process gone from being a labor-intensive manufacturer of shoes to being a being extremely well placed for high-tech manufacturing and services in a wide variety of areas it's actually done significantly better than that regard in my opinion than say south korea and of course much better than most other economies around the world so what's the problem well the problem is the following the manufacturing in fact the modern economies of today are increasingly as you all know globalized so that one base manufactures a part here and another part somewhere else and one has the design somewhere else and the marketing in addition place most of the manufacturing establishments whether we're talking about or the industrial establishments where they're talking about the united states or whether we're talking about japan or korea or hong kong or whatever it happens to be have had to become globalized now in one sense taiwan is extraordinarily well placed to be globalized it has it already has ties around the world uh it of course because of language and cultural similarities it is naturally placed to take advantage of the mainland economy and and many of the chinese businesses of hong kong are in fact leaders in this effort at globalization one thinks of the firm of lee and fung and so on the but then you turn to the reality of of the nature of the contacts between taiwan and the mainland and you go to airport and you and of course there are no flights anywhere to the mainland you go to hong kong you can fly anywhere in the chinese mainland you go to incheon i was in ninchan just a few weeks ago and you can you know you not only can fly to qingdao and beijing and and to the northeast you can fly all over the interior of china taiwan and many in taiwan have pushed this issue in the past but taiwan is very well placed to be a hub for uh all of it for all of china asia but particularly for the mainland of china but it has to be but but it will have to make fundamental changes of if it is going to do that and the issue is of course are there any risks in this and the answer of course the risk will the mainland use this to pressure taiwan almost certainly does taiwan have a choice uh my own view is no uh it has to move in this direction the all the alternatives are all worse and if we want to get into why we can go into the question period so thank you dude and the uh just uh looking at the press the uh last evening uh there there is as you may know this plan for indirect uh uh cross uh directly indirect or indirectly direct uh flights that would go from taipei chart you could charter them for chinese new year's which don't seem to be likely to happen but that's well and and you know it isn't the same thing yes uh i mean i i used to go often from beijing to korea south korea and it would take all day you'd fly i mean you'd fly down because you couldn't go over north korean space you'd fly down over shanghai and then up to tokyo and then you take a plane from tokyo to seoul uh it literally was an all-day affair and now it's an hour and a quarter or hour and a half or whatever it is you know anyway anyway let us turn now to professor jason huang who received his bachelor and doctorate from government at here at harvard and he is a professor of business government and international economy at the harvard business school he's also a faculty associate of the center for international affairs fairbanks center and the asia center here at harvard and his work in looks at the institutional and policy drivers of foreign direct investment in china including investment from taiwan he's published widely including two books inflation and investment controls in china and a new book a terrific book which should be required reading for and will be required reading for the next time i teach my core course on greater china it's called foreign direct investment in china professor huang with that endorsement i i i i i'm expecting some constant stream of royalty payment which intellectual property rights which i have not earned in the past uh in my past publications yeah let me talk about china and taiwan relations across trade relations from three perspectives one is the economic aspect and just to sort of put some numbers uh the trade in 2001 between china and taiwan was about 27 billion dollars and that was about 11 of uh trade total trade in in china of china fdi foreign direct investment was about 3 billion that was about 7 of the total fdi inflows into china in 2000 2001 so despite the the view that the economic interactions between the two sides of uh tavern straight have increasing importance in fact if you look at fdi the relative share of fdi by taiwan has actually declined in 1990s it was about nine percent at one point and now because china is a very attractive fdi destination so it is increasingly attracting large western japanese u.s multinational corporations so the relative importance of taiwan is actually declining so without the kind of direct transport without the kind of political supporting environment for further economic integration i for one worry about the uh economic relationship between china and taiwan and especially at the time when china is gaining a lot of attention from many companies in the world if the taiwanese government is not more proactive in fostering that economic ties taiwan may lose its economic competitiveness in china the second aspect has to do with uh it's not so much the economic uh importance per se but the way the taiwanese economy is is organized which i believe that dwi has done a lot of work on this which i believe has a very positive impact on chinese way of thinking about how to develop the economy the taiwanese economy developed on the basis of a small and medium enterprises it developed on the basis of a relatively efficient financial market it developed on the basis of supporting indigenous it's a market economy and these are the kind of aspects of the economic model that are attractive to the chinese when the chinese are moving forward to a market economy the the former uh party secretary of china uh in 1980s uh used to refer to taiwan as our model province um he was thinking about actually he was thinking mostly in political terms which is something i'm going to get to next so taiwan is the economic model for china is i also believe that it is it should be a political model for china as well the island made the peaceful transition from an authoritarian system to a democratic system and this is something that i think should be one of the proudest achievements of the taiwanese society and taiwanese people and that transition debunks the idea that chinese culture is incompatible with democracy uh although i understand uh some people on taiwan don't believe they're chinese but then still the idea is that the the culture that is similar to the chinese culture that that's coming from a long confusion tradition is still in the end compatible with a democratic system and that's to me a a encouraging sign let me just comment very briefly before i end uh on the role of taiwan in the modernization of china i believe that role ought to be very very important it could be more important than it is now if the government on taiwan i believe if the government in taiwan doesn't pursue the independence agenda as aggressively as it has done i believe that agenda is hugely unproductive and damaging not only to taiwan itself but also to a future of china that most people in this room would cherish to see greater interactions economic interactions social interactions between taiwan and china are going to help china move forward to a market economy it's going to be extremely helpful for china to develop a middle class which is going to moderate the nationalistic sentiment in china and so when the political when there's sufficient political progress in china then we can think about how to deal with the independence issue so rather than putting independence issue ahead of some sort of political and economic convergence between china and taiwan we ought to postpone and taiwanese leaders also postpone that agenda to a future time when china politically is a little bit different from it is now and it has all the promise of becoming a more humane modern and a more democratic uh system in society so which we should we also gave the chinese the leadership time and and and and the and the necessary environment to work out lots of the problems and lots of issues thank you thank you the cross-strait relations relationship is a complicated one not the least because of politics different political systems different political ideologies and different political eras since 1949 1950 and not the least in recent times because taiwan has been such a moving target as it were so changing so rapidly in political terms the prc has changed of course in political terms uh as well but that's obviously in some ways to external observers taiwan has moved from being a military dictatorship to what one might think of as a technocratic autocracy to now a vibrant and raucous electoral democracy with all of the unpredictability that that term entails this is a weekend of elections in taiwan and perhaps the only thing that we can be predict with absolute certainty was predicted in today's crimson which i'm sure you've all read is that whoever wins the mayoral election a very good article by johnny sway whoever wins the mayoral election in taipei will be a harvard alum which is surely assures good governance to enlighten us on the political relationship across the strait we turn to professor stephen goldstein who's the co-director of the fairbanks center taiwan studies workshop here at harvard uh and he's the sophia smith professor of government at smith college he serves on the editorial board of the china quarterly and the journal of contemporary china uh he has written very widely about china's relations with the soviet union with the united states and uh in particular in recent years very presciently on taiwan in all of its dimensions he has hands-on experience in moments of great political change uh in china uh during the 1989 tiananmen demonstrations he was a commentator with cnn and cbs and is here nevertheless he is written co-authored and edited eight books and more than 20 articles and it's pleasure to turn it over to steve thanks bill um in terms of cross-strait political relations i i think there are four questions that you have to address and i'll probably have room i have time for three and we'll throw out the fourth for last i think the first question is how would you characterize the current straight state of cross-strait relations and i think the way i would characterize it would be as an equilibrium resulting from stalemate and what that means is that neither side today can achieve its maximal goals uh in terms of the other side and it might be useful for a second to look at what those maximal goals are i i think for the mainland for the people's republic of china they have two maximal goals one is taiwan's reunification as they would put it with the mainland under the principle of one country two systems and the second maximal goal is is the termination of taiwan's place in the international system as a quasi-state entity uh apart from the people's republic of china as far as taiwan is concerned it too has i think if you put it simply in as dwight said sort of bluntly has two um goals vis-a-vis the international system in the mainland the first is equality it wants to be treated in any negotiations in any interactions in the international system by the mainland as an equal the second uh goal it seems to me of any taiwan government if you take out the two extremes is to maintain its rights as a full sovereign member of the international community of states now you one observation and one very obvious observation that these are obviously irreconcilable goals and because they're irreconcilable goals it seems to me that you can deduce from that or conclude from that that the chances of compromise are less likely than the chances of conflict uh that is because neither side finds the present situation acceptable uh both sides would like to change it if they could so it's an unstable equilibrium it's an equilibrium that both sides accept uh as a less than um acceptable uh situation the second question it seems to me is what are the causes uh what are the causes of these irreconcilable goals and obviously the causes are very complex but again to simplify it seems to me that the major source of those causes lies in the history but also in the domestic politics of both countries and i think that's where the focus should always be on cross-straits relations is what is the impact of this issue on the domestic politics if you were to look at the mainland it seems to me that four points are very important to keep in mind the first point is that the recovery of taiwan is for the mainland leadership a symbol really it's a symbol of the culmination of the chinese revolution it's a symbol of the end of a century or more of domination by external powers who intervened in the in the internal affairs of china at the elite level and this is the second point that i'd make no leader in china uh can be soft on the taiwan issue as i keep saying it's probably as close to the anti-communism issue was during the mccarthy era you you would pay a serious price to look soft on the taiwan issue particularly if you're a new successor who is somewhat young thirdly at the mass level i we don't know of course the chinese will always tell you that the chinese people feel this the chinese people are insulted by that we don't know what the chinese masters want or don't want uh but we do know that in the eyes of the leadership and in the eyes of many of the intellectuals that this is a very volatile issue that a leadership that gave away anything on the taiwan issue will yield on the taiwan issue uh would have its legitimacy and perhaps legitimacy of the rule of the communist party uh question fourthly there's the dead hand of deng xiaoping uh reaching out of the grave uh and leaving a formula of one country two systems uh which the current leadership is very want to abandon uh because after all it was dung's legacy for taiwan uh i think there are two major points that you'd want to make one the government today the dpp government is a minority government it's a government whose fundamental bases of support come from the independence sentiment on taiwan so the current government can't go too far without beginning to alienate it's very solid and very necessary base but secondly i think i would argue and perhaps this is something that we might argue that any of the major oppositions parties in taiwan be it the pfp or the kmt are going to be guided by a public opinion that at the moment overwhelmingly favors status quo separation from the mainland but secondly also wants to see taiwan's visibility or profile in the international environment raised or at least kept at the level where it is now so observation uh it's in the domestic political interests of neither side to make any fundamental changes in their irreconcilable position the third question uh the third point and the final point that i'm going to raise and then we can talk about the fourth uh perhaps in the discussion the third question is what factors sustain the present situation and what might undermine the present situation and here i think that what sustains the present situation is basically that both sides are benefiting from it both sides are gaining something from the present stalemate situation the mainland of course is gaining firstly an absence of conflict in a peaceful environment for its uh addressing of its major issue which is the modernization of china secondly it's also getting a good relationship with the united states which is an essential part of the modernization thirdly uh the international image of beijing is of course improved by uh uh by a non-hostile uh approach to taiwan and finally and fourthly it is encouraging this economic exchange that we've talked about and in the mainland's view creating a constituency on taiwan that favors reunification as far as the taiwan side is concerned uh the economic benefits of the mainland have been for the last three or four years a lifesaver for an economy that that's had serious problems secondly the government has to satisfy at least some of the business demands in terms of ease of cross straight economic relations thirdly by maintaining an economic relationship and i think i would differ slightly with dwight uh as to who has the leverage i think it's interdependency rather than d dependency uh but thirdly at least in the view of some taiwan people it does uh help maintain the peace by giving the chinese an economic interest quick uh factoid uh about uh the mainland's 40 about 40 billion exports 40 billion dollars worth of exports in electronic goods 60 of those are by taiwan corporations that's not something china wants to throw away very quickly by imposing sanctions and fourthly and finally as far as taiwan is concerned the benefit is that it presents a con conciliatory um face to the world taiwan doesn't look like a troublemaker it looks like a responsible state trying to do what the best it can in a difficult situation that i think is what's sustaining the present status quo and let me just very briefly say what i think is uh could possibly undermine it and i think here we have an irony because the very same factors that are sustaining the present status quo can undermine the present status quo that is if you go down that list that i did and i won't go through it again as far as the china side is concerned it's a double-edged sword each for example uh the more it presents a peaceful non-hostile uh picture or or a posture towards taiwan the more the world becomes less sympathetic uh for its own goals towards taiwan and you could go down every one of those i think four points that i made and find a negative to the long-term interests of china in reunification uh and as far as taiwan is concerned it's a similar situation increasing economic uh ties does raise the problem of sanction does raise the problem which the taiwanese are always talking about which is the existence of a fifth column as they term it now in the in the in the newspapers that is promoting closer relations with the mainland and if again if you went down those factors you could see as far as each side is concerned a dark side in other words short-term the achievement of a short-term goal of stability undermines the possibility of the long-term goals that each side has so to finish uh last observation on that point is uh very simply uh the point that i began with that uh what the current equilibrium of stalemate as i call it is most likely to lead to is uh not any kind of compromise it might stay in stalemate for the near term but as each side assesses the gains and costs of their current policies one side might decide if certain things happen that the costs are greater than the gains and that would be my fourth point under what circumstances would they make those calculations but that we can save for later thank you steve very much one of the reasons why we're here and so many people are here in this great american school in the united states of government uh is that the issue of crosstrade relations is of very fundamental concern to the united states government and by extension to the people of the united states this is no accident this is because the united states has been as it were present from the creation at least of the separate uh taiwan with the introduction of the seventh fleet in 1950 providing a military buffer between the mainland and taiwan and providing the military umbrella ultimately under which taiwan would develop separately from the prc politically and at least initially economically for a very long period from 1958 to 1996 the united states did not need to demonstrate militarily its concerns regarding the strait and yet in 1996 the american government did so again cross-strait relations remain surely uh the potential the most have the greatest potential for the destabilization of chinese american relations whatever their effect on either the parties on either side of the street and to help us think about that we're extraordinarily fortunate to have our guest from as far away as we have a guest uh alan romberg who's the senior associate and director of the chinese program at the henry l simpson center uh before that he was special assistant to the secretary of the navy he served in the department of state uh from 1994 to 1999 as principal deputies director of the policy planning staff and then until 1998 as a senior advisor and director of the washington office of the us permanent representative to the united nations for 10 years he also served as the cb star senior fellow for asian studies at the council for foreign relations he served in all 20 years as foreign service officer dealing with east asia and also as director of the state department office of japanese affairs and staff member of the national security council great pleasure to welcome you to harvard thank you very much in many ways the principal issue for the united states for a very long time i'd go back even a little further than dean kirby did has been sovereignty of taiwan who has it and how it's going to be determined and the principal goals around that issue have changed however over time in the mid 40s from the time of the cairo conference and the potsdam conference the issue was to return taiwan to china but the u.s position in fact was that it never was legally return to china in the late 40s the objective was to keep taiwan out of communist hands although not through military means but also it was strongly concerned with the brutality of the nationalist regime as it was shifting over to taiwan and so other options were considered options that included trusteeship under the united nations or even a plebiscite which it was expected probably would lead to independence with the communist victory in 1949 however the us government also estimating that the communists would be able to take over taiwan within a year basically threw up its hands and in january 1950 made a statement which was very famous about how the u.s was in fact not going to get involved even though its view about taiwan's legal status had not changed as secretary of state atchison put it we were not going to quibble with any lawyer's words we were just going essentially to let nature take its course this lasted for all of five and a half months until the korean war broke out when president truman interposed the seventh fleet by the way both to stop uh the communists from going toward taiwan but also the nationalists from attacking the mainland and said that the status of taiwan was undetermined and could only be determined by one of three international events peace in the pacific a treaty with japan or some u.n action none of that essentially ever was viewed to have happened in a way which uh changed the situation so between 1950 and 1971 72 with the nixon slash kissinger opening the position remained that the status of taiwan was undetermined from that opening in the early 70s on essentially what the u.s has done with its policy is to leave that question alone the position is it's up to the chinese themselves and has evolved into what has been called the one china policy well what is the one china policy the united states acknowledges the chinese position that there is one china and taiwan as part of it it acknowledges it it also doesn't support a one china one taiwan or two china's or independent taiwan solution but it also is worth noting neither does it support reunification that's their issue as it's put it's for the two sides of the strait to work it out the us position essentially is what we are concerned about but what we have been concerned about except for that brief period in 1950 for all of these years has been that any resolution be peaceful why well for one reason it's tied to u.s domestic politics those politics have changed over time but i think it has been essentially unacceptable in most of this period to the american public to simply allow a forceful resolution the second it is a part of this is that it is a strategic national interest of the united states not to allow a forceful settlement of the taiwan question if we allowed that what would that say for the rest of our just putting it in today's context for the rest of our commitments in the region even though we may have treaty relationships with some or other kinds of relationships with others nonetheless the same point applies third there is also of course concern for the well-being of the people in taiwan that was seen in the 40s i mentioned the fact that that the concern with the nationalist regime drove consideration of various alternative kinds of policies and it has been especially true again since the democratization of taiwan starting in the late 80s it's interesting that we know from all of the various documents that are now available that privately i'm willing to say all but maybe it's virtually all presidents secretaries of state and national security advisers have privately said that they endorse one china or the one china principle or they can settle they can see the settlement of taiwan in accordance with the one china principle something like that even ronald reagan said that but publicly this has proven very difficult to do partially that's for legal reasons people have seen that if one did take a position of formally endorsing one china and of course recognizing the government of the prc as the sole legal government of that china then it becomes very difficult to think of a legal international basis for arms sales or other security relationships possibly even military intervention politically it simply is unacceptable to impose a solution on taiwan for the americans to do that the upshot has been a position which is full of nuance and i would also have to argue full of confusion especially with the democratization and the taiwanization of taiwan politics which also one needs to note came at the same time as essential essentially as ten on one and the end of the cold war and those are not irrelevant it has become much harder to manage and integrate taiwan policy with overall american china policy nineteen ninety five leedongue's cornell visit 1999 his two states theory and two thousand with the election of chunchue bien coming from a party with a history of independence advocacy brought moments of tension but also i would argue they brought some clarification to u.s policy the result has been a much better defined statement of policy that is we have re-emphasized the importance of peaceful resolution but we have also said there should be no provocation from either side there should be no unilateral efforts to change the status quo that isn't to say the end result should be unification or independence but that neither side should try to force one result or the other on its own i think it's important to note that as much as a lot of us were concerned have been concerned with president bush's approach which seemed to push the envelope on taiwan policy he endorsed this no provocation approach and the benefits of our one china policy in the campaign in beijing in february of 2002 and again i would argue after uh august 3rd when uh president trunchwabian in taipei talked about uh one country on each side he be an eagle let me conclude by noting where i see the debate on u.s policy today i think it really is being conducted at two levels one is what you might call the macro level one argument is that we should push taiwan toward negotiation with the mainland probably under johnson men's 1995 eight points which would accord taiwan full autonomy it would have to be negotiated but that's the basic thrust the other side is let's recognize reality there are two states here let's drop the one china policy and get over it the concern of the former group is largely that we could end up in war the concern of the latter group is largely that we should act in accordance with reality and morality u.s policy as i have described it tries to walk a line that embraces both of those objectives preventing war and acting properly and we can assess in the question and answer period whether in fact u.s policy has succeeded in doing that at the micro level and that's where the debate really operates today the question is how do we conduct relations with taiwan the principal issues are one how do we best address u.s concern for taiwan's security within a framework of overall china policy this involves arms sales and other military relationships and involves the question of so-called strategic ambiguity or strategic clarity that is under what circumstances would the us either get involved or stay out of involvement in a taiwan contingency and it also involves the political issue of how far to go with taiwan's respecting taiwan's dignity and its achievements that involve such things as contacts policy between government officials senior officials visits or transits taiwan's international participation and what i might call name plates but what kinds of names are used for identifying taiwan offices and and so on let me just leave it at that though thank you alan very much well as you've heard four extremely knowledgeable individuals not one of which has been able to actually resolve the relationship uh between people and taiwan so we ask for your help uh and for your questions and if as as you do so if you would identify yourself and come to a microphone and say to whom you are directing your question please and i ask that questions be big questions ideally and not statements yes sir i'm sorry uh my name is origin gupta i'm in the business school i had a question all of you seem to think this is a long-term problem now should the u.s try to create some kind of a nato-like alliance between uh japan north korea south korea india perhaps the other asean states to create some kind of a counterbalance to china so that it doesn't have to keep worrying about this like does the u.s really want to have this on its plate for the next hundred years perhaps well already 50 into it yes i think we've already done that but let me ask um one of our administrators yeah i think this is for you i guess my quick answer to your question is no we shouldn't do that and i don't think the nations of the region want to do that it's very different from what the basis of nato is i don't i don't see how it is in the united states interest to create a situation which as you describe it i think would put us into confrontation with china i don't think we need to be in confrontation with china this issue could put us at war there's no question about that i agree with that but i don't think the way you handle that is by creating an adversary situation of this sort so i would argue that no we should not do that i would also say that very quickly that i think our alliance relationships with japan and south korea in particular uh are very critical to our ability uh to help maintain peace and stability in the region through our our presence and it includes not just our military presence but that is a very important component of it but i don't think trying to forge an alliance with that sort of the way to go just very quickly um that since 54 55 taiwan has been wanting to become part of a multilateral asia-pacific alliance and dulles uh turned it down and uh because it would be extremely provocative uh to the mainland i i think it remains that yes please okay uh my name is harry wong from kennedy school i suppose thank you panel for coming here to share with us with your perspectives our questions for panel as time goes on say 20 25 years after that's because the great majority of people in taiwan will be born in taiwan will actually have less likely have relatives who is born in mainland china and will have less recognition that they are chinese i think they pretty much think they are taiwanese do you think this will have major implications to the china taiwan uh relationships because i think the china leader have the big question to ask themselves can china wait very good question well i i think um your point's a good one and if you look at public opinion polls and there's a lot of identity polling that goes on in taiwan um it it's no question that what seems to be growing is a taiwan identity not necessarily an ethnic identity but what you'd call a civic identity a sense of attachment to the political institutions of taiwan and the history of taiwan and time in that respect is is clearly running against the mainland uh a brief word i the issue is time uh what one's trying to do is by maybe 50 years of staying out of war so that these things can hopefully resolve and what you've implied in your remarks is in fact they're going to get further apart but i would just suggest that while that's one force at work uh potentially a much bigger force would be the fact that the the people of taiwan while they might be separate are all going to be heavily involved in the mainland uh in in in very direct ways and mainland people will be increasingly involved in taiwan uh in an economic uh business sense and that that will more than offset this separateness based on birth which to a large degree is true even today bill mayheck yeah or something yeah i would please when i first went to taiwan which was in 1960 to live there uh my sense was that the the feeling of taiwanese identity although it was sort of under wraps because of the political situation within taiwan at the time was to the exclusion of accepting chinese identity for an awful lot of people what i think has happened over time is that although taiwanese identity has grown and certainly become much more public i think a willingness to accept some level of chinese identity has also grown and what gives me hope for the future so that we don't end up in a war to resolve this issue is that if people on both sides or let's say all sides including the u.s are creative enough that all of this can be melded into a solution which does in fact meet the bottom line needs of all all sides and i think that this dual sense of identity not one replacing the other is a factor that could work to make that happen but it certainly requires a lot of uh of work on all sides ashley would you like to yeah i think the taiwanese identity is stronger not just because more and more people are born on taiwan but because of a antagonistic relationship between china and taiwan which also increases the taiwanese identity you usually define yourself not just who you are but as someone against somebody else right so if the relationship between china and taiwan improves uh despite the fact more and more people are going to be born in taiwan i don't think the identity is going to be a severe threat to the relationship to a smooth economic and political relationship across straits let me just add i think his last two comments are very important as a historian taiwan clearly speaking as a historian taiwan individuals living on that island and which is a really a frontier community over the last several centuries have proved capable of having multiple identities very often in eras before this was illegal multiple passports and a very significant presence of taiwanese businessmen on mainland china during the period of japanese rule was as japanese citizens and japanese passport holders on on the chinese mainland uh i think it i i would very strongly associate myself with the last two comments yes please um ask the people in the balcony first oh i'm sorry i can't i've been blinded thank you very much yes sir uh hello my name is herman liu uh i'm from china i'm the first year student here in kandy school i have a question for the panel as in this century as china is getting stronger and stronger in the global economy and the international affairs how should u.s reshape the china and taiwan policy in order to play a more active role in helping both sides to solve this problem and given the fact that u.s have played in a more in active role in the middle east crisis and in the same time how should you ask them to maintain a healthier relationship with china i mean during this process thank you you know when you think of if america's success in the middle east is any gauge for what we can hope this is a very very sobering question i did alan would you here do comment please yeah i think that for one thing i i guess i would go back to an image that uh secretary of state george schultz used to use which was to try and create an environment which facilitated cross-strait positive cross-strait relationship there is a great risk there's a temptation to get into the middle of it and sort of either mediate or try and say you should do this and you should do that and so on i i don't think that's a winning approach frankly i mean number one we'll simply get blamed by probably both sides for what we do and i don't think it's likely to be very helpful i think that if if obviously both want us to do something we have a long history in the post-war post-world war ii period of being manipulated by both sides and trying trying to get us to do things but i think it is important uh in my own view and maybe i've been too involved in this policy over too long a period of time to maintain essentially the policy that i described to you and and uh not to take not to be tempted uh by either of the two macro arguments that i cited the one is to push taiwan to negotiate some sort of settlement with the mainland and the other uh hand not to give in to the notion that g you know these these courageous folks in taiwan deserve all of our backing and whatever the prc says that's that's too bad and of course that would in any case run against your point about maintaining what i think is vital which is healthy relationships with the prc so i think we need to to uh try and and uh stay out of their issue but to make it clear that we do have an interest it is as i said before a national strategic interest not to allow this issue to be resolved by force and to keep healthy relationships with both sides uh i don't have a much more creative approach to it than that saying the same i think really the same thing in a somewhat different way the main role of the us is is to provide a military component that makes it difficult to solve the problem by military means at least in the short run but the real the changes are not going to come from some negotiating position of the united states they're going to come from changes in the mainland chinese mainland if they occur and i mean fundamental changes in the way that the mainland is governed uh as well as of course the continued growth of the economy and and it's those kinds of changes that are essential and when they if they occur when they occur then uh one then i think the issue of negotiation between the two becomes much simpler and the us really has no real role in the political changes in the mainland yes please hi my name is quack and i'm from gsas i have a question about how american domestic politics play out in the taiwan straits um looking through what has happened over the years i kind of have an observation that um presidents tend to veer towards beijing while um congress tends to veer towards taiwan i mean like we see the qatar we see carter abolishing the mutual defense treaty and congress reacts with the taiwan relations act um the clinton administration promises china that they are not going to give li donghui a visa and congress insists that it does and after that i think in 1996 congress tries to pass a bill that um have the tra supersede the reagan joints communique so i mean like i might be totally misled in my observation if that is true please correct me but if there is something to what i see could you um explain how certain forces work on congress and not on presidents and how student forces work on presidents and not congress political i think i'd say two things the ian replied to that uh one is i think since the 1950s uh congress has almost had an institutional interest in taiwan uh one of the interesting things about some of the debate that accompanied the tra and after was that um and also came out during the clinton administration was that congress when it was pressuring the clinton administration by using the tra said very specifically that uh congress has a special obligation now codified in law uh to monitor the president on this one foreign policy issue uh special on this one uh because it is the only domestic legislation in this country where congress has mandated a role in foreign policy to this extent second point that i'd make is that again poaching a little on bill's status as a historian if if you go back even to the 50s to the talks that we had with the chinese the secret talks what you'd see is a pattern whereby the united states that is whoever was negotiating for the united states any gesture of conciliation towards the people's republic of china had to be matched with a similar gesture of friendship towards taiwan which in turn vitiated most of the effectiveness of the gesture towards the people's republic of china so it's been a real conundrum uh determined by domestic politics as to how far any government can go because of that that duality i just had two comments on this uh it's a very interesting question go to write a thesis on this question first of all i want to reiterate something i said before and that is you have to keep in mind that the opening up of taiwan which made taiwan very attractive in american politics occurred at the same time virtually as chairman so you have bad prc image good taiwan image which has had a a major effect especially in an institution like congress and because the cold war was over and it was harder to say well but we need to maintain this relationship with the prc for strategic reasons although i happen to think one could make that argument but it was much harder to be persuasive that also i think gave those in the congress who wanted to stand up and sort of uh talk about this issue more space the other thing i'd point out is this is not only a congressional administration issue remember when john f kennedy took over as president on the eve of his inauguration he met with eisenhower and eisenhower said to him you know i want to stay out of your way but the one issue if you make a wrong move on it and it's reported differently whether it's in the u.n or toward recognition so i'm not exactly sure but if you make the wrong move on china i will come out and i will publicly oppose you so this issue has a lot of controversy in the united states over a very long period of time and i agree with you that more recently it seems to have come down uh more to a congressional executive issue but it it is the the china question the taiwan relationship this has all been mixed up in american politics in very complicated ways for a very long thank time yes please thank you hi my name is doris huang i'm a freshman at the college and um it seems to me that while in recent years the communist regime in beijing has allowed its economy to move from state control to more of a market economy system that the government is still at best reluctant to admit openly that that's what it's doing um ostensibly to save face and avoid admitting that its past policies may have failed so my question is if re reunification between taiwan and china were to occur what would its impact be on this phenomenon would the reacquisition of taiwan encourage the communist party to openly acknowledge the fact that it wants to move towards democracy and capitalism or do you think that the status quo would be maintained or would the guomindang be elected overwhelmingly back to power good good question as well right i think you know in terms of the communist party openly admitting that to what it is doing in terms of creating a market economy basically a capitalist economy it's obviously you know as long as it's a communist party that is uh claims to have you know to have its origins in the in thought and so on uh it's it's it's extremely hard to come out and say uh bluntly because it undermines the very logic of having a monopoly power uh in government but the reality is of course that everyone knows what's happening and that socialism is taking on gradually to the extent it has any meaning it'll eventually i suppose move toward the way socialism is thought in western europe or something where it's more of a social welfare phenomena than a anything to do with uh state ownership of the means of production so i so i think that uh that is happening and long before we're going to be talking about any real uh substantial negotiations on reunification or anything of that sort uh the chinese will have abandoned uh any notion of of socialism and they've effectively virtually done it already i mean the central government is only trying to support about one or two thousand state enterprises out of the tens of thousands that exist uh and uh anyway i'll stop at that yeah i i very much echo what just what do i just said but i think the communist party has come closer in a recent month uh to recognizing that explicitly that it is moving to a market economy and and even a political system that is not based on dictatorship of the proletariat they have explicitly given up on that doctrine of dictatorship of proletariat the three represents theory advocated which is you know becoming a piece of laughing stock in the western press but to me this is actually one of the most fundamental political changes in china that has happened in the last 20 years for a communist regime to come out and say that we gave up on the notion of class struggle it's as i said this is not something very easy for the regime to do it and yet they have done it and and the the obviously the party is now suffering a little bit because of the legitimacy problem uh but yet we have to admire uh gave them credit uh for their ability to actually make this doctrinal transition and there's again a lot of inconsistency between their view of what the socialist democratic system is and what a true democratic system is obviously there's a lot of inconsistency there but i think we ought to recognize that the communist party is coming around eventually to this incredibly convoluted idea that they can actually still be a continuing communist country when the economy and society are fundamentally different and this leadership has come to that contradiction and try to deal with it in a way that i think quite courageous just just very quickly the the point that i made a few seconds ago about identity and civic identity i think that complicates the two political systems coming together because what i meant to say was that ethnicity really doesn't make any difference what counts is a civic loyalty to a particular kind of political system and that's growing in taiwan and to mesh that with anything that's going to emerge in the foreseeable future in china i think is very difficult i i would just say that christophe gave up on class struggle four decades ago and uh the soviet union stumbled on for for a considerable amount of time after that he did people struggle but he just didn't tell anybody no he said the state of the whole people yes sir uh hi it's kevin chan from the candy school um i had a question about i i think a lot of the talks uh start centering on the windows of opportunity for reunification are predicated on the idea of further economic integration uh but there are a lot of there's a lot of researchers out there who are saying that in fact perhaps the chinese economic miracle isn't as robust as we might think it is um indeed there's an article in the new republic i think this week that addresses this issue um so i guess the question is um in terms of chinese foreign policy the way they're thinking about it how does a faltering economy uh affect the timetable for unification how does a what altering if the chinese economy were to falter that's correct i personally think it would be it will be a major problem a poor weak china is i mean under what circumstances would taiwan want to be be part of of that kind of of an entity so that's one issue a poor weak china is also probably a less stable china and and for that matter a weak taiwan economy is a less stable taiwan none of which also plays into all kinds of political uh activities that would probably uh create tension rather than than solutions i don't happen to think that the chinese economy uh the mainland economy is in great trouble uh i think it all economies have problems and certainly the chinese we could spend the next two hours talking about the problems but uh but i think there's every reason to think they will continue to grow at a fairly rapid rate yes also i think the u.s press often portrays china as having a very aggressive foreign policy i actually think china has a very moderate foreign policy it has been very cooperative with the united states on anti-terrorism war it has been assigned down to the wto agreement uh which is uh fundamentally uh is going to bring about a lot of changes in the chinese economy and so there's one issue about whether the chinese economy is growing fast or growing slow but there's another issue which is the chinese economy relative to the size of the economy and relative to the fact that it is a continental economy is actually extremely dependent on foreign trade and 400 investment right so that moderates the behavior of the chinese foreign policy makers to some extent so i actually view chinese foreign policy as quite accommodating and there are few key principles that the chinese policymakers are not going to give up in order to to keep the economy going taiwan being one of them so i think this is one issue that the u.s and taiwan ought to be extremely cautious about because this is one issue one foreign policy issue that chinese government is not going to subordinate to to their economic interests thank you yes please our penultimate question okay tomorrow kennedy school my questions about the role of taiwanese democracy in this whole process um the mainland's made very clear that any sort of taiwanese referendum on independence is completely unacceptable so my question is how is beijing going to respond to what seems like the new reality that any substantial move from the status quo in either direction is going to require some sort of democratic legitimization in taiwan i think the chinese position is also that if there is to be a referendum it's one in which china should also take part um or just beijing that would be nice [Laughter] comment on this uh steve would you like um it is the policy i believe of the united states that uh any accommodation uh must be with i think there are two versions either with the consent of the people of taiwan or according to the democratic processes of taiwan i think the former was president clinton i think the latter was richard bush the referendum question is an interesting question uh because if american policy is what it says it is then how else can the people of taiwan express their willingness to become a part of the people's republic of china except by referendum or perhaps a vote of the legislative u.n but it isn't clear and and so i think that when chancho bien and others talk about a referendum first place the constitution does not provide for a referendum the second point is that i think what they're what they're talking about predominantly is a um positive referendum do you want to reunify not do you want independence now the view on the mainland would be i think the result would be the same but there is a subtle difference there it's a difficult question a referendum because as bill says as far as the chinese are concerned this is a problem of all the chinese people right and there is nothing in the roc constitution right that would constitution act correct is our final question yes sir thank you i'm a graduate of the kennedy school i'm wondering what the major uh world power centers have had to say about the resolution of the issues between these two sides and i'm thinking japan russia the european union and the united nations well almost every country in the world has in some way acknowledged expressed respect for the prc position on one china that said almost every country in the world also or major country has some kind of very substantial relationship unofficial relationship with taiwan nobody wants to see war japan is the country outside of the us that is probably the most engaged and potentially conflicted that is to say if there were a real threat of war we have an alliance and i don't have any doubt that the united states would expect japan to fulfill the obligations which are spelled out in various ways under that alliance um but i think there would also be a very strong feeling in japan that depending on this it's a scenario driven situation how did this start was it provoked by taiwan was it provoked by the mainland was it unclear etc so i think everybody would like to see it not explode into war but i think most of them the major european powers for example feel very distant i think from the central political issues they're increasingly engaged economically and they would like to promote some sort of stability but i don't uh myself see this as far as russia is concerned um there's this standard sort of exchange that china and russia had including this week with putin in beijing that they support each other's principal positions i mean russia says it won't have any official relationship of any kind with taiwan and but i'm sure they have a fairly major relationship of various substantive source can i take the opportunity to make one other point about what this issue is really all about and i wanted to do it perhaps in response to the economic question before i don't think the issue that we're all talking about is really um whether there's going to be reunification be it forced or peaceful in any near-term time frame i think the issue first of all the the really salient issue today is can a political framework be created in which the mainland can be competent the taiwan is not going to move to separatism and which taiwan can be confident that the male is not going to use coercion force of various sorts against it so that as they work out a longer term relationship they have some confidence that their basic needs and principles are being met i think that that kind of political framework is very difficult to come by for all the reasons that have been talked about here but i don't think it's impossible and and but i have to say i don't think that other major powers for the most part are going to play a role in that i guess i disagree a little bit with with dwight perkins i do think that the us uh while we shouldn't get in the middle of it whatever we do is going to play an important role in this and we have to be careful about it but the main responsibility rests in taipei and beijing and not with anybody else i will take that because we are at the end of our time a very cautiously optimistic note on which to end our forum today and i would like to to thank john and nina again i'd like to thank bill white uh the director of the forum uh and to thank you all you have heard from our we should call them our citadel our four people who have represented four four given us different points of view and perspectives uh on an issue of without question enduring interest and in a permanent state of creative non-resolution thank you all very much foreign

Channel: Institute of Politics Harvard Kennedy School

Views: 2,560

Keywords: Diplomacy, Military & Security, South & Central China

Id: IP1KbkVrw_Q

Length: 80min 1sec (4801 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021