When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with his Chinese counterpart, Dong Jun, in Singapore late last month, he was treated to the usual litany of preemptive Beijing complaints alleging hostile U.S. intentions — “containment,” “encirclement” etc. — and U.S. bad faith by failing to honor the “one China principle.” Such charges have been repeated so often and so relentlessly that many Americans and others have come to accept them as historical fact.
Whether China’s professions of injured sensitivities are feigned or authentic depends on whether the communist leaders believe their own propaganda.
The bad-faith charge stems from the seminal document co-authored by Henry Kissinger and Zhou En-lai, the Shanghai Communiqué, the original sin of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations. Attempting to bridge the longstanding chasm between the Chinese and U.S. positions on Taiwan, Kissinger utilized what he, President Nixon, and many others considered “brilliant” wordsmithing.
In the Joint Communique, China emphatically stated its position on Taiwan: “[T]he Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China; Taiwan is a province of China; which has long been returned to the motherland. … The Chinese Government firmly opposes any activities which aim at the creation of ‘one China, one Taiwan,’ ‘one China, two governments,’ ‘two Chinas,’ and ‘independent Taiwan’ or advocate that “the status of Taiwan remains to be determined.” Over the last half-century, that language became encapsulated in Beijing’s “one China principle.”
Kissinger apparently took no issue with China’s misstatement of history that Taiwan “has long been returned to the motherland.” In fact, after its surrender ending World War II in the Pacific, Imperial Japan, which had held Taiwan as a colony since 1895, simply relinquished its own claim to Taiwan without designating which country now exercised sovereignty over the island.
In the face of China’s unambiguous declaration, the U.S. side mildly stated: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.” The shorthand for the U.S. formulation is our “one China policy,” which Beijing routinely conflates with its own position.
As a former Harvard professor perfectly fluent in English notwithstanding his background as a German immigrant, Kissinger surely knew that the term “acknowledge” has several meanings.
Its first definition is “to admit to be real or true.” Beijing immediately accepted that meaning as expressing America’s agreement with China’s position. The second dictionary definition of “acknowledge” is “to express recognition or realization of.” That is the bottom-line view Washington has espoused over the decades — that it simply took note of China’s position without concurring in it. But Beijing and much of the world are not buying the semantics.
