By Faculty Director Emeritus Jerome A. Cohen
Originally published August 31, 2020 in Newsweek

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This is a time of great tension and uncertainty in U.S.-China relations. Beijing and Washington are engaged in increasing controversies over trade, technology, investment and cyber regulation. Beijing's construction of military bases in disputed areas of the South China Sea and its refusal to accept the decision of a UN Law of the Sea tribunal rejecting its vast claims over that body of water have heightened military apprehensions in Asia. The intensifying coercion imposed on the Chinese people by the Xi Jinping regime during the past eight years, suppressing all dissent and punishing human rights advocates and their lawyers, has magnified the concerns of liberal democracies. Moreover, the world's growing awareness of the regime's multifaceted "transformation" of millions of Muslims in China's Xinjiang region has gradually produced revulsion in Washington and other major capitals. There is also a broad international challenge to Beijing's recent enforcement of an oppressive National Security Law in Hong Kong and beyond.

Immediate prospects for resolving any of these disputes are slim. After veering from pillar to post on various aspects of China policy, the Trump administration has finally decided to mobilize the American people against the "People's Republic of China" (PRC) or, as the Trump group now sometimes calls it, "the Chinese Communist Government." Trumpists hope that dramatizing their "whole of government" campaign will bolster Trump's chances for re-election. In 1972, President Nixon also made China the focus of his re-election campaign, but he sought to improve a long-hostile relationship. Trump, by contrast, is playing the China card to "decouple" the U.S. from the PRC. And Xi Jinping's government, while expressing concern about this disturbing trend, refuses, unlike Deng Xiaoping's government of the 1970s, to brook any compromise.

Yet none of these disputes, even the South China Sea, has as much explosive potential as contemplated changes in America's relations with Taiwan. Given the anti-PRC atmosphere in Washington, there is even interest in possible establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and Taiwan. Such "recognition" of the island's government, whether under its current name—the Republic of China (Taiwan)—or as a newly-branded Republic of Taiwan, would very likely trigger a long-threatened military reaction from Beijing that could envelop the PRC, the United States and Taiwan in a devastating nuclear war.

To understand why requires recalling recent history.

When in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces lost the Chinese Civil War on the mainland to Mao Zedong's Communists, Chiang's central government, called the Republic of China (ROC), fled to Taiwan. The ROC had reincorporated Taiwan into China four years earlier, after the Allied Powers, victorious in World War II, authorized Chiang's military to occupy the island, which had been a Japanese colony for half a century. China had been forced to transfer sovereignty over Taiwan to Japan in the 1895 peace treaty that ended the First Sino-Japanese War. Following Japan's 1945 defeat in World War II, Tokyo surrendered sovereignty over the island but, because of the ongoing Chinese Civil War, the post-World War II treaty arrangements never specified whether that sovereignty was transferred to the ROC, then occupying the island, or to the PRC, which established its national government on October 1, 1949, or to some other status.

Taiwan's legal status was thus in doubt as Mao's PRC forces were preparing an assault that might overcome Chiang's control of the island and terminate the civil war. The highly debated question in Washington was whether the United States, which had long equivocated about how to respond to China's civil war, would intervene in the Taiwan Strait to defend the ROC. In January 1950, President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced, amid great controversy, that the U.S. would not intervene. Despite the fact that no peace treaty had transferred Taiwan's sovereignty to either of the still-contending Chinese governments, Washington maintained that Taiwan had, in fact, been restored to China when Chiang's forces were placed in control of the island. That, stated Secretary Acheson, was done in accord with the allies' wartime commitments, and "nobody raised any lawyer's doubts" about it. The U.S. thus concluded that, since Taiwan should be deemed Chinese territory, Washington should not intervene, since intervention would subject it to international condemnation for violating China's territorial integrity.

Yet less than six months later, when North Korea invaded South Korea, the U.S. immediately reversed its position. Because it perceived the North Korean attack to be not only the initiation of civil war in Korea, but also an all-out attack by the communist bloc that threatened Taiwan as well as French-controlled Indochina, President Truman announced that the legal status of Taiwan, referred to by its Anglo-Portuguese name "Formosa," had actually never been determined and that it would await "restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan or consideration by the United Nations"; in the interim, America's Seventh Fleet would defend Taiwan.

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