Pinning Down that Elusive Status Quo

US Ambassador Harvey Feldman, who led the drafting of the Taiwan Relations Act, weighed in at the Heritage Foundation last month with a review of what the Status Quo is.

At the most obvious level, the status quo is an entity called China on one side of the Taiwan Strait and an entity called Taiwan on the other. The claims each makes certainly are part of the status quo and so deserve some consideration.

The Chinese government asserts something it calls "the sacred One China Principle" which, when it speaks to the people of Taiwan, goes like this: One China is the China that will be created by the necessary and inevitable unification of Taiwan with the mainland. But when China addresses an international audience, it goes like this: There is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is a province of that China whose only lawful representative is "the people's government in Beijing." This is the formula used to block Taiwan's participation in the World Health Organization and other international bodies.

Back in the days of one-party authoritarian rule on Taiwan, Taipei claimed to be the seat of the legitimate government of all China, including not only Taiwan but Mongolia and Tibet as well. And the United States recognized it as such, more or less, up to January 1, 1979, when diplomatic recognition switched to Beijing. "More or less," because after President Nixon's visit to China in 1972 and the issuance of the Shanghai Communique, diplomatic niceties aside, America dealt with the government in Beijing as the government of China and the government in Taipei as the government of Taiwan. Despite the subsequent change in diplomatic relations, it still does. And we recognized Mongolia many years ago.

In 1991, a dozen years after the U.S. switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing, the Taipei government stopped claiming to be the legitimate government of China and asked to be recognized only as the government of the territory it obviously controls, Taiwan and associated islands. But the government still calls itself, formally, "The Republic of China" (ROC for short), its name under a constitution written for all of China, adopted in Nanjing in 1947, and brought to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. That constitution has been amended many times, for example to eliminate the seats of those who claimed to represent mainland districts not under ROC control since 1949, but it remains in force.

The U.S. regarded neither the amendments nor dropping the claim to be the legitimate government of all of China to be changes in the status quo—or at least not changes that merited some statement of displeasure. After all, it would be a bit difficult to insist that the ROC should maintain its claim to legally govern all of China when the U.S. recognizes another in that role. But were the Taipei government to call the mainland-issued 1947 constitution null and void, drop the name Republic of China, and call itself something simple and descriptive like "Taiwan," the U.S. would likely denounce these actions as a most grievous unilateral change in the status quo. China would regard it as intensely provocative.

Feldman's article is a good basic review of what the Status Quo means from an American perspective. Note that the way the Status Quo is understood and constructed by all sides, China's diplomatic isolation of Taiwan is not treated as a violation of the Status Quo -- if Costa Rica jumps ship, that's too bad, but events that happen within the Taiwan Straits are regarded as potential violations of the Status Quo. In other words, in addition to the Status Quo's increasingly wongheaded basis, it is manifestly incomplete, with competition between Taiwan and China likely to occur anywhere in the world.

Several conservative scholars are attempting to reconstruct recent US policy, which is tilting toward China -- State Department maps list Taiwan as part of China -- and return it to the days prior to Henry Kissinger, when the US was quite clear: the status of Formosa was undetermined:

Actually, no. In fact, the U.S. makes no formal statement at all about Taiwan's status. In the communiqué establishing diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, the U.S. "acknowledged" the Chinese position that there is but one China of which Taiwan is a part. That word, "acknowledged," is diplomatic jargon meaning "we understand that is your claim." Washington has never said it regards Taiwan as a PRC province. Nor, when various Taiwan spokesmen assert that the island republic is a separate, independent sovereignty, has the U.S. contradicted that claim. It is true that both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have said they would not support Taiwan's membership in international organizations that admit only states. But in this, they appear not to have read American law carefully enough.

Wish more people understood things this way.

[Taiwan] [US] [China] [Status Quo]