Defenders of freedom around the world, especially on Taiwan, have learned to hold their collective breath whenever an American president, foreign leader or other prominent government official makes a high-profile visit to Beijing. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit this week is the latest occasion for concern. What did the Biden administration have to concede for China to allow the visit? What was Blinken maneuvered into doing or saying while there to earn a brief audience with Xi Jinping?
Foreign visitors invariably make damaging policy concessions to China. Sometimes the U.S. concession is willingly granted in advance; other times the U.S. side, disadvantaged by playing on China’s home turf, is manipulated or pressured into giving ground. The classic example, which combines both scenarios, was Henry Kissinger’s 1972 visit to prepare for President Nixon’s historic opening to China.
Kissinger was already predisposed to give away the store — i.e., Taiwan — before he left Washington; Nixon had agreed preemptively to pull the Seventh Fleet out of the Taiwan Strait and to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Taiwan, all to show the communist leaders America’s good faith prior to Nixon’s visit.
Those concessions violated Nixon’s own caveats about how not to negotiate with Beijing. “We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do. We’ll withdraw [from Taiwan], and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing.” It also proved Kissinger’s realpolitik admonition that “In foreign policy, you never get compensated for services already rendered.”
And so the U.S. did not get any of its desired compensation. Beijing did not help in ending the Vietnam war on honorable terms. China did not commit to refrain from using force against Taiwan.
On the contrary, Mao Zedong and Zhou En-lai, through a combination of wit and flattery, kept extracting small, nuanced concessions from Kissinger that cumulatively set the stage for Beijing’s One China principle and Washington’s One China policy. The former declared that Taiwan is part of China; the latter “acknowledges” China’s position and “does not challenge” it, but states America’s “interest” in a peaceful resolution.
Inevitably, the two formulations were deliberately blurred and melded by Beijing, except for the “peaceful” part.
Having misinformed much of the world as to what the Shanghai Communique actually says, China is now in a position to argue that Washington has reneged on the core deal. If enough Chinese believe the canard of U.S. bad faith, China and the U.S. may well come to blows over it.
Of course, it isn’t fully known what winks and nods Kissinger may have given Zhou and Mao that led them to believe Washington had conceded more than the communique’s language conveyed. But there is a hint of possible duplicitous posturing in Kissinger’s book “On China”: He relates Mao saying China could wait 100 years to take Taiwan, and Kissinger quipped he was surprised “China would wait that long.” The “joke” resonates with Kissinger’s more ominous warning to Taiwan in 2007 that “China will not wait forever” for it to submit to Beijing’s rule.
There are other examples of bad outcomes from high-level visits to China. In 1998, President Clinton went to Beijing and yielded to Chinese pressure to announce a presidential imprimatur to China’s Three Nos proscription for Taiwan: no Taiwan independence, no Two Chinas, no One China/One Taiwan. Rather than taking the opportunity to reinforce the congressional policy mandates in the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, Clinton allowed his trip to serve as a boon for Beijing and a serious setback for democratic aspirations and the cause of cross-Strait stability.
U.S. officials aren’t the only ones who make ill-advised remarks when in Beijing. French President Emmanuel Macron said during a visit in April that Europe should not be a U.S. vassal on the question of Taiwan.
Now it was Blinken’s turn at bat, with the first visit to China by a secretary of State in five years.
At his press conference afterward, he cited the Taiwan Relations Act mandate that Washington provide Taiwan with weapons of self-defense. But he missed a perfect opportunity to dispel lingering strategic ambiguity and invoke two key provisions that Beijing needs to be reminded of. (1) The TRA states that Washington’s diplomatic recognition of communist China “rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.”
To enforce that condition, the TRA also mandates that (2) the U.S. “maintain the capacity to resist any use of force […] or coercion” against Taiwan. Hopefully, Blinken told his interlocutors that Washington has not only the capacity but the will to defend Taiwan.
Before the trip began, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang kept up the pressure, blaming Washington for the recent downturn in relations: “It’s clear where the responsibility lies.” It was a continuation of his office’s reaction immediately after President Biden predicted a “thaw” last month. “The US side asks for communication on the one side, yet on the other, suppresses and contains China by every possible means.”
Blinken’s trip is actually a re-schedule of his planned visit in February that was postponed because of the Chinese spy balloon incident. So far, in apparent deference to Beijing, the Biden administration has not released a report on the extent of damage to U.S. national security caused by the balloon’s leisurely travel across North America, touring America’s strategic bases and scooping up incalculable quantities of critical intelligence. Biden ordered it shot down over the ocean after it completed its mission over the United States.
Now that Beijing has deigned to permit Blinken’s visit, Biden should be less reluctant to tell the American public what he allowed to happen on his watch. But the initial signals from the White House do not inspire confidence that it has gained a sense of realism regarding China’s strategic intentions. Biden told Financial Times that Xi did not know what the balloon was doing. “It was more embarrassing than it was intentional.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher, Republican head of the House China committee, said the president’s comments were “naive and misleading. […] We cannot afford to mistake the Chinese Communist party’s recent violations of our sovereignty and increasing aggression as mere accident.”
All this was for the sake of facilitating the Blinken visit, which Washington made clear had to occur before the meetings China really wants. It sees Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as better positioned and more inclined to make economic concessions. Biden already signaled his inclination to ease up on China when Commerce relaxed restrictions on foreign chip manufacturing in China.
Washington needs to stop allowing China to treat normal diplomatic contacts and communications as rewards for “good behavior,” meaning ignoring communist China’s many violations of international norms on human rights, economic relations and national sovereignty. Hopefully, Blinken delivered that message directly in his brief meeting with Xi. The follow-up by both countries will reveal more about the likely path forward.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA