A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, and: About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton (review)

Patrick Tyler, a reporter who has worked in China, the Middle East, and Russia for the Washington Post and the New York Times, has written a sophisticated and absorbing book. Even though based mainly on American sources, including some two hundred interviews with American officials, and only sparsely on Chinese sources, it nevertheless manages, with several exceptions, to be fair toward the People's Republic of China.

The book begins by raising right away the question of whether the Taiwan problem is likely to result in warfare between the United States and China. Although the author believes that such a war is not inevitable, he points out somberly that the likelihood of military conflict over the future of Taiwan is no longer decreasing but will continue to increase in the next two decades.

More alarmingly, Tyler speaks of "the certainty that any war between China and Taiwan would draw the United States into a defense of the island" (p. 6). His reasoning is not based on the requirements of the Taiwan Relations Act, passed by an overwhelming majority by Congress in 1979. For this Act, contrary to widespread belief, went no further than to proclaim that in the event of a Chinese military action against Taiwan, the United States would consider any such action to be "a threat to the peace of the Western Pacific" and "of grave concern to the United States."

Still, it is a valid question whether, in that event, American public opinion could be mobilized by a strongly pro-Taiwan Congress so as to force the president to put major military muscle behind that "grave concern." Tyler claims to perceive "the inescapable reality that America would enter such a war" (p. 6). He takes this so much for granted that he barely bothers to try to prove the point.

Next, the book turns to the episode of March 1996, when China fired two surface-to-surface missiles from the mainland to "target boxes" just outside Taiwan ' s main harbors, and President Clinton responded by dispatching two aircraft carrier task forces to Taiwan waters for the purpose of showing American resolve to defend Taiwan if need be. Here Tyler describes a dramatic clash between Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and Secretary of Defense William Perry, when the latter wanted the carriers to sail right into the Taiwan Strait right next to the "target boxes" as a show of force, whereas the former insisted on keeping the carriers to the east of Taiwan, far away from China's missile targets. Shalikashvili prevailed, thus conveying the message that on this issue the U.S. Navy would rather float around than fight.

But then Tyler ignores his own evidence by concluding that in the aftermath of this deployment "there was no longer any ambiguity. America was bound by law, politics, and moral imperative to act in the face of blatant coercion or unprovoked aggression" (p. 36). He is, of course, wrong as to law, as I have noted with regard to the Taiwan Relations Act, although arguably correct as to American domestic politics. But Tyler's claim that America has a moral imperative to defend Taiwan in the face of "unprovoked aggression" rests on the false proposition that Chinese military action against Taiwan would constitute aggression.

For, in view of the fact that most of the world's governments, including that of the United States, have long acknowledged that Taiwan is part of China, any Chinese military action against Taiwan would be a domestic affair rather than foreign aggression. In the event of a possible...