Diplomatic Interlude with the United States
One result of the
crisis was the resumption of a formal dialogue between the United
States and China. At the Geneva Conference of 1954 to settle the
first Vietnam War between France and the Communist-led independence
movement, Beijing and Washington had grudgingly agreed to maintain
contacts through consular-level officials based in
Geneva.
The arrangement
provided a framework for a kind of safety net to avoid
confrontations because of misapprehensions. But neither side did so
with any conviction. Or rather, their convictions ran in opposite
directions. The Korean War had put an end to all diplomatic
initiatives toward China in the Truman administration. The
Eisenhower administration—coming into office with the war in Korea
not yet ended—considered China the most intransigent and
revolutionary of the Communist powers. Hence its primary strategic
goal was the construction of a security system in Asia to contain
potential Chinese aggression. Diplomatic overtures to China were
avoided lest they jeopardize still fragile security systems such as
SEATO and the emerging alliances with Japan and South Korea.
Dulles’s refusal to shake hands with Zhou Enlai at the Geneva
Conference reflected both moral rejection and strategic
design.
Mao’s attitude was
the mirror image of Dulles’s and Eisenhower’s. The Taiwan issue
created a permanent cause of confrontation especially so long as
the United States treated the Taiwan authorities as the legitimate
government of all of China. Deadlock was inherent in Sino-U. S.
diplomacy because China would discuss no other subject until the
United States agreed to withdraw from Taiwan, and the United States
would not talk about withdrawing from Taiwan until China had
renounced the use of force to solve the Taiwan
question.
By the same token,
the Sino-U.S. dialogue, after the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, ran
into the ground because so long as each side maintained its basic
position, there was nothing to talk about. The United States
reiterated that the status of Taiwan should be settled through
negotiations between Beijing and Taipei, which should also involve
the United States and Japan. Beijing interpreted this proposal as
an attempt to reopen the Cairo Conference decision that, during the
Second World War, declared Taiwan part of China. It refused as well
to renounce the use of force as an infringement of China’s
sovereign right to establish control over its own national
territory. Ambassador Wang Bingnan, the principal Chinese
negotiator for a decade, summed up the deadlock in his memoirs: “In
retrospect, it was impossible for the US to change its China policy
at the time. Under the circumstances, we went directly at the
Taiwan question, which was the most difficult, least likely to be
resolved, and most emotional. It was only natural that talks could
not get anywhere.”15
Only two agreements
resulted from these discussions. The first was procedural: to
upgrade existing contacts at Geneva, which had been held at the
consular level, to ambassadorial rank. (The significance of the
ambassadorial designation is that ambassadors are technically
personal representatives of their head of state and presumably have
somewhat greater latitude and influence.) This only served to
institutionalize paralysis. One hundred thirty-six meetings were
held over a period of sixteen years from 1955 until 1971 between
the local U.S. and Chinese ambassadors (most of them in Warsaw,
which became the venue for the talks in 1958). The only substantive
agreement reached was in September 1955, when China and the United
States permitted citizens trapped in each country by the civil war
to return home.16
Thereafter, for a
decade and a half, American policy remained focused on eliciting a
formal renunciation of the use of force from China. “We have
searched year after year,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified
before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March 1966, “for some
sign that Communist China was ready to renounce the use of force to
resolve disputes. We have also searched for some indication that it
was ready to abandon its premise that the United States is its
prime enemy. The Chinese Communist attitudes and actions have been
hostile and rigid.”17
American foreign
policy toward no other country had ever been submitted to such a
stringent precondition for negotiation as a blanket renunciation of
the use of force. Rusk did take note of the gap between the fierce
Chinese rhetoric and its relatively restrained international
performance in the 1960s. Still, he argued that American policy, in
effect, should be based on the rhetoric—that ideology was more
significant than conduct:
Some say we should ignore what the Chinese Communist leaders say and judge them only by what they do. It is true that they have been more cautious in action than in words—more cautious in what they do themselves than in what they have urged the Soviet Union to do. . . . But it does not follow that we should disregard the intentions and plans for the future which they have proclaimed.18
Based on these
attitudes, in 1957, using the Chinese refusal to renounce the use
of force over Taiwan as a pretext, the United States downgraded the
Geneva talks from the ambassador to the first secretary level.
China withdrew its delegation, and the talks were suspended. The
second Taiwan Strait Crisis followed soon after—though ostensibly
for another reason.