Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Maggie Lewis and Paul Heer.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get, well, access. Access to not only our great newsletter, the Daily Dispatch, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Last month in June, the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR, published a report called U.S.-Taiwan Relations in a New Era: Responding to a More Assertive China. The task force was chaired by Susan M. Gordon and Michael G. Mullen, and David Sacks was the project director. It brought together 26 participants, many of whom will be known to listeners of this podcast. As the task force was bipartisan, it included people’s views on Taiwan, on China, and on many other issues, which were quite far apart, shall we say. And so it is not at all surprising that there were a number of dissenting views on both the more hawkish and dovish sides, as it were.
This week on Sinica, I’ve asked two of the task force participants, both of whom I’ve had on the show, talking about Taiwan in recent years before, and both of whom penned dissents to the CFR report that were published along with that report. Maggie Lewis is a professor of law at Seton Hall and has been on the program before to talk, not just about the Taiwan elections of January 2020 when she was there, along with Shelley Rigger and a lot of the sort of smartest folks on Taiwan out there for that election. She was also on the show the following year to talk about the DOJ’s China Initiative, no longer so named, but still doing its thing. Maggie has been at the forefront on that issue, doing the important work of pushing back against the ethnic profiling that has bedeviled that controversial program since its inception back in the Trump administration. Maggie joins us from Taipei. Welcome back to Sinica. Great to see you.
Margaret Lewis: Always a pleasure to be here. And, boy, is this presidential race getting interesting in Taiwan.
Kaiser: Well, you’ve already promised me that we’re going to get you for a before and after of that, so you’ll be hearing a lot from Maggie come election time. All right, our other guest today, joining us from the City of the Big Shoulders, Chicago, Illinois, is Paul Heer, who listeners will know from his turns on the show. Paul was trained as a historian and has had a long career at the CIA, where he headed the China Desk for many years, and from 2007 to 2015 was the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, ODNI. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia, and bears, I have to say, an uncanny physical resemblance to the subject of that book. Paul is now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Welcome back to Sinica. Great to see you.
Paul Heer: Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be invited.
Kaiser: Just looking at the names of the participants, I think anyone with even a glancing familiarity with the China policy field would know that there was certainly going to be a lot of disagreement within this group. What were the ground rules going in? How was this obvious issue intended to be resolved? They certainly didn’t think you would all come to a set of common denominators of points of agreement, and that that would be a wrap. Maggie?
Maggie: As you said, this was a robust discussion over a long period of time. I appreciate that CFR brought together a range of views, and I think that shows just how much conversation and real debate there is about the best path forward for U.S. policy toward Taiwan. And two, just to be clear, CFR member-based organization, that CFR itself does not take a position. This is an independent expert group that is putting together this report. I really found it useful. I agree that when I’m in a room with Matt Pottinger, we’re going to have differences, but I’d much rather be in a room with people who are going to disagree with me in ways that push me to think about my views and to articulate them better.
I also appreciated that there was the space to have additional views/dissents, because ultimately, this is a report that has got a strong military energy, and that is, of course, key. But there’s a lot more to this debate than just the military aspects.
Kaiser: Yeah, for sure. That’s something that I wanted to drill down on and talk to you about. I do want to get a little more of the mechanics of how this thing worked. Maybe Maggie you could elaborate a little bit and talk about the actual process of producing the report. There were days of in-person meetings and then maybe drafts sent around?
Maggie: David Sacks is the project director, and he did the real heavy lifting. And behind him too, there’s the CFR staff that works not just on this task force, but more generally on the task force, who really were fantastic at hurting us cats, because it’s not easy to have as many people involved. It was a mix of in-person for some people, and then others of us were remote in Zoom land, but it was a series of meetings that were punctuated then in between with sharing drafts, and before it was a full draft, sort of in progress points. Certainly, some things were kind of easier to do, the history, which is not without its complications, but that part took less of our effort.
And then issues like what to do about strategic ambiguity, of course, is going to take a lot more energy to figure out, were we going to get to any sort of general coalescing on a point that could be put into the report itself, or do we have to agree to disagree? But it was over the course of a number of months, and then to the point then you finally get to people like me who are lawyers who like digging in to figure out where there’s commas that shouldn’t be. It was definitely an iterative process involving a lot of brains.
Kaiser: Paul, what were some areas where you had, I mean, Maggie mentioned history, but where you had perfect or near-perfect consensus? Were there some assumptions going into this that you could safely assert were shared by all of the participants or at least the overwhelming majority of the participants?
Paul: If you look at the key findings and recommendations, well, actually more importantly, the key findings, I think there was a consensus from the outset that the reason to confront this issue was that the formulation, the diplomatic formulation that had been made, maintained stability across the Taiwan Strait for the last 40 years was faltering and was no longer serving its purposes over the longer term. There was a common understanding and agreement that that challenge needed to be confronted. You asked about whether there was an expectation or a requirement that we’d reach an agreement and what the ground rules were.
As Maggie said, it was an iterative process, but there was no requirement that we come to closure on the issues. The way that the task force, CFR task force is arranged is there’ll be this iterative deliberative process where we’ll go through successive drafts and successive meetings to wade through things. But then, at the end of the process, the final draft will be presented. And the way it was framed was that we have the option of concurring on the report or withdrawing from it if we fundamentally disagree with its thrust.
I think those of us who wanted to sign additional or dissenting views did so because we largely agreed with the central thrust of the imperative confronting the issue. I think there was much less disagreement on some of the general security issues, some of the economic issues, for example. I mean, Maggie can speak for herself. I saw the greatest divergences of views on some of the diplomatic and political issues.
Kaiser: Sure, sure, sure.
Paul: But as I said, we were given the opportunity to record those, so there was no requirement that we reach full agreement on everything.
Kaiser: Right. Are you at liberty to say whether there were any withdrawals?
Paul: Not to my knowledge, actually. Not that I recall.
Kaiser: Okay. Interesting. There were some things that were in the body of the report that certainly resonated with me. One line that stuck out was “Beijing has not yet decided to pursue a non-peaceful resolution, and deterrence remains possible.” That hopeful note which is quite key in there, but much of the report does ring alarms, and it talks about, I mean, from the very, very outset in Richard Haass’s introduction to it, he talks about this 2027 date, and it’s referred to many times throughout the report, this date that’s often attributed to Admiral Philip Davidson. Whether the readiness that Xi Jinping has supposedly set out is a goal for the PLA centennial actually means, not just be ready for it, but actually go for it, going to do the thing.
For our purposes today, how seriously did the CFR task force take this 2027 date? And was there debate over the significance of it or whether it should be included in the report without the context e.g., that, well, it’s the centennial of the PLA and has more symbolic than maybe real import?
Paul: On that issue, I think that the task force kind of quickly converged around what had, by that time, become the general consensus. There’s been a lot of drawing on this issue for the last two years. But the general view, and I think there was general agreement within the task force on this, is that the 2027 date is a timeframe for the acquisition of a capability. It does not reflect a decision to send a balloon up when that date arrives. Well, I’m not reading classified information anymore on a regular basis, but I don’t think there’s any discernible evidence for that. I think that the general public discourse on that issue has reached that, kind of tendered a conclusion. That was not strongly debated within the task force, but I think that we generally agreed on that point.
Kaiser: Maggie, as you mentioned, much of the report focuses on the military calculus around Beijing’s capabilities, stuff about which I will readily cop to abject ignorance, but Maggie, you worry, as I do, that seeding the ground of expertise on military matters kind of allows those people who do have knowledge to have maybe disproportionate way or to give disproportionate way to the military component of the relationship at the expense of diplomatic and political and economic considerations. It’s one of the things that you expressed discomfort with in your dissent, this dominant military thrust of the report as you described it. This echoes what I’ve often heard from people like Ryan Hass, his co-authors on this new book U.S. Taiwan Relations, Bonnie Glaser, and Richard Bush.
Ryan, as well as Paul, and others as well have often described the Taiwan issue as a political issue with a military dimension, right? But Maggie, your concern seems to be that it’s presented in this report as too military forward.
Maggie: I think there’s a couple things going on here. First, we need to have a credible military deterrent, but we also need credible reassurance. One of the recommendations of the task force is that the United States maintain its One China Policy, recognizing the PRC is the sole legal government of China. Saying that, we go into the history and make clear that the U.S. has not taken a position on the sovereignty of Taiwan. And thank goodness many years ago that the U.S. government only acknowledged the PRC’s position of the One-China principle that it has Taiwan as part of China. The U.S. never recognized, endorsed, or anything like that. So, we do have in this report that political aspect. But my view was that that didn’t get enough attention in the report, particularly with respect to what extent there should be assurances that the One China Policy on the U.S. has not shifted, and in particular with Biden’s multiple remarks that seem to be setting a new baseline and even making some connections to treatment of Taiwan as similar to treaty allies like Japan.
It’s there, but it needed some oomph in my view. The other aspect is that, I, as someone who spent a lot of time in Taiwan, lived here three of the past six years, and perhaps because of my human rights framing, just wanted to make sure too that there was enough Taiwan in this report. It is D.C.-centric with good reason because we’re people writing for a U.S. audience. This was not written by people who identify as Taiwanese or ROC passport holders. But I think it is important to recognize, as we do, that the people who would be most devastated by any military conflict are the people who live here in Taiwan. And also making clear that Taiwan needs to do more to address its shortfalls with respect to defense and civil resilience. That was something which I think is in there, but I certainly want to make sure it gets enough attention as well.
Kaiser: On that point, on the lack of sort of Taiwan centricity to this, was there, to your knowledge, any effort to rope in more people with specific Taiwan expertise into this? Because again and again in these things, Taiwan ends up being this sort of bone of contention, and it ends up being entirely framed as this sort of great power, U.S. and China thing, and Taiwan falls out of the conversation. We all recognize this as a problem, I hope, but it keeps on happening. You are obviously somebody who qualifies, but I didn’t see a lot of other names who immediately jumped out at me as people who are really invested in intellectually and maybe act professionally in Taiwan itself.
Maggie: I do not know the process that they went through to put together the task force. And I’ll be first to say that, although I’ve spent a lot of time in Taiwan, I do not identify as Taiwanese. I’m a U.S. passport holder, and I never want to make it sound like I’ve got this, right? Again, it was supposed to be about U.S. policy toward Taiwan. But I think, though, at the same time, just sort of recognizing our limits about what we could do and not do in this report. But I will say, though, I felt very listened to, and I appreciate that. We had some people in the task force who had tremendous knowledge of geopolitics, international relations, U.S. politics, but quite limited Taiwan experience, and I appreciated that they were very interested in hearing from those of us who had spent more time on the ground here.
Paul: Yeah. On the Taiwan perspective, I would make two points. One, Doug Paal was a member of the task force. As a former AIT director, he has a depth and breadth of expertise on the Taiwan issue. The second thing, which is mentioned, and I think in the foreword to the report is that a subset of the membership of the task force, David Sacks and Sue Gordon, and I think Admiral Harris went to Taiwan on a fact-finding trip early this year, directly as a product of this task force to conduct a wide range of meetings inside and outside the government there. So that was another contribution to the Taiwan perspective.
Kaiser: Okay. This is a little out of order from what I originally planned, but let’s move to this question that Maggie’s already introduced about the fate of strategic ambiguity because the report is ostensibly ambiguous on this question of strategic ambiguity, maybe strategically so. It claims to have not reached agreement on that question, but it seems to me that the report itself, taken without the dissents that were published with it, does lean very much toward what Richard Haass endorses, sort of an end to strategic ambiguity. I think this may be the most controversial section, this box that’s titled “with a Strategic Ambiguity,” and it says the following, let me just quote this, and Maggie has brought this up already, “The task force also assessed that given President Biden’s comments on four occasions that the United States would defend Taiwan, his successors should not attempt to walk back these comments and should instead use them as the new baseline for U.S. declaratory policy.” That’s in there. That’s part of the report. That must have been a controversial assertion.
Paul: Well, I think partly that was a late addition to the report, and it prompted some dissenting views because we were inconclusive in our discussion of that issue. I would note that David Sacks, who was the drafter, the director of the task force and the drafter of the report, was the co-author with Richard Haass of Richard’s article a couple years ago advocating strategic clarity. I mean, that was just a perspective he was going to come from, and then there were other members of the task force to believe that. I think there was an imprecision there on the inclusion of that statement as reflecting the views of the task force as Maggie and I, and I think perhaps one or two others, made explicit in our dissents.
Kaiser: Yeah, Maggie, you certainly did. You called this out in your dissent. Is there any way in which this can be interpreted as less than the task force essentially calling for an end to the very essence of strategic ambiguity that is we will defend Taiwan if Taiwan is attacked, no conditions applied to it?
Maggie: I think, as it says, the task force did not come out on that to that level. I agree with Paul that this was something which obviously several of us made our years go up, and was part, not the only reason that we decided, several of us, to add our additional views/descent. But one thing that I point out too is that before that sentence that you quoted, we also say that the task force concluded that the, you know, more pressing issue is for the United States to credibly demonstrate to the PRC that it has the military capacity and the will to come to Taiwan’s defense. And I think that there was a consensus that we need to show that we’re serious, right?
But again, this comes back to the alongside showing that military might, that where is the political side? Where is the credible reassurance on what the policy is, and how clear is that, how loud is it? And there is debate about sort of, well, yeah, saying that isn’t going to matter. Why does the U.S. have to keep saying what the One China Policy is to the Chinese side? I think that there is good reason to say where we are as a country in our policy, especially because Biden has been not as disciplined as certainly I would’ve hoped in his comments on the issue.
Paul: I think there was an effort to finesse the language, which frankly was not entirely successful. The final reference, to using President Biden’s statements, as a new baseline for established U.S. policy. In one sense, that’s kind of technically correct because he’s said it now four times. It’s the point of departure for a lot of analysis. But I mean, the language does stop short or at least attempts to translating that into advocacy of strategic clarity, which we did not collectively agree to do.
Kaiser: Paul, let me ask you this, as I read the report, deterrence is very much the theme of it, and it’s very much front and center throughout the report. But I didn’t sense that much consideration was given to Chinese calculations of deterrence. After all, what they are trying to do is to deter Taiwan from declaring de jure independence, and deter the United States from intervening militarily. I mean, they flicked at it, but it seems to be sort of an afterthought. It wasn’t really centered in the thinking of how Beijing sees this. Is there enough attention being paid to how, maybe if we could imagine a Beijing counterpart to this task force, a group, a small leading group or some group, foreign policy think tank, how are they thinking about deterrence? And are we thinking about how they’re thinking about deterrence?
Paul: That’s an excellent question. I think you’re right that that is not direct or addressed at great length in the report. And it wasn’t really a central part of the deliberations or a key part of the deliberation of the task force. Actually, you’re highlighting one of the concerns I had, and Maggie mentioned earlier, this overemphasis, as we saw it, on deterrence, on the need for U.S. deterrence. There’s no disagreement that our military deterrent could benefit from being enhanced. I think we also agree with the recommendations that the report makes about the efforts we need to do to encourage the Taiwanese side of the equation to enhance its deterrence.
But we didn’t focus that much on how the Chinese perceived it. My concern was that in the political sections of the report, and even earlier than that, rather than address the Chinese calculus of deterrence, there was an overemphasis on the assumption that what is happening in terms of the escalation of tensions is not a product of Chinese calculus of deterrence. There was an inordinate weight that’s assigned to it that the source of tensions across the strait is essentially the Chinese determination that the status quo is no longer acceptable and that China has become more aggressive and more assertive for systemic reasons, for CCP legitimacy reasons, and for Xi Jinping personal interest and legacy reasons.
This is one of the things I’ve registered in my descent because I thought that the Chinese perspective was, in a sense, exaggerated and overstated. Because you asked the question about how the Chinese calculates deterrence, I think that is a key question because what I think, or the report gives insufficient attention to, is the extent to which Chinese calculations, Chinese behavior, in fact, across the strait, is a response to, or reaction to activities or policies or statements from both Taipei and Washington.
Kaiser: Precisely.
Paul: And there’s acknowledgement in the report of this, but I think it isn’t discussed in sufficient detail.
Kaiser: No, I think you’re absolutely right. Maybe to the task force’s credit, it does recognize, to some extent, that maybe overemphasizing deterrence could actually provoke the conflict that that deterrence is intended to avoid. But this is just sort of said and allowed to sit there without really delving into how that would work, how that might play out, or whether it is in fact already causing Chinese behavior to change, right?
Maggie: There is a recognition of the action-reaction dynamic that we are concerned about where that ratcheting up. And so with this, too, it’s interesting because one thing about being in Taiwan right now is we’re seeing a lot of people come through Taiwan, and starting to see too many people being able to go to China itself. You had Neysun Mahboubi on recently to talk about his trip to China. One thing that struck me throughout this report is just the Rumsfeldian “known unknowns.” What do we know? And how the lack of contact amongst academics, think tankers, as well as government people, means that we just have less information to go on.
I was in Tokyo before coming to Taipei and had a chance to meet with some international relations scholars from China. And to be back in a room talking with them and having the tea breaks, it was just invaluable. So, part of my feeling throughout this process was a sense of that loss of contact, and really just trying to not read too much into the published speeches that we do have and taking a few key sentences in Taiwan and extrapolating, well, then this must be Xi Jinping’s thinking.
Kaiser: That’s right. Let me go back, Paul, to you. Your dissenting opinion focuses on what I think is a very central issue, not just in this report, but in general, on how the American media and policy elites seem on balance to view the causes of this state of affairs. I am constantly seeing this assertion that, like you said, this is China, primarily, that this is for the various reasons that you cited, whether it’s Xi’s personality or for sort of structural changes or what have you, that China has been the principal agent of change to the so-called status quo when it comes to Taiwan. I think the report very much reflects that same general belief. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that it assigns the preponderance of blame to China.
In your descent, which I have to say is quite brave in this current environment, you try to exercise that strategic empathy and look critically at how our behavior, this is a theme we’ve been trying to draw out here, might at least be perceived by China, even legitimately perceived by China as threatening the status quo. So, I’m going to ask you to do this. I know this is risking your neck and your career, everything, but you’re retired, so it’s okay, where have we sliced the salami? What has the United States done to move the status quo? And then maybe we can also talk about what Taiwan has done to move the status quo. I think we should, just in fairness, also talk about how China has to move the status quo, but this is already the conventional wisdom, and everyone is already full of ideas of how China has done so. I think it’s more important to highlight the first two. First, the United States, Paul.
Paul: Well, that’s a loaded question.
Kaiser: Not leading, though.
Paul: My first thought was, you started in terms of the attribution of responsibility for the Cross-Strait tensions being primarily Beijing. I would just reinforce maybe the point I made earlier, and I think Maggie referred to this, it goes beyond that to a certain extent and attributes it in particular to Xi Jinping. There’s a statement in the report that you mentioned earlier, that the risk of conflict will increase over time for various reasons, but one of the central drivers that this is attributed to is this judgment that Xi Jinping, as his tenure proceeds, his source of legitimacy will shift from economic prosperity to promoting nationalism. In fact, Patty Kim, in her descent, questions this judgment for the same reason that I do, and I think Maggie does as well.
Again, it’s the idea that Beijing is responsible, and Xi Jinping in particular. To get to the core of your question, I think that’s a misattribution of one of the core drivers here. What I say in my dissent is that we have to pay attention to the extent to which Xi, whatever his calculations or his personal ambitions, is to some extent responding to actions by Taipei and Washington. This is where I emphasize the point, and this gets to your question about salami slicing that we recommend in the report that Washington needs to reaffirm its One China Policy. My concern is that this does not give sufficient attention to the extent to which that One China Policy has been eroding considerably in terms of both substance and credibility. And you asked, what do I mean by that in terms of the specific salami slicing measures? The strengthening of U.S.-Taiwan relations incrementally over the last 20 years.
The report explicitly acknowledges that these are sources of tension. The fact that the Trump administration largely eliminated any constraints on diplomatic interaction with Taiwan leaders that certainly in Washington, and the Biden administration has retained that loosening of tensions. I think the other is reflected in another part of the report. We’re slicing the salami and, in the sense, getting closer toward, arguably, and I don’t know if I say this explicitly in the descent, but it’s harder to make the case that our policy is not drifting toward a One China, One Taiwan policy. We did have discussion of this in the task force. The report cites, in the security section, and this I think is a central part of the salami slicing. Again, to reinforce that, I’m addressing your question, the testimony that Assistant Secretary of Defense Ely Ratner made in December ’21.
Kaiser: That’s right. I was going to treat that as a separate issue entirely, but we can start into that now.
Paul: I think it fits into this category of Chinese perceptions of U.S. salami slicing. And the report largely endorses the notion, in fact, almost explicitly that Taiwan is a strategic node, is a strategic asset. I think this is the heel of the salami from Beijing’s perspective because this is a new historical formulation that I think is arguably inconsistent with the affirmation that the report makes that we need to provide assurances to Beijing that we’re not pursuing permanent separation of Taiwan from the mainland. But to view and present and portray and advocate Taiwan as a critical strategic node that cannot be allowed to fall under Chinese hostile hands, by and large, arguably makes the case for advocating permanent separation. And that’s a large cut of salami.
That’s why, my point, as I said in the descent, is that, I mean, that’s one of the reasons why we need to be much more persuasive in our affirmation that our One China Policy has not changed. Because when Beijing says that… well, I’m not going to advocate the Chinese rhetorical perspective on this, but I mean, it’s less persuasive to issue reassurances. In fact, the last point I’ll make, Maggie and I were, among others, who raised this same point, that the emphasis on deterrence in the report is not sufficiently balanced by the emphasis on reassurance.
And this is where reassurances are vitally important. The report acknowledges the need to do this, but it doesn’t go into sufficient detail on what the form and substance and nature of those assurances need to be. I think they have to involve a more credible explanation of our One China Policy to make it consistent with what it historically has been.
Kaiser: Maggie, are you in agreement with Paul, were you also alarmed at this kind of formulation of Taiwan as a strategic asset of a critical node that needs to be denied to China? Was that something that also stuck out for you?
Maggie: Yes. Taking a step back, in the part of the report that describes what is the One China Policy, which, of course, itself is complicated because there is no single document headlined One China Policy, one of the bullet points that we make clear is that part of that policy is that the U.S. does not take a position on what any resolution of Cross-Strait differences should look like. Instead, prioritizing process, in particular, that any outcome needs to be arrived at peacefully and as added during the Clinton administration with the ascent of the Taiwanese people. For me, that’s critical. And partially, again, you let a human rights person onto a fairly military-focused task force. But this comes down to me, that’s respecting self-determination, right?
It is not the U.S.’s job to tell the 23 million people surrounding me on Taiwan what their future should look like. But it is fair to say whatever process, the U.S. supports that it be done peacefully and in a democratic manner. For me, that is really, really important. And I say that, again, as the election season is heating up here, which could turn out with having a three-way race right now, and who knows what Terry Gou’s going to do, and maybe make it a four-way, and throw in James Soong, we could have a five-way race. But that is their choice, not my choice. And so, to throw in this, well, because Taiwan is strategically important, which is a descriptive matter, yeah, I mean, if Beijing could make it so they launch submarines from the east side of Taiwan, that changes what happens in the Indo-Pacific, and it changes our ability, as the United States, to feel confident in even how much we can help out, maybe perhaps even allies like Japan.
I think it’s a descriptive matter. The U.S. has tremendous interests in Taiwan militarily, but as a policy matter, what really needs to be made loud and clear and highlighted in neon lights is this point about the U.S. does not, and nor do I think should it take a position on the ultimate status of Taiwan, what that endgame should be.
Kaiser: This point was made really, really clearly in the Doug Paal and Danny Russel dissent. I think that was sort of the centerpiece of theirs. Maybe it’s important to ID them both quickly. Doug Paal, we’ve mentioned it before, was a foreign service officer who was at Policy Planning at State. He had a long career as a senior analyst for the CIA. He was at AIT, importantly; was an NSC staffer during Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Danny Russel, who I had the great pleasure of interviewing for this show, was a career foreign service officer who served as the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific under President Obama. He’s now the VP of International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Neither of these guys is a panda hugger. They’re not kumbaya types. They raise really important objections to this piece of the task force findings, and on those same grounds that Maggie, you were talking about. Because the U.S., it has to make clear that it is prepared to accept unification on terms that the U.S. has long agreed to. It would accept that as peacefully and with the ascent of both Taiwan and China. If we treat Taiwan as a strategic asset, that forecloses the possibility that we would accept even a peaceful unification. Is that correct?
Paul: Yeah, I think that was the point that we were making. In fact, that would reinforce that. Ryan Hass at the Brookings Institution just published an article, which reinforces this point as well. The risks in Taiwan of treating it and talking about it as a strategic asset.
Kaiser: Yeah, that was a great piece. It’s in the Taiwan Times, right? Is that right?
Paul: Taipei Times, I think.
Kaiser: Taipei Times.
Paul: But you can find it there or on the Brookings website.
Kaiser: Yeah. It’s a very good, very short op-ed, but it makes exactly that same point. So, Doug and Danny, Doug Paal and Danny Russel, argue that this simply contradicts the longstanding assertion that any future arrangement is up to the people of China and Taiwan to decide.
Maggie: I want to add here, though, in some ways, just to make clear that the people of Taiwan have made very clear that it’s not in the realm of possibility in the near right, or I think median, at least turn, that there won’t be their ascent to join with the PRC under a single entity. Right. For this, we’ve already mentioned early on Shelley Rigger, but she’s done work with Lev Nachman, who is a political scientist based in Taiwan that goes beyond the standard polling that asks about identity, which itself is fascinating to see the rise in Taiwanese identity over time with now pushing 70% of the people of Taiwan say, “I am Taiwanese. And I’m not Taiwanese and Chinese. I am Taiwanese.” But Lev and Shelley and their co-authors dig deeper to try to figure out, well, what are the views towards China?
What they tease out is more the sense that a lot of people in Taiwan feel great affinity for Chinese culture. Of course, Taiwan is a fairly multicultural place, including indigenous peoples. But it’s the political system which people here are adamantly crystal clear, they do not want to be a part of. I’ll say, you know, looking back to being here in 2020 for that presidential election, the deterioration, if not obliteration, of civil and political rights in Hong Kong really hit hard and was hugely helpful in Tsai Ing-wen’s reelection. That doesn’t feel quite so present in day-to-day conversation right now. But there is no way that ascent would be there anytime soon to join Beijing.
Kaiser: I mean, as completely unlikely as such eventuality might be, it’s still hard for me to imagine an American politician of either party being able to stand up in front of an audience and say, “I would support peaceful unification between China and Taiwan.” Even that seems just terribly impalatable right now.
Maggie: Oh, I agree. And that would be, talk about a soundbite for someone to use in a campaign ad against that person. But I don’t think that needs to be said necessarily. I would even be happy if there was clear statements about, again, this right of self-determination, which is that is what is in the One China Policy and what’s in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the U.S. is a member of, and that we’re not making decisions for the people of Taiwan. And that is short of saying, and we’re okay with one of those decisions being joining together. But of course, the U.S. politicians, not just the executive branch, but in Congress are constrained by domestic political realities. And our Chinese counterparts know that. So, I think that there’s some limits about what can be asked for. You’re not going to get a unicorn with a rainbow here.
Paul: One of the interesting things about that is that the self-determination clause, if you want to call it that, was a relatively new inclusion in our One China Policy. Because when our One China Policy was forged back in the 1970s, Taiwan was neither a democracy nor was that part of the equation that either Beijing or Washington was looking at. And the report, I think, accurately and correctly outlines that this is one of the things that altered the equation over the last 40 years. It’s created some of the dilemmas we’re confronting now.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Maggie: I first came to Taiwan with Jerry Cohen, who, happy birthday, Jerry just turned 93 earlier this month.
Kaiser: Woo-hoo!
Maggie: What we were studying were vestiges of martial law in the criminal justice system and administrative law system. And in the early 2000s, you still felt that. I mean, it was only 1996 that there was the first direct presidential election. So, this is a young democracy. And that bears reminding because it’s amazing that in a quarter century, so much has changed.
Kaiser: Yeah. Absolutely. Hey, so I have one more question, and I want to ask Paul, a while back, shortly after Nancy Pelosi’s visit — during another one of those sort of maelstroms around Taiwan — John Culver, who you know very well, published a piece for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in which he laid out what it was that we would see, what it is that we would see were China, in fact, preparing some kind of a military action against Taiwan. I wonder whether either of you have seen any, I mean, I assume that you both read this, it was a really influential piece, whether you’ve seen anything that he enumerated, transpire. Is there any reason, by his measure, to fear that we’ve moved closer?
Paul: I don’t think so. I mean, I certainly would defer to John, but I think he would argue that he had a very specific list of indicators as the kind of operational things and diplomatic things and all kinds of other preparations that Beijing would be launching if they had decided to send a balloon up.
Kaiser: Well, they did send a balloon up, didn’t they?
Paul: Yeah. And we brought it down.
Kaiser: Yeah. One of those conditions wasn’t the three-week disappearance of the foreign minister?
Paul: No. Well, we might find out some clarity on that in the next day or two. But I mean, the reason I think we haven’t seen those things is because I still believe, and I think logic and history and the evidence still supports the idea that the Chinese are not eager or planning to use force against the island. Now, the counter-evidence that’s cited is China’s exponential and persistent military buildup, which have been described by others as simply war preparations. Well, a military buildup, yeah, you can characterize that as war preparations. That’s what militaries do. You can make the counter observation that when the Pentagon says that China is our pacing challenge, it’s the rationale for our comparable war preparations.
We’re not preparing for war. We’re preparing contingency plans to be capable and ready for war. And that’s what the Chinese are doing. If they had decided that they were going to actually use force, I think we would start to see some of the indicators that John outlined, and we haven’t seen them.
Kaiser: I wonder, though, if there aren’t sort of steps short of war that we haven’t maybe thought through and thought of contingencies for. For example, what would happen if they decided to put a blockade around just Kinmen, just Quemoy, and if they decided to demilitarize Quemoy to insist on its demilitarization, what would we be able to do? I wonder what we think through these sorts of contingencies. I mean; again, I’m absolutely ignorant of American military preparations for these sorts of things and military calculus, but I wonder whether somebody with your long experience in intelligence knows, might have some inkling about that.
Paul: Well, I’m largely ignorant of operational and military plans, especially in the recent years. I would have to defer to operational experts like John Culver and others as to what specific capabilities we would have to counter that. But I think the diplomatic impact would be as important as the military operational impact of that. I mean, it would be immediately perceived as the Chinese having decided to use force and go for the gold in terms of affecting reunification with Taiwan, I’m not sure that it would necessarily reflect that. It might be a test of our capabilities or Taiwan’s capabilities. My guess is that there are options that we could pull off the shelf.
I guess all I can say is that I’m just assuming that if our pacing challenge includes contingencies with regard to Taiwan that those kinds of scenarios are among the planning that INDOPACOM is involved in. And again, in conjunction with our allies who might participate in some way in responding to that.
Kaiser: I mean, I only say this because it struck me reading the report that it seemed to think of things in a kind of a binary that it’s either war or not war, right? An invasion or not an invasion.
Maggie: I’d say here on the ground in Taiwan that there is a real debate about, first of all, how immediate, what are the possibilities for different kinds of, you know, more direct action by Beijing. Of course, we’ve seen over recent years, a huge increase in the number of flights in the vicinity of Taiwan. There’s no doubt there’s been an escalation in that kind of, I’m not touching you behavior, as I think of kids in the backseat of the car. There’s a real debate about how to be prepared because Taiwan has huge vulnerabilities. Some of this is in the report that Taiwan imports nearly 100% of its energy. So, the question is, is nuclear energy going to come back? Something that KMT is raising, Taiwan has increased its conscription to a year for men.
The KMT has also made some noises about whether they agree with that. And there are good questions about quantity versus quality. One thing we flag in the report, which I’m very interested in, is whether there should be more national service that requires female participation. There’s no constitutional barrier to that in Taiwan, and that’s part of the discussion. So, here, too, there’s a lot of conversations about what kind of more coercive or even kinetic warfare scenarios could play out. And just very anecdotally, people I interact with, they really vary in how much they sort of walk around with a sense of foreboding, or this is a far distant future, if anything.
Paul: Actually, I think, on the point you raise, that’s incredibly important because, I mean, John Culver and others, I know, have been on the forefront of making this argument that the conventional wisdom is that if the Chinese decide to use force, it’s going to be D-day, it’s the amphibious assault. But one of my colleagues used to call it the “million man swim” across the Strait. That is probably among the least likely scenarios. China has a wide range of non-kinetic course of options that could be much more effective in achieving its goals, and in fact, has been somewhat effective already in undermining, as Maggie has said, the confidence of folks on the Taiwan side.
Kaiser: Yeah, that’s why I found it so curious that there wasn’t so much discussion devoted to those other coercive, non-kinetic options available to Beijing and what our contingencies might be. In any case, you can only do so much in a hundred-page report.
Paul: I was going to say, I mean, we were constrained because we didn’t have the option of making it encyclopedic, I think.
Kaiser: Right. But kudos to you both for offering such, I think spirited descent. They were excellent. And those were, I think, a saving grace in many ways of the report. I would add Patty Kim’s, which was also excellent, and, of course, Danny Russel’s and Doug Paal’s, very, very good.
Let’s move on now, oh, first, thank you very much for your time, and move on to recommendations. First, a very quick reminder that the Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project, and the best thing that you can do to support the work that we do with this podcast and with the others in our network is to become an access subscriber. For a very reasonable annual fee, you get access to our daily newsletter, which is just great. Just a really, really good one, super readable, really nicely put together. Visually, very nice. We’re always experimenting with new products, so you’ll be the first to get to try them. Yeah, so onto recommendations. Maggie, why don’t you start us off? What do you have for us?
Maggie: Well, I wish that I could send you all mangoes, specifically Irwin, the Irwin mangoes, and I mean, they’re always fantastic this time of year, but I’ve been told by several people that they’re particularly sweet this year because of very climactic reasons.
Kaiser: El Nino.
Maggie: So that’s a recommendation, but get them if you can. But one thing, my recommendation that is available to everyone everywhere is I’ve been listening to a podcast called Fever by John Sudworth, who was the BBC reporter in China for about a decade. He actually ended up fleeing here with his family in the spring of 2021. My family was in Taiwan, and they ended up coming over, and it was literally followed to the airport by plain-clothes police because he was under so much pressure, first for his reporting, his excellent reporting about Xinjiang, and then looking into COVID. Now he’s done this podcast, and it’s a multi-part podcast, looking at trying to find out the origins of COVID. And there was so much noise, Lab Leak and this, and I’ve really appreciated listening to John try to make accessible to a non-scientific audience these very complicated debates. So, I would recommend that.
Kaiser: Okay. All right, I’ll check it out. Although, I’m very, very close to being unable to read another thing about COVID origins. I mean, partially because it is just so complicated, it just breaks your brain. But excellent recommendation. Thanks. All right. Paul, what do you have for us?
Paul: Well, I don’t know if I can now do fresh mangoes. That’s a tough one. But I’ll cheat as usual and give you two quickies. One is I’m going to strongly recommend the movie, Oppenheimer. Not because I want to endorse the politics that has been attributed to it, but because I’m a historian, and it’s an excellent history lesson for, I think the majority of Americans who probably aren’t that familiar with this story, the details of it. It’s a very powerful cinematic experience and very thought-provoking. I mean, it’s not perfect. There’s a couple little things that grit me the wrong way, but I think it’s an extraordinary movie and it’s a must see because I think we need to understand this episode, the magnitude of it in our history, and how it still has relevance today.
Maggie: Wait, Paul, did you do a double feature, Barbenheimer? That’s the question.
Paul: I did not do Barbenheimer. At this stage, I’m not particularly interested in the Barbie version, the Barbie saga, I should say.
Kaiser: Are you wearing your Barbie outfit there? I mean, you’re wearing hot pink right now.
Maggie: I know. I’m in the spirit. And I’ve got my, even so, my hat.
Paul: Oh, God. No, I didn’t do the full Barbie-Heimer.
Kaiser: I am going to see it. I’m going to see it. I’ve already determined that because it’s part of the cultural conversation now, and I feel like I’d be speaking from ignorance if I didn’t see it, so I will. But Oppenheimer, yeah. I thought it was very much worth seeing. I took my history nerd daughter, and we just talked about it for an hour and a half afterward. It was great.
Paul: The second thing I was going to say, as a Kennan doppelganger, I strongly recommend the new biography of Kennan by Frank Costigliola. It just came out earlier this year. I actually found it in some ways more interesting than what supposedly, or is still I guess, considered the definitive Kennan biography by John Lewis Gaddis. I think Costigliola gets more into the personality, sometimes a little more than I’m comfortable with. He even dabbles with some psychoanalysis a little bit around the edges. But I think it’s an excellent book for two reasons. I mean, well, just the topic, but I think it gives you a more human comprehension of Kennan. And it also does a really good job of drawing out the immediate contemporary relevancies of some of his ideas about the need for mutual understanding between East and West. And he’s not explicit on the China side of the equation, but I think it very much applies there.
Kaiser: Looking at it right now. Yeah. I’m going to buy this. This looks excellent. Fantastic. Thank you. Another excellent book recommendation. I’ve been doing a lot of your book recommendations and really enjoying them. All right. So, mine is going to be a book recommendation as well. It’s in anticipation of an upcoming interview on this podcast. It’s really good, though, and it’s not out yet. It’s not going to be out until late August, I believe, but get your hands on a review copy if you’re able. If not, let this just be an appetite-wetting for you. It’s Yasheng Huang’s book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. It’s a fantastic book. It’s one of these books that dares to take on a gigantic historical sweep, a big topic, and to make sort of bold assertions and to really kind of draw links from China’s imperial past to the present in a way that, this is Yasheng Huang, after all, we’re talking about, so, they’re well thought through. They’re very subtle and smart. It happens to also be an area that I’ve worked through myself when working on the rise of technocracy in China and looking at its relationship to the Kējǔ, to the examination system in Imperial China. I’m pretty blown away by this book. It’s really, really good. The rise and fall of the East by Yasheng Huang. Yeah, check that out. Once again, thank you to both of you for taking the time to talk with me. And please make sure to check out the CFR report. Once again, the title of the report is U.S.-Taiwan Relations in a New Era: Responding to a More Assertive China. You’ll see it’s quite the who’s who of people in the China watching space who participated in it. Thanks once again to both of you.
Paul: Thank you very much.
Maggie: Thanks, Kaiser. Thanks, Paul.
Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all of the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
