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only be, Lee said, Beijing’s acceptance of the reality of the existence of the
Republic of China on Taiwan as the sovereign authority on that island. There
existed on Taiwan and the mainland of China two different political entities,
each of which exercised full authority over a distinct and discrete territory.
Neither entity was, in fact, subordinate to the other. This was the reality that
Beijing should recognize, Lee said. The governments ruling the two sides of
the Taiwan Strait should establish normal relations. Meetings at “interna-
tional occasions” might be an appropriate venue for beginning such normal
government-to-government relations.^9
From Beijing’s perspective, Lee’s formula was nothing less than a two
Chinas proposal. Xinhua denounced Lee’s proposal for ignoring the one
country, two systems formula, which was, the news agency asserted, the com-
mon aspiration of the people on both sides of the Strait—still a rather mild
rebuke. From the PLA perspective, Jiang’s generous and lenient proposal had
been met not with a like-minded attitude, but by a hard-line “two Chinas” re-
sponse. From the PLA perspective, the weak and conciliatory approach that
China had taken under MFA guidance since fall 1992 was not only permitting
but actually encouraging the Taiwan splittists and their American backers.
Conciliatory moves by Beijing were taken by Lee Teng-hui and his American
backers as indication that yet another step toward Taiwan independence
could be safely taken. Rather than moving toward peaceful unification on
reasonable, even generous terms, Taiwan was moving further and further
away from unification. This was being done with the support of anti-China
forces in the United States, PLA leaders concluded, and was part of a plot to
split Taiwan from China via institutionalization of Taiwan’s separation from
the PRC.
The threshold of PLA tolerance was crossed in May 1995, when the US State
Department announced the issue of a visa for President Lee Teng-hui to make
a “private” visit to the United States to deliver a speech at the commencement
ceremony of his alma mater, Cornell University. Lee had graduated from
Cornell in 1968 with a PhD in agricultural economics. This would be the first
visit by a ROC president to the United States since normalization of US-PRC
ties in January 1979. Lee could be expected to use, and did in fact use, his US
visit to propound his views about two separate sovereign governments ruling
the two sides of the Strait, i.e., “Taiwan independence” from Beijing’s point of
view. Allowing an incumbent president of Taiwan to visit the United States in
any capacity was, from Beijing’s perspective, unacceptable and a violation of
the US pledge to have no official contact with Taiwan. In the context of 1995, it
constituted US support for Lee Teng-hui and a turn away from peaceful unifi-
cation under the “one country, two systems” framework. It must be noted that
neither Lee Teng-hui nor Clinton administration officials believed that the
issue of a visa for Lee or Lee’s April 1995 statement on “two political entities”
constituted a repudiation of peaceful cross-Strait unification or of the “one