420 { China’s Quest
and to authorize specific nonofficial entities of each state to represent the
interests of its citizens in the other. A legal basis had to be created for “the
people of the United States ... [to] maintain cultural, commercial, and other
unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan,” as provided by the December
1978 US-PRC normalization communiqué. Thus, in January 1979, the Carter
administration submitted a legislative proposal to Congress. Pro-Taiwan
sympathies and skepticism about the PRC were strong in Congress. As a
result, Congress rejected the administration proposal and crafted its own.
The result was the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), passed 345 to 55 in the
House and 90 to 6 in the Senate in mid-March. The TRA was signed into
law by Carter in April. Beijing demanded that Carter veto the legislation,
but the lopsided votes in Congress indicate that a presidential veto would
have failed.
Beijing believed the TRA seriously violated the bilaterally negotiated nor-
malization agreement. Foreign minister Huang Hua noted (accurately) that
the TRA deleted the word “unofficial” in describing the relations to be main-
tained between the peoples of Taiwan and the United States.^44 The TRA also
stated that the US decision to open diplomatic ties with the PRC “rests on the
expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.”
During the 1978 normalization negotiations, China had repeatedly rejected
exactly this sort of explicit linkage. The TRA also said that the United States
would “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than
peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace
and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United
States.” These clauses, together with the TRA stipulation that the United
States would provide Taiwan with arms “necessary to enable Taiwan to main-
tain a sufficient self-defense capability,” were taken by Beijing to be “covert”
reinstitution of the US military protectorate over Taiwan that had been can-
celed by Washington’s abrogation of the 1954 mutual security agreement. In
sum, the carefully negotiated and finely balanced compromises embodied in
the 1978 normalization agreement were being overturned by unilateral US
action, at least in Beijing’s view.
Beijing understood by this point the American system of separation of
powers with its sometimes unexpected consequences, and may have taken at
face value the administration’s efforts to defend the original normalization
agreement. Yet Beijing was determined to prevent a US retreat from the terms
of the December 1978 bargain over Taiwan. The result was a forty-month dip-
lomatic battle (from passage of the TRA in April 1979 to the signature of the
“third communiqué” in August 1982) that in effect constituted a renegotiation
of the Taiwan issue.
The pro-Taiwan sympathies of the Reagan administration that took office
in January 1981 deeply troubled Beijing. Reagan had long and close ties with
Taiwan’s leaders. During his election campaign he had criticized what he