The Strategic Triangle } 425
a small wheel located inside this big wheel.”^56 Huang retorted: “Arms sales
to Taiwan are not ... a small wheel, but a big wheel and a big question that
influences our bilateral relations and the strategic overall situation. I hope the
United States will pay serious attention to it.”
The Americans tried repeatedly to insert consideration of “the interna-
tional situation” in various documents regarding the arms sales issue. The
Chinese side just as consistently rejected this. When Vice President George
H. W. Bush arrived in China in May 1982 to discuss the increasingly tense
arms sales issue, for example, he released a statement upon arrival at the
airport saying that his talks would cover Argentina, Afghanistan, Poland,
and Cambodia. His purpose in doing this, according to Huang Hua, was
“to cover up the crisis existing in Sino-US relations and to create the false
impression that China and the United States were discussing international
strategy.” Beijing kept all statements arising from the arms sales talks free of
references to various international issues, other than pointed statements that
failure to reach agreement on the arms sales issue could have adverse effects
on the international situation. Beijing was in effect (i.e., not explicitly) threat-
ening defection from its anti-Soviet/hegemony partnership with the United
States to pressure Washington on the arms sales issue. In November 1980 (the
same month Reagan was elected president), the Netherlands announced it
intended to sell two submarines to Taiwan. After Holland moved ahead with
the sale, the PRC mission in the Netherlands threatened, in March 1981, to
downgrade China’s mission in Holland to a chargé d’affaires. In June, Beijing
followed through on its threat. Later in the year, during discussions with Haig
in Washington, Huang Hua insisted that if the United States sold arms to
Taiwan, Beijing would have to treat the United States the same way it had
treated the Netherlands. China could not be expected to treat a great power
and a small country differently, Huang insisted. “Only when the US under-
took to reduce its arms sales to Taiwan on an annual basis and to stop them
eventually could China treat the US and the Netherlands differently,” Huang
told Haig.^57
China’s position in the arms sales negotiation battle was not strong. The
United States had clearly and explicitly stated during the 1978 negotiations
its intention to continue selling arms to Taiwan after normalization. In the
broader context, the collapse of PRC-US strategic cooperation could seri-
ously injure the Four Modernizations, which were the core of Deng’s pro-
gram. These weaknesses were reflected in the outcome of the 1981–1982 arms
sales negotiations. Beijing failed to directly link arms sales to territorial sov-
ereignty. It permitted the United States to implicitly link “peaceful resolu-
tion” and arms sales in the communiqué. Moreover, this implicit linkage was
translated into a presidential directive which established the US interpreta-
tion as US policy. The United States gave only a vague and temporally indef-
inite commitment to end arms sales. Arms sales continued. And the TRA