Author's Response

Abstract

[ 137 ] book review roundtable • untying the knot Author’s Response Richard C. Bush Iam deeply grateful to the six reviewers for their thoughtful commentaries. Having different perspectives on one’s work is useful. I share many of the commentators’ observations, and wish here to briefly address some of the issues that they have raised. One of the complaints I heard soon after the release of Untying the Knot was that the front cover of the book portrayed the island of Taiwan in the same color as the Chinese mainland. As Dan Blumenthal indicates, there is concern that the book carries a pro-unification bias. To clarify, my purpose in writing the book was to explain why the Taiwan Strait issue is so difficult to resolve. Given that point of departure, and given the apparent reality (at least to me) that Beijing is not going to permit de jure independence for Taiwan, any “resolution” would seem to mean some sort of unification. Since the people of Taiwan have expressed no enthusiasm whatsoever for China’s “one country, two systems” formula, the question now concerns whether there are other approaches to political union that might be mutually acceptable. Other approaches can certainly be conceptualized (e.g., confederation). Since these options have not been offered in any objective way, however, whether any or all of these alternatives would be acceptable to the people of Taiwan is an open question. Perhaps there is no “one China” approach that would be acceptable. By the same token, however, it is not for outsiders nor for Taiwan’s political leaders to assume that a one-China solution is impossible. Moreover, as I think I demonstrated in Untying the Knot, the only way for Beijing to have some hope of achieving unification is to creatively offer one of these alternatives. A similar creativity and openness is necessary when it comes to the cross-cutting question of identity. I am in fundamental agreement with Allen Carlson’s conclusion that “any resolution of the current standoff will hinge upon the degree to which those on both sides of the Taiwan Strait (at the elite and popular levels) can successfully cultivate a new set of more inclusive and mutually compatible constructs in regard to the question of what it means to be Chinese—and, perhaps, Taiwanese.” As he understands much better than I, these constructs are vigorously contested on Taiwan. Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian may indeed represent the past more than they do the future. Richard C. Bush is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. From 1997 to 2002 he served as chairman and managing director at the American Institute in Taiwan. He can be reached at . [ 138 ] asia policy In his discussion of Beijing’s reading of Lee and Chen, Steve Goldstein argues that Beijing and Taipei were stuck in a sovereignty-unification dilemma analogous to their security dilemma: “[For Beijing] to accept, or perhaps even to explore, the implications of Lee and Chen’s position on sovereignty and their vision of the future composition of China would be essentially to grant Taiwan independence against the promise of an uncertain outcome yet to be negotiated…Lee and Chen would face a similarly unfavorable outcome if they surrendered claims to sovereignty before negotiation had even begun.” Though a fair capsule statement, the above articulation misses a couple of important points. The first is that this dilemma is probably truer of Chen Shui-bian than of Lee Teng-hui. Lee’s position throughout his entire presidency was that there was one divided China. The point of contention centered around the status of the Republic of China (ROC) and how to end the state of division. From a legal point of view, therefore, for Beijing to have accepted Lee’s view that the ROC was an independent sovereign state would have amounted to less of a sacrifice than to have accepted the similar principle on the part of Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) because the DPP did not start from the premise of one divided China. Even with Chen there was an openness to...