The Taipei Act: A Small Step out of the "One-China" Quagmire - 台北法

by Charles DeBenedetto

(Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen with US senator Cory Gardner (R - CO), co-author of the Taipei Act. Photo Credit: The Diplomat) 

The “Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative,” colloquially known as the Taipei Act, passed the House earlier this month, and I believe it is still awaiting a signature from the President before it becomes law. And the President will most definitely sign, because it passed the House nearly unanimously, with 415 yes to 0 no (meaning 20 people chose not to vote). But still, that is about as unanimous as a vote can get in an otherwise extremely divided government, and why is that?

I think that everyone in the US can get behind Taiwan because everyone has at least one reason to want to support Taiwan. Perhaps you believe Taiwan is important militarily, as it has famously been described as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific.” Or, maybe you are a China hawk, and view supporting Taiwan as a way to further infuriate China. Or, maybe you acknowledge that it is wrong to support authoritarian China at the expense of Taiwan, a democratic country with guaranteed freedoms in line with Western ideals.

When President Nixon first visited China, and subsequently President Carter officially switched diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China), both sides were oppressive authoritarian regimes with lamentable human rights records. At that time, it did not really matter, morally, which side the United States recognized.

But that was over forty years ago. Since then, as the Taipei Act states, “Taiwan [has become] a free, democratic and prosperous nation of 23,000,000 people.” But still, the world continues to play Mainland China’s One-China Policy game, where countries must choose to acknowledge only Mainland China or only Taiwan, and all but fifteen countries around the world have chosen Mainland China. Why then, does the United States continue to play China’s game of isolating Taiwan?

In the Taiwan Travel Act of 2018, the US acknowledges that the limitations on the US-Taiwan relationship are “self-imposed.” We do not need to have pseudo-embassies and pseudo-ambassadors and pseudo-diplomacy. We could have real diplomacy, if only we allowed ourselves to. But what would be the consequences? A war with China? World War Three? We expect the worst, and so we choose the “status quo” which is not what Taiwan deserves, but we seem to conclude that it is the best that Taiwan can get.

So I wonder, who is the intended audience of the Taipei Act? Is it for the fifteen countries that still officially recognize Taiwan? Perhaps, because part of the act states that the United States should “reduc[e] its economic, security, and diplomatic engagement with nations that take serious or significant actions to undermine Taiwan.” Read: you mess with Taiwan, and you mess with the United States. But, this sounds hypocritical, because the United States has also abandoned Taiwan, so why shouldn’t those remaining allies do the same?

Or maybe this is for Mainland China to read. Part of the Act also states that “the President should conduct regular transfers of defense articles to Taiwan that are tailored to meet the existing and likely future threats from the People’s Republic of China.” This is doubling down on our current procedure, as outlined in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, that the US provide Taiwan with defense articles, and is telling China that we do not plan on stopping anytime soon.

But, more than anything, I think that this Act is for the Taiwanese people themselves to see. I think it is about reassuring the Taiwanese people that, even though the world is treating them poorly, giving them a terrible situation, we know that they deserve to be treated as an equal member and partner of the international community. We neglect them because, as King Arthur observed, we live in a world where “Might is Right,” and, since China is much more powerful than Taiwan, we listen to China’s Might, instead of doing what is Right and standing up for them.

But King Arthur created the Knights of the Round Table and they followed chivalry because they believed that we should strive for “Right is Right,” that regardless of the dangers and risks, that doing what is Right should be the only thing that matters.

Reading the Taipei Act, I know that it will most likely result in little change in the real world, but it is an acknowledgement that we know we are doing something wrong. We know that the One-China Policy is ridiculous, that it is built on lies that China has claims to Taiwan when it doesn’t. Lies that they share an inevitable fate of reunification when they don’t. Lies that Taiwan and China cannot exist as two independent states when they can.

In our personal lives, lies tend to slowly eat away at us. We obsess at covering them up with more lies, creating more and more disharmony until eventually, usually in some kind of pathos or watershed moment, the lie comes out, because it has to in order for us to realign ourselves with Order. And so, international lies work in the same way. They do not reflect reality, and they become messier and messier until they have to be confronted, and that is what the US is doing now. We are trying to get out of the lie that we have allowed ourselves to be caught in. The Taipei Act is a small step out of that quagmire, because, regardless of all the ways we neglect Taiwan and embrace China, we are fully cognizant that embracing China’s Might is wrong, and standing with Taiwan is Right.

Update: The US President signed the Taipei Act on March 26th. It is now law.