China is incredibly complex, to be sure. Five thousand years of history is a richer tapestry of plot and character development than any historian could fictionalize. Yet contemporary China is, at some basic level, easier to understand than one might think. The key to understanding China today is to understand its basic ideology of patient pragmatism.
Three areas mark China's pragmatism best: its relations with Taiwan, its ongoing negotiations for accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO), and its policies on human rights. All three sets of policies totally frustrate other nations dealing with China. On all three, China seems unwilling to bend from what seems like a rather irrational position. Yet on all three, understanding why China takes such a position is the first step in the thousand-mile journey to convincing China that its policies are injurious and counterproductive.
China has held Taiwan to be an integral part of the mainland ever since the Nationalist Kuomintang government fled Mao's forces in 1949 to form a "separate" China. In recent years, both sides have been making overtures both of reconciliation and of hostility. China has been using its economic weight to lure nations into switching their official recognition from Taiwan to China, declaring that recognition is mutually exclusive. Only around two dozen states still formally recognize Taiwan, although virtually every state maintains trade links with the island.
Taiwan, for its part, has been making the occasional vague threat of a declaration of independence. Such a declaration is unlikely to come soon, though, if ever. Early in Taiwan's first-ever direct presidential election campaign in 1996, President Lee Teng-hui of the ruling Nationalist Party was running roughly even in the polls with Peng Ming-min of the Democratic People's Party (DPP). The crucial issue in the campaign was the question of independence. The Nationalist Party platform advocated a continuation of the status quo; that is, to sustain the ambiguous relationship with the mainland. The DPP advocated independence.
China had been threatening for years that any declaration of independence would be tantamount to a declaration of war. As if to prove the seriousness of that claim, a few months before the election, China began a series of "missile tests" near Taiwanese territory. The missile tests had two effects. First, it scared the world so much that the entire United States Seventh Fleet sailed to the region prepared to fight. Second, it scared Taiwanese so much that they voted overwhelmingly for the Nationalist Party and their anti-independence platform, both in the Presidential and parliamentary elections. The former effect, in China's eyes, was a tolerable price to pay for the latter. After the election, China stood down, and the Seventh Fleet sailed for home.
