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CNN
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Former US President Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100, is remembered in China for ending decades of hostility and establishing diplomatic ties with the Chinese government at the expense of Taiwan.
The diplomatic shift of 1979 led to significant changes in U.S.-China relations in the decades that followed. And its effects are still being felt today as tensions rise across the Taiwan Strait.
At the height of the Cold War, the Carter administration held months of secret negotiations with Chinese officials to normalize relations, which had been estranged since the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949.
For decades, Washington recognized the Republic of China in Taipei as China’s sole legitimate government after the Kuomintang lost a civil war to the Communist Party and fled from mainland China to the island of Taiwan.
The country’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China began under President Richard Nixon, who visited Beijing in 1972. But it was Carter who oversaw the formal switching of Washington’s diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
On December 15, 1978, President Carter announced that in early 1979 the United States would end diplomatic relations with the Republic of China in Taipei and recognize the People’s Republic of China in Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China.
While there were celebrations in Beijing, the announcement shocked many in Taiwan and was followed by widespread anger and intense feelings of abandonment and betrayal, and sparked violent anti-American demonstrations in Taipei. It has developed to. The United States also canceled its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and withdrew military personnel from the island.
On January 1, 1979, the United States and the People’s Republic of China officially established diplomatic relations and opened embassies in their capitals. Later that month, President Carter welcomed China’s supreme leader Deng Xiaoping on the South Lawn of the White House, the first visit by a Chinese Communist Party leader to the United States.
“I hope that normalization will help unite us toward a world of diversity and peace,” Prime Minister Carter said at the welcome ceremony. “For too long, our two peoples have been cut off from each other. Now we share the prospect of new flows of commerce, ideas and people that will benefit both countries.”
In response, Deng Xiaoping praised Carter’s “visionary decisions” that played a key role in ending “30 years of discomfort between us.”
In the years that followed, bilateral relations developed, ranging from trade and investment to academic and cultural exchanges. One of the areas of engagement Carter facilitated was student exchange. During the negotiations to normalize diplomatic relations, Deng Xiaoping raised the issue of whether Chinese students should be allowed to study in the United States.
“When that question was posed, my advisor, Dr. Frank Press, thought it was important and called me at 3 a.m. in Washington just to be safe,” Carter said at the Chinese embassy in Washington. He wrote in a letter to the U.S. Department of State. 2019.
“Deng Xiaoping asked me if China could send 5,000 students, and I said China could send 100,000 students,” Carter wrote.
Supporter of engagement and democracy
As bilateral relations have deteriorated in recent years, some U.S. critics have questioned the country’s engagement strategy with China.
Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has taken a more authoritarian turn domestically and become increasingly assertive externally, as China grows economically and integrates with the world. It is shattering the once widely held hopes that there would be a shift towards a liberal political model.
Amid rising tensions and calls for “decoupling,” Mr. Carter remained calm and steadfastly supported continued engagement.
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of normalization of U.S.-China relations, Carter wrote in the Washington Post that the two countries’ important relationship was “in jeopardy” and that normalization of relations between the two countries would “result in a modern Cold War between the two countries.” It is unthinkable,” he warned. A deep sense of distrust continues.
“At this sensitive time, misunderstandings, miscalculations, and failure to follow carefully established rules of engagement in areas such as the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea could escalate into military conflict and cause a global catastrophe,” he said. There is a gender,” he said.
Even after leaving office, Carter remained a key figure in U.S.-China relations. He has visited China many times and has been welcomed by successive Chinese leaders, from Jiang Zemin to Xi, who called him an “old friend of the Chinese people.”
In 2019, in the midst of a bitter trade war with China, former US President Donald Trump made an unusual call to the Carter Council to discuss ongoing trade negotiations with China.
But Mr. Carter’s experience with China long predates his presidency. Carter’s interest in China began in 1949, when he visited the Chinese coast as a young submarine officer in the U.S. Navy, according to an interview he gave to the Council on Foreign Relations.
As the civil war raged in China, Carter’s submarines operated in and out of Chinese ports from Shanghai to Qingdao.
“And I could see the transition of China between the Chinese nationalist army, which had only captured a few ports, and the communist army, where you could see campfires on the hillside,” he said. Ta.
A few months after Mr. Carter left China, nationalists fled the mainland to Taiwan. “So I saw the birth of China. By the way, China was born on October 1, 1949, which is my birthday. And since then, my strong interest in China has grown. I think so,” he said.
Mr. Carter remains a respected figure in China, despite the rocky relationship in recent years.
On Monday, the Chinese government expressed deep condolences over Carter’s death, praising him as a “key promoter and decision-maker” of establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and China.
“He has made great contributions to the development of China-US relations and friendship between the two countries over the years, which we highly value,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said at a regular press conference.
In reporting on Carter’s death, Chinese state media focused on his accomplishments in U.S.-China relations. On Chinese social media, many users praised him as a “good old man.”
But the Chinese government and state media have said little about Carter’s role in promoting religious freedom and grassroots democracy in China.
At a dinner he hosted for a Chinese delegation in 1979, Mr. Carter secured Deng Xiaoping’s agreement to allow unlimited worship and Bible distribution in China. (Christians experienced large-scale repression under the Xi Jinping regime).
For more than a decade, starting in the late 1990s, the Carter Center has supported and monitored elections in rural China. Carter himself traveled to a village in eastern China to observe a similar election in 2001, where he witnessed villagers vote and elected local officials greet them on stage.
This kind of involvement is almost unthinkable in China today. The Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly attacked “Western values” and views foreign nonprofit organizations with deep suspicion, especially those promoting democracy, the rule of law, and rights advocacy.
In Taiwan, Mr. Carter’s legacy is even more complex.
When Mr. Carter first visited Taiwan in 1999, he was still facing many questions and criticism for his abrupt announcement 20 years earlier that he was severing diplomatic relations with Taipei.
In a speech in Taipei, Mr. Carter confronted Taiwan’s veteran opposition politician Annette Lu, who accused Mr. Carter of rolling back Taiwan’s democratic process and demanded an apology to the Taiwanese people.
Mr Carter refused to apologize and insisted his decision was “the right one”.
In a guest lecture at a university in Atlanta in 2018, Carter said he had a “huge argument” with Deng Xiaoping over the status of Taiwan during the 1978 negotiations.
“China has always wanted us to declare Taiwan a province of China and wanted us to break our agreements with Taiwan and stop all military aid.” “I had argued that we should abandon our treaty with Taiwan only if we agreed to a treaty that required one year’s notice. I also advocated continued defense assistance to Taiwan. and insisted that differences between China and Taiwan be resolved peacefully.
After the diplomatic shift, the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which allowed the U.S. government to maintain close unofficial ties with Taipei, providing commercial, cultural, and Other exchanges were encouraged.
The bill also requires the United States to “provide arms of a defensive nature to Taiwan” in order to maintain an “adequate self-defense capability,” but would require the United States to It is not specified how to respond. This is known as a policy of “strategic ambiguity.”
As relations between China and the United States have sharply declined in recent years, the Taiwan issue has become an important source of tension between the two countries.
