Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations

• 1. Introduction

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  The Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, announced on the 15th of December 1978, changed the shape of international politics in ways that are still contested today. In a single document, the United States formally recognized the People's Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, and simultaneously ended its official recognition of the Republic of China on Taiwan. President Jimmy Carter made that announcement himself. What the world did not know at that moment was that buried inside the text of the communiqué was a single Chinese word that the two governments did not actually agree on. That word would fuel a dispute over Taiwan's status that has never been fully resolved. How did a translation discrepancy of one verb survive into the final version of a document of this magnitude? Who knew? Who said nothing? And what exactly did the United States agree to?

• 2. What Carter Gave Up

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  Jimmy Carter did not simply extend a diplomatic handshake to Beijing. He simultaneously withdrew all U.S. military personnel from Taiwan and terminated the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty that the United States had signed with the Republic of China. Both announcements came in December 1978, in the same breath as the communiqué. The implications for Taiwan were immediate and stark. Official government representation was gone. Diplomatic relations were severed. What remained in place was a framework that operated at arm's length. The Taiwan Relations Act, passed with unequivocal congressional support and signed by the Carter Administration shortly after the communiqué, created a legal basis under U.S. domestic law for maintaining commercial, cultural, and other relations with Taiwan without official government-to-government ties. Those relations would be managed through a body called the American Institute in Taiwan, an unofficial channel standing in for the embassy that no longer existed.

• 3. Nine Points, One Ambiguity

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  The American Institute in Taiwan later outlined nine core summary points from the 1979 agreement. Most of them read as careful diplomatic balancing acts. The U.S. recognized the People's Republic of China as the sole legal government of China. Both sides pledged respect for each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Neither would interfere in the other's internal affairs. On the question of arms sales to Taiwan, the United States stated it did not seek a long-term policy of supplying weapons to the island, and instead intended to gradually reduce those sales over time, working toward what the document called a final solution. The Chinese government, for its part, emphasized that the Taiwan question was an internal Chinese affair. Both sides agreed that the development of U.S.-China relations would serve not only their own interests but peace and stability more broadly. They also reaffirmed the principles of the Shanghai Communiqué, which had been released almost seven years earlier. Point five of the nine contains the phrase that would anchor decades of American diplomatic language: the U.S. stated it was not pursuing a policy of two Chinas or one China, one Taiwan.

• 4. The Hidden Word

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  During the final proofreading stage on the eve of the communiqué's release, Zhang Wenjin, then Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, noticed something. The English text used two different verbs. When referring to recognition of the PRC as the legal government of China, the U.S. text used the word "recognizes." When referring to the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China, the English text used only "acknowledges" and qualified the statement as a "Chinese position" rather than an accepted fact. Zhang decided to resolve that asymmetry in the Chinese-language version of the document. He set the Chinese verb for the Taiwan passage to "承认", the same word that in English carries the force of "recognizes" rather than merely "acknowledges." The two language versions of the communiqué went out simultaneously, with that difference intact. U.S. diplomat Harvey Julien Feldman later disclosed in a 1999 interview that James Stapleton Roy, the deputy director of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing and a participant in the negotiations, was aware of the translation change. Feldman believed Roy said nothing because he wanted normalization to proceed.

• 5. A Disagreement That Continues

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  Successive U.S. governments after 1979 have maintained a consistent position: the United States only acknowledges, meaning it does not agree with, the Chinese view that Taiwan is part of China. American officials have restated this on many occasions and have argued that only the English text is binding on the U.S. government. China's position is equally firm in the opposite direction. Beijing insists the Chinese text is also binding on Washington, and therefore that the U.S. accepted and agreed with the one-China principle as China defines it. That gap between "acknowledges" and "recognizes" has never closed. It is the same gap Zhang Wenjin quietly bridged in the Chinese text on the night before the communiqué was announced, and that Roy apparently saw and left alone in the interest of moving forward.