Quiescence on Taiwan could be maintained only so long as none of the parties challenged the three communiqués. For they contained so many ambiguities that an effort by any party to alter the structure or to impose its interpretation of the clauses would upend the entire framework. Beijing had not pressed for the clarification, but once it was challenged, it felt compelled to demonstrate at a minimum how seriously China took the issue.

  In early July 1995, as the crisis was still gathering momentum, I was in Beijing with a delegation from the America-China Society, a bipartisan group of former high officials dealing with China. On July 4, we met with then Vice Premier Qian Qichen and the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Li Daoyu. Qian laid out the Chinese position. Sovereignty was nonnegotiable:

  Dr. Kissinger, you must be aware that China attaches great importance to Sino-U.S. relations, despite our occasional quarrels. We hope to see Sino-U.S. relations restored to normal and improved. But the U.S. government should be clear about the point: we have no maneuver-room on the Taiwan question. We will never give up our principled position on Taiwan.

  Relations with China had reached a point where the weapon of choice of both the United States and China was the suspension of high-level contacts, creating the paradox that both sides were depriving themselves of the mechanism for dealing with a crisis when it was most needed. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, each side proclaimed friendship with the other less to pursue a common strategic objective than to find a way to symbolize cooperation—at that moment, in defiance of its actuality.

  The Chinese leaders conveyed shortly after my arrival their desire for a peaceful outcome by one of the subtle gestures at which they are so adept. Before the formal schedule of the America-China Society began, I was invited to give a talk at a secondary school in Tianjin that Zhou Enlai had once attended. Accompanied by a senior Foreign Ministry official, I was photographed near a statue of Zhou, and the official introducing me used the occasion to recall the heyday of close Sino-American cooperation.

  Another sign that matters would not get out of hand came from Jiang. While the rhetoric on all sides was intense, I asked Jiang whether Mao’s statement that China could wait one hundred years for Taiwan still stood. No, replied Jiang. When I asked in what way not, Jiang responded, “The promise was made twenty-three years ago. Now only seventy-seven years are left.”

  The professed mutual desire to ease tensions ran up, however, against the aftermath of the Tiananmen crisis. There had been no high-level dialogue, nor a ministerial visit, since 1989; the only high-level discussion for six years had been at the sidelines of international meetings or at the U.N. Paradoxically, in the aftermath of military maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait, the immediate issue resolved itself into a partly procedural problem of how a meeting between leaders could be arranged.

  Ever since Tiananmen, the Chinese had sought an invitation for a presidential visit to Washington. Both Presidents Bush and Clinton had evaded the prospect. It rankled. The Chinese, too, were refusing high-level contacts until assurances were given to forestall a repetition of the visit to America by the Taiwanese President.

  Matters were back to the discussions at the end of the secret visit twenty-five years earlier, which had briefly stalemated over the issue of who was inviting whom—a deadlock broken by a formula by Mao, which could be read as implying that each side had invited the other.

  A solution of sorts was found when Secretary of State Christopher and the Chinese Foreign Minister met on the occasion of an ASEAN meeting in Brunei, obviating the need of determining who had made the first move. Secretary Christopher conveyed an assurance—including a still classified presidential letter defining American intentions—regarding visits to America by Taiwanese senior officials and an invitation for a meeting of Jiang with the President.

  The summit between Jiang and Clinton materialized in October, though not in a manner that took full account of China’s amour propre. It was not a state visit nor in Washington; rather, it was scheduled for New York, in the context of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the United Nations. Clinton met with Jiang at Lincoln Center, as part of a series of similar meetings with the most important leaders attending the U.N. session. A Washington visit by a Chinese President in the aftermath of Chinese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait would have encountered too hostile a reception.

  In this atmosphere of inconclusive ambivalence—of veiled overtures and tempered withdrawals—Taiwan’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for December 2, 1995, raised the temperature again. Beijing began a new round of military exercises off the Fujian coast, with air, naval, and ground forces conducting joint maneuvers to simulate an amphibious landing on hostile territory. This was accompanied by an equally aggressive campaign of psychological warfare. The day before the December legislative election, the PLA announced a further round of exercises to take place in March 1996, just prior to the Taiwanese presidential election.23

  As the election approached, missile tests “bracketing” Taiwan hit points just off key port cities in the island’s northeast and southwest. The United States responded with the most significant American show of force directed at China since the 1971 rapprochement, sending two aircraft carrier battle groups with the carrier Nimitz through the Taiwan Strait on the pretext of avoiding “bad weather.” At the same time, walking a narrow passage, Washington assured China that it was not changing its one China policy and warned Taiwan not to engage in provocative acts.

  Approaching the precipice, both Washington and Beijing recoiled, realizing that they had no war aims over which to fight or terms to impose which would alter the overriding reality, which was (in Madeleine Albright’s description) that China “is in its own category—too big to ignore, too repressive to embrace, difficult to influence, and very, very proud.”24 For its part, America was too powerful to be coerced and too committed to constructive relations with China to need to be. A superpower America, a dynamic China, a globalized world, and the gradual shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific required a peaceful and cooperative relationship. In the wake of the crisis, relations between China and the United States improved markedly.

  As relations began to approach previous highs, yet another crisis shook the relationship as suddenly as a thunderclap at the end of a summer day. During the Kosovo war, at what was otherwise a high point in U.S.-Chinese relations, in May 1999, an American B-2 bomber originating in Missouri destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. A firestorm of protests swept over China. Students and the government seemed united in their outrage at what was assumed to be another demonstration of American disrespect for China’s sovereignty. Jiang spoke of “deliberate provocation.” He elaborated with defiance revealing a latent disquiet: “The great People’s Republic of China will never be bullied, the great Chinese nation will never be humiliated, and the great Chinese people will never be conquered.”25

  As soon as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was informed, she asked the Deputy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accompany her to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, though it was the middle of the night, to express the regrets of the U.S. government.26 Jiang felt obliged by the public mood, however, to express his own outrage but then to use that expression to restrain his public (a pattern similar to that of American Presidents on the human rights issue).

  Chinese indignation was matched on the American side by arguments that China needed to be faced down. Both viewpoints reflected serious convictions, and illustrated the potential for confrontation in a relationship in which both sides were drawn by the nature of modern foreign policy into tensions with each other around the world. The governments on both sides remained committed to the need for cooperation, but they could not control all the ways the countries impinged on each other. It is the unsolved challenge of Chinese-American relations.

  China’s Resurgence and Jiang’s Reflections

  In the midst of the periodic crises recounted above, the 1990s witnessed a period of stunning economic growth in China, and with it a transformation of the country’s broader world role. In the 1980s, China’s “Reform and Opening Up” had remained partly a vision: its effects were noticeable, but their depth and longevity were open to debate. Within China itself the direction was still contested; in the wake of Tiananmen some of the country’s academic and political elites advocated an inward turn and a scaling back of China’s economic links with the West (a trend Deng ultimately felt obliged to challenge through his Southern Tour). When Jiang assumed national office, a largely unreformed sector of state-owned enterprises on the Soviet model still constituted over 50 percent of the economy.27 China’s links to the world trade system were tentative and partial. Foreign companies still were skeptical about investing in China; Chinese companies rarely ventured abroad.

  By the end of the decade, what had once seemed an improbable prospect had become a reality. Throughout the decade China grew at a rate of no lower than 7 percent per year, and often in the double digits, continuing an increase in per capita GDP that ranks as one of the most sustained and powerful in history.28 By the end of the 1990s average income was approximately three times what it had been in 1978; in urban areas the income level rose even more dramatically, to roughly five times the 1978 level.29

  Throughout these changes, China’s trade with neighboring countries was burgeoning, and it played an increasingly central regional economic role. It tamed a period of dangerously escalating inflation in the early 1990s, implementing capital controls and a fiscal austerity program that were later credited with sparing China the worst of the Asian financial crisis in 1997–98. Standing, for the first time, as a bulwark of economic growth and stability in a time of economic crisis, China found itself in an unaccustomed role: once the recipient of foreign, often Western, economic policy prescriptions, it was now increasingly an independent proponent of its own solutions—and a source of emergency assistance to other economies in crisis. By 2001, China’s new status was cemented with a successful application to host the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and the conclusion of negotiations making China a member of the WTO.

  Fueling this transformation was a recalibration of China’s domestic political philosophy. Traveling further along the reformist road Deng had first charted, Jiang undertook to broaden the concept of Communism by opening it from an exclusive class-based elite to a wider spectrum of society. He spelled out his philosophy, which became known as the “Three Represents,” at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 2002—the last Congress he would attend as President on the eve of the first peaceful transfer of power in China’s modern history. It laid out why the Party that had won support through revolution needed now to represent as well the interests of its former ideological foes, including entrepreneurs. Jiang opened the Communist Party to business leaders, democratizing the internal governance of the Communist Party in what remained a one-party state.

  Throughout this process, China and the United States were becoming increasingly intertwined economically. At the beginning of the 1990s the total volume of U.S. trade with mainland China was still only half the volume of American trade with Taiwan. By the end of the decade U.S.-China trade had quadrupled, and Chinese exports to the United States had increased sevenfold.30 American multinationals viewed China as an essential component of their business strategies, both as a locus of production and as an increasingly monetary market in its own right. China in turn was using its increasing cash reserves to invest in U.S. Treasury bonds (and in 2008 would become the largest foreign holder of American debt).

  In all this China was surging toward a new world role, with interests in every corner of the globe and integrated to an unprecedented degree with broader political and economic trends. Two centuries after the first mutually miscomprehending negotiations over trade and diplomatic recognition between Macartney and the Chinese court, there was a recognition in both China and the West that they were arriving at a new stage in their interactions, whether or not they were prepared for the challenges it would pose. As China’s then Vice Premier Zhu Rongji observed in 1997: “Never before in history has China had such frequent exchanges and communications with the rest of the world.”31

  In earlier eras—such as Macartney’s or even the Cold War era—a “Chinese world” and a “Western world” had interacted in limited instances and at a stately pace. Now modern technology and economic interdependence made it impossible, for better or for worse, to manage relations in such a measured manner. As a result, the two sides confronted a somewhat paradoxical situation in which they had vastly more opportunities for mutual understanding, but, at the same time, new opportunities to impinge on each other’s sensitivities. A globalized world had brought them together, but also risked more frequent and rapid exacerbation of tensions in times of crisis.

  As his period in office moved toward its conclusion, Jiang expressed his recognition of this danger in a personal, almost sentimental, way not generally found in the aloof, conceptual, self-contained manner of the Chinese leadership. The occasion was a meeting in 2001 with some members of the America-China Society. Jiang was in the last year of his twelve-year tenure but already seized by the nostalgia of those who are leaving activity in which, by definition, every action made a difference for a world in which they will soon be largely spectators. He had presided over a turbulent period, which had begun with China substantially isolated internationally, at least among the advanced democratic states, the countries China most needed to implement its reform program.

  Jiang had surmounted these challenges. Political cooperation with America had been reestablished. The reform program was accelerating and producing the extraordinary growth rate that would, within another decade, turn China into a financial and economic global power. A decade that began in turbulence and doubt had turned into a period of extraordinary achievement.

  In all of China’s extravagant history, there was no precedent for how to participate in a global order, whether in concert with—or opposition to—another superpower. As it turned out, that superpower, the United States, also lacked the experience for such a design—if indeed it had the inclination for it. A new international order was bound to emerge, whether by design or by default. Its nature and the measures for bringing it about were the unsolved challenges for both countries. They would interact, either as partners or as adversaries. Their contemporary leaders professed partnership, but neither had yet managed to define it or build shelters against the possible storms ahead.

  Now Jiang was encountering a new century and a different generation of American leaders. The United States had a new President, the son of George H. W. Bush, who had been in office when Jiang was elevated so unexpectedly by events no one could have foreseen. The relationship with the new President started with another unsought military clash. On April 1, 2001, an American reconnaissance plane flying along the Chinese coast just outside Chinese territorial waters was being tailed by a Chinese military aircraft, which then crashed into it near Hainan Island off China’s southern coast. Neither Jiang nor Bush permitted the incident to torpedo the relationship. Two days later, Jiang left on a long-planned trip to South America, signaling that he, as head of the Central Military Commission, did not expect crisis action. Bush expressed regret, not for the reconnaissance flight but for the death of the Chinese pilot.

  Some foreboding of the danger of drifting events seems to have been in Jiang’s mind during the meeting with America-China Society members, as he meandered on in a seemingly discursive statement quoting classical Chinese poetry, interjecting English phrases, extolling the importance of U.S.-Chinese cooperation. Prolix as his utterances were, they reflected a hope and a dilemma: the hope that the two countries would find a way to work together to avoid the storms generated by the very dynamism of their societies—and the fear that they might miss their chance to do so.

  The key theme of Jiang’s opening remarks was the importance of the Sino-American relationship: “I am not trying to exaggerate our self-importance, but good cooperation between the U.S. and China is important for the world. We will do our best to do that [said in English]. This is important for the whole world.” But if the whole world was the subject, were any leaders really qualified to deal with it? Jiang pointed out that his education had started with traditional Confucianism on a trajectory that included Western education, then schools in the former Soviet Union. Now he was leading the transition of a country that dealt with all these cultures.

  China and the United States were confronting an immediate issue, the future of Taiwan. Jiang did not use the familiar rhetoric to which we had become accustomed. Rather, his remarks concerned the internal dynamics of the dialogue and how it might be driven out of control, whatever the intention of the leaders, who might be urged by their publics to actions they would prefer to avoid: “The biggest issue between the U.S. and China is the Taiwan issue. For example, we often say ‘peaceful resolution’ and ‘one country, two systems.’ Generally speaking, I limit myself to saying these two things. But sometimes I add that we cannot undertake not to use force.”

  Jiang could not avoid, of course, the issue that had caused a deadlock in over 130 meetings between Chinese and American diplomats before the opening to China or the deliberate ambiguities since. But while China refused to abjure the use of force because it would imply a limitation of its sovereignty, it had in practice refrained from it for thirty years by the time of the conversation with Jiang. And Jiang had put forward the sacramental language in the gentlest of manners.