Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

James Green: Welcome to the U.S.-China Dialogue Podcast from Georgetown University.

This podcast series explores diplomacy and dialogue between China and the United States during the four decades since normalization of relations in 1979. We'll hear from former ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries, and White House advisors, who will share how they shaped the course of the most complex relationship in international diplomacy today.

I’m your host, James Green. Today on the podcast, we talk to Richard Bush.

Few people alive today have had the Congressional, executive branch, intelligence service, and academic experience of Richard Bush in dealing with the most challenging issue in U.S.-China relations. The one that could lead to armed conflict. Here, I am talking about Taiwan.

At the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces left the mainland and retreated to the island of Taiwan. At the outbreak of the Korean War a year later, the U.S. sent warships into the Taiwan Strait and bolstered military ties with Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek and his son ruled Taiwan as a single-party Leninist state through the leadership of the Nationalist Party, known as the Guomindang or KMT. That police state began to unravel after 1984, when an assassin killed Taiwan dissident Henry Liu in Daly City, CA. Diane Sawyer did a full piece on 60 Minutes about the murder.

Diane Sawyer (audio): Shockwaves halfway around the world, from Washington to Taiwan. The murdered man was a fifty-one-year-old American of Chinese descent named Henry Liu. A journalist, a constant critic of the government of Taiwan, the author of a critical biography of its president. But there are signs that Henry Liu was also a man playing with fire.

Interviewee: The date was October the 15th, 1984. Murder occurred sometime, 9:15 in the morning.

Diane Sawyer (audio): Lieutenant Tom Reese is chief of detectives in Daly City, CA. The middle-class suburb south of San Francisco where Henry Liu lived on this quiet cul-de-sac overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As Henry Liu walked to his garage, the gunmen were lying in wait. They opened fire. Henry Liu was shot at close range three times, twice in the abdomen, once between the eyes.

James Green: In response to U.S. outrage over the execution, Chiang's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, began to relax political restrictions and open up space for public discourse and civil society on Taiwan. Eventually, the ruling KMT lost power to the opposition Democratic Progressive Party in a watershed election in March 2000. But while politics on Taiwan evolved, the Chinese Communist Party remains firmly in control in Beijing and continues to claim Taiwan as a rightful part of China.

In his conversation with me, Richard Bush explains his role in the democratization process on Taiwan. He then unpacks the key elements of U.S. policy towards the People's Republic of China and Taiwan since 1979, including military ties and areas of contention between Washington and Beijing. For anyone wanting to understand this intricate history and a potential flashpoint in U.S.-China relations, Richard Bush's experience and insights are simply unmatched.

Thank you, Richard Bush, for talking today. You've had a long career in the Congress, in academia and think tank world, and in the intelligence community. I want to start with your biography, particularly as someone who graduated college in the late 1960s and then went to graduate school to study Asia. I guess I would ask: what prompted that given broader global events?

Richard Bush: It was personal history. My parents were missionaries in Asia, and during my high school years we lived in Hong Kong. I learned absolutely nothing about China at the British middle school that I attended. But the experience of living in a Chinese society for five years without a break, left a lasting impression. And not too long after I began college I decided I wanted to do China professionally and I'm still doing it and I feel very fortunate.

James Green: Wow, that's an amazing story. So, did you grow up at the school in Hong Kong, did they teach Cantonese or Mandarin or no Chinese language at all?

Richard Bush: No. This school was a British school, there was no international school, the curriculum was very much supportive of U.K. students who were there and were looking to go back to the U.K. for university. And so, the emphasis was on British history, British geography, British literature. For languages, we learned French and Latin. The Chinese society outside the walls of the school might as well not existed.

James Green: Wow, fascinating. So, you didn't go onto French, you went on to continue to study Chinese, for which we're all very grateful that you've spent your career on.

Richard Bush: Thanks.

James Green: Just an incredibly important part of the world. So, you go to graduate school, you write your dissertation on KMT economic policy, one particular part of it, and then you come out and you start to work at the Asia Society-

Richard Bush: Yes.

James Green: -working with China. What was it like in the pre-normalization phase to think about dealing with China or traveling to China? Did you go to Hong Kong or to Taipei? Was that mostly, if you could travel, where people went?

Richard Bush: My first trip to China actually occurred while I was at the Asia Society. It was 1978. I was the so-called scholar on a commercial tour group of about fifty Americans, mainly older, who really wanted to go to China before they hung up their traveling shoes. And it was early days in China tourism, but it was fun. And I saw things as they were starting to change.

Richard Bush: This was when the debates were going on within the Communist Party about the fundamentals of future policy. I happened to be in Beijing at the time that Zbigniew Brzezinski and Mike Oxenberg were there.

James Green: Wow.

Richard Bush: And viewed that trip as ordinary Chinese do. By going to the bulletin board where People's Daily is posted and reading it for clues. And I made a guess that normalization was coming.

James Green: So, at that time, reading newspapers on the street, certainly etched in your memory. Were there other things that you recollect? Lots of bicycles, gray clothes? Are there other periods during that time that really stick out to you as how much has changed between Beijing today and China at that time?

Richard Bush: Beijing at that time and other parts of China I think were still trapped in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. It was all very grey and very poor and undeveloped. This next time I went to China again with a group was in 1979 and already the change was occurring. People were wearing more colorful clothes. There was a little bit more sense of optimism about the future.

And I'm impressed today at how far China came in a relatively short period of time and also in the context of the disaster that the Cultural Revolution was for China. It’s a tribute to the leaders like Deng Xiaoping who addressed that disaster head-on and did something about it.

James Green: And what was the interaction like with normal Chinese or government minders at that time?

Richard Bush: Pretty limited. The government minders I think were eager for information about the outside world, eager to know what was going to happen in U.S.-China relations, willing in private conversations to offer their own observations about their own political system. I remember one guide in 1981 who observed that the American people had elected Ronald Reagan and the Chinese people hadn't elected Deng Xiaoping.

James Green: Before moving on to your work in the Congress, I just wanted to ask, as a son of missionary parents, do you feel like your parents' religious beliefs influenced at all the way that you interacted with China or the rest of East Asia or your career path? Did that have any kind of influence or they could have been working for GE? It just happened that they were working for a church.

Richard Bush: My parents were kind of a special case. My father had gotten a PhD in comparative religions and he never really did evangelical work.

He really believed that Westerners should treat foreign religions, including Chinese religions, on their own terms and start from the premise that each religion is actually addressing the same set of problems. They may come to different answers, they may not. But, the proper stance was engagement. It wasn't to denigrate other religions or to say that this is not a genuine expression of faith. So, that's a good perspective, I think.

James Green: So, after your work as a tour guide and kind of a concierge for visitors to China, you started working in the House. Tell me how that kind of opportunity came up and when you first started working, what you were working on?

Richard Bush: It happened at a Christmas party; I think. A friend who was working on the staff of the House Asia Subcommittee happened to mention that the China person was leaving and why didn't I apply? I wasn't sure that that was the right institutional environment for me, but I decided to go ahead and apply, and everything worked out.

My responsibilities were China, Taiwan, Indochina. I later took on Japan and Latin America. So, a lot of different things, none of them in terribly great depth. The Taiwan part was particularly interesting because the Congressman I worked for, the late Steve Solarz, took as one of his objectives promoting democracy and human rights in Taiwan. And so, my job was to help him do that. And we did it through hearings, through speeches, through travel to Taiwan, through welcoming Taiwan opposition leaders to the Congress, all of that.

I think that people like Solarz did make a contribution to at least the timing of democratization. One of the things that Steve did was to make the case that a democratic Taiwan would have a greater claim on the support of the American people in the American government than one that was still authoritarian.

James Green: We had chatted a bit earlier about one particular time in Taiwan democratization and the role that you all played in that. And you had mentioned, the one specific incident. I found it fascinating. Would you mind retelling what happened and that the role that you all played?

Richard Bush: Sure. The context was that the political situation in Taiwan was in a gridlock. President Chiang Ching-kuo apparently wanted to move towards democracy, but he was not in the best of health. And the security services had a fairly powerful position in his government, making the argument that we can't trust these radical Taiwan independence people by opening up the political system and China’s still there and it’s hostile, et cetera.

James Green: And this is what, what timeframe?

Richard Bush: Oh, I'm sorry. 1983, 1984. There were reformers in the Taiwan government who supported the idea of democratization, but they couldn't make headway. Then in, I think it was October, November 1984, one of the security services sent some gangsters, to Daly City, California to murder a gentleman named Henry Liu who was at least a permanent resident, if not an American citizen, didn't matter what he was in those terms.

Henry Liu got on the bad side of some people in Taiwan because he was publishing material that was critical of Kuomintang leaders. So, he was killed. Nobody knew at first that this was a Taiwan government hit job.

At a certain point, listeners at the National Security Agency picked up conversations between security services in Taiwan and these guys and figured out that this was a government-inspired hit. At that point it became very serious. It's one thing to kill people in your own country, it's another to kill people in the United States who have certain constitutional protections.

Fairly soon, people from the State Department called Congressmen Solarz because they knew of his interest in Taiwan and knew of an amendment that he had passed that would limit U.S. arms sales to Taiwan if there was a consistent pattern of intimidation and harassment of people here in the United States by any government.

James Green: Wow. So, he put that into the legislative powers, that Taiwan officials had to be on notice about their behavior.

Richard Bush: Yes, yes.

James Green: Or their access to US weapons would be affected well.

Richard Bush: That was a provision in the Arms Export Control Act. So, we were in Central America traveling around at the time. We got the phone call, and as soon as I got back, I started planning a hearing to make a big issue of this. And we did make a big issue of this.

And Taiwan had a number of supporters in the congress, but this was not something that they could defend.

James Green: So, who did you have at the hearing? What sorts of people would come and talk for a hearing about this?

Richard Bush: Well, first of all, we had the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for China and Taiwan, William Brown.

And he probably revealed at that hearing more than he intended to when he came in, but it was very illuminating. Then we had the widow of Henry Liu.

James Green: Wow.

Richard Bush: Come and testify. It was real political theater.

James Green: That must have been very powerful.

Richard Bush: I forget who else we had, but that was enough. We then proceeded to file a resolution that condemned this killing and et cetera, et cetera. And that did pass the House of Representatives. It was the only resolution of this kind that did pass but killing people on American soil is not something that can be defended. And I think that case in the American response to it helped break open the logjam in Taipei. Because the security services were involved, Ching-kuo realized that he had to restrain them.

He gave marching orders to some of his more liberal officials to start preparing for democratization. There came a point—September 28th, 1986—leaders of the opposition in Taiwan gathered at the Grand Hotel and announced the formation of the Democratic Progressive Party. And that was illegal at the time.

We were afraid that the government would wrap these people up and I engineered a letter from the four members of Congress who were most pro-democratization and human rights so that it could be released quickly, urging President Chiang not to do anything about this and he didn't. He probably didn't intend to anyway. About a week later, he had an interview with Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and announced that he was going to lift martial law, emergency rule.

James Green: All right. Just stepping back a little bit on Taiwan history.

Richard Bush: Yeah.

James Green: So martial law was in place?

Richard Bush: Since the late 1940s. And what it essentially meant was that political dissent would be treated as a crime, tried by military courts.

James Green: Yeah. So very big policy step to lift that martial law.

Richard Bush: Yes, that's right. And so that was done in July of 1987, the next year. And the process of democratization continued step-by-step after that. It was accelerated when Lee Teng-hui became president on the death of President Chiang in January 1988.

James Green: So, do you think, looking back, certainly members of Congress had an important role to play in this. Do you think, Chiang Ching-kuo given who he was as the son of Chiang Kai-shek, was in a unique position to kind of deliver that political openness that another official might not have been able to do, or another leader might not have been able to do?

Richard Bush: I think it was really fortunate for Taiwan that he was still living in the 1980s and had enough strength and energy to begin this process and put his stamp on it. Chiang Ching-kuo in his early days in Taiwan had a reputation as a thug. He was in charge of the security services. But he also had a populist image too; he would go out among the people and asked, how you doing? Much more approachable than his father was, who was always very reserved and removed.

And so, I don't think it was an accident that he decided later in life that opening up the political system was a good thing to do. And I think he also bought the argument that if Taiwan was to continue to have the support of the United States, there had to be a values basis for that and it couldn't just be anti-communism because China was changing.

Maybe it wouldn't be communist anymore. And so, pushing forward Taiwan's political development was a way of keeping Taiwan ahead of China.

James Green: Interesting. Well, I want to get to Lee Teng-hui and his visit here. But there is, in U.S.-China relations, 1989 something that happened that was rather big. And so, leading up to the protests in Tiananmen Square, there was a lot of interest in the Congress about what was happening in China and about the fate of the students. You at the time were working for Representative Solarz. Could you talk a little bit about what sorts of information you all had and the level of interest in the members of Congress and what was happening in Tiananmen and both during the protests and then the crackdown as well?

Richard Bush: The main information was what we saw on the media and newspapers and TV which had, at that time, more access to what was going on in China. We also, I'm sure, saw intelligence briefings about what our intelligence agencies knew of what was going on on the ground. We had hearings, as I recall, that sought information from various experts including, Pei Minxin who at that time was a student at Harvard and had a lot of contacts with the students back in Beijing.

James Green: Wow. And he's now, just so that we're aware, he's now a very well-respected scholar.

Richard Bush: Yes. Yes.

James Green: So, hearings, some intelligence briefings, no doubt, CNN, which was just at that time taking off as a source of information. And what was the mood like on Capitol Hill? What was there excitement, concern? Was this an area of not such large focus? Because what was happening in the Soviet Union was also kind of quite large in terms of U.S. foreign policy.

Richard Bush: Well, that spring, I think China was the focus. People's sensitivity that something was going on had already been heightened in March of that year when there were protests in Tibet and they were harshly cracked down upon. But the mere fact that Chinese people were coming out, not just in Beijing but all over China, and criticizing corruption, seeking an opening of the political system, this was very exciting. This was not something that people necessarily expected. But it was rather moving to watch, particularly in the final days. There was also a deep concern that the regime would not allow this to continue and that at some point it would bring it to heel. There was disagreement in Washington at the time over whether violence would be used. When violence came, it was a great shock.

James Green: You had mentioned before, shock to some in some ways but less to others. What do you mean by that? How do you recall that happening?

Richard Bush: The members of Congress who were least surprised that the Chinese Communist government use violence to end these protests were conservative Republicans because this revealed what they thought to be the true face of this regime.

I think the people who were most disturbed by it, were, liberal Democrats because they, with some justification, had the impression that this was the system that was changing in a good direction. It was changing gradually. At least up until that time, I think there was a belief that communist systems don't change quickly and gradual changes all one can hope for. That presumption changed after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the reversal of this positive trend in China, I think was very disappointing to people.

James Green: And so, then the PLA is sent into Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3rd, June 4th. Students are rounded up; others are sought after. What was the response here in Washington but specifically in the Congress to those actions of the PLA and the Chinese leadership?

Richard Bush: Deep outrage and a belief that we had to do something. So, there was immediate pressure to consider legislation that would in some way punish China. There was criticism of the George Herbert Walker Bush administration for being too soft. The Bush administration had to think about all the different equities that we had with China and understandably did not want to have the relationship defined by one set of issues.

James Green: When you say all of those different issues, what sorts of things are you thinking of?

Richard Bush: Oh, the economic relationship was very important, to have access to the Chinese economy, benefiting from the trade relationship. There were intelligence relationships. We worked with the Chinese to get information on Soviet missile tests, we collaborated with the Chinese in supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

There was, at that time, a hope that the United States and China and others could work together to deal with the situation in Cambodia, which was in a situation of deep uncertainty because the Vietnamese had withdrawn. And, in fact, China and the United States and Russia and others did work well together to bring about a peace accord.

So, for those who saw the big picture, there was a lot in that picture. The Bush administration did impose some sanctions. There was still a belief in the Congress that it needed to do its own sanctions then. We went ahead and did that. There was an effort to try and limit the scope of those so that it didn't affect the whole relationship, including the trade relationship.

But the idea that there should be some kind of sanctions continued through the next several years. The ones that were done in 1989, 1990 were the only ones that were actually passed and put into law. But, some people in the Congress wanted to do more.

James Green: And when you say some people, the name that comes to mind most is the person I associate most with this time in U.S.-China relations and in a series of many years to U.S.-China relations is Nancy Pelosi.

Richard Bush: Yes.

James Green: Could you talk just a little bit about how that intra-Democratic party discussion went and where the Congress ended up and how that happened?

Richard Bush: Nancy Pelosi represents a district in San Francisco and there were a lot of Chinese students in her district so many of them sought her help and she made China her issue. The split in the Congress really wasn't between Democrats and Republicans; it was within each party. And so more moderate people, in each party, had a common viewpoint and it was more people on the wings of each party, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans that, chose to work together.

Mrs. Pelosi tried, on two or three occasions, along with supporters in the Senate to pass legislation that would condition China's tariff treatment on its human rights record, on things like intellectual property and on proliferation. And she was never able to pass legislation.

Well, there were a couple of times when a bill was sent to President Bush, he vetoed it, and then it came back to the Congress for an override. And the question was always in the Senate and the Senate never voted to override the President's veto.

The economic sanctions and tariffs and whatnot was done through other legislation. And it was kind of part of the 1992 presidential campaign, as well. Putting President Bush on the spot.

James Green: Right. So, speaking of campaigning, maybe we should return back to Lee Teng-hui.

Richard Bush: Yes.

James Green: And his visit here and the aftermath of it. Could you just talk a little bit about Lee Teng-hui and who he was and then why he wanted to come here and why that ended up being a, a problem for U.S.-Taiwan and then U.S.-PRC, U.S.-Chinese relations?

Richard Bush: Sure. Lee Teng-hui was born in 1923. He was, the child of people whose family had been in Taiwan for a long time, so he was called a Taiwanese. Chiang Ching-kuo picked him to be his Vice-Presidential candidate in 1984, which was a real signal of the political change that was occurring, transfer of power from Mainlanders to Taiwanese.

He became president in January of 1988, and he adopted, as one of his objectives, continuing the process of democratization. And I think he understood that this was important as relations with China were improving, at least on the economic front, because it was important to give the Taiwan public a seat at the negotiating table that sort of emerged between the governments of the two places.

James Green: So, he felt that as the leader of a party, like the KMT, that really wasn't enough authority to be dealing with Mainland China. But the people of Taiwan should have some voice to the table.

Richard Bush: That's right. And he could always say, my people won't support your proposal. How do you expect me to get it passed? You have to do something that's salable within the Taiwan political context. Lee Teng-hui very skillfully moved forward on democratization by working with more moderate elements in the Democratic Progressive Party, the opposition, of the harshest conservatives in his own party were sidelined. The more radical people in the DPP were sideline. And so, the whole thing was pushed through and the process was deemed to have been completed by 1996 with the first direct presidential election.

James Green: I'm sorry, the leading up points were certain things that had been appointed before it became elected positions?

Richard Bush: Yes. The president had previously been picked by a national assembly which was just filled with KMT holdovers and so really didn't reflect the popular will. One of the things that he felt was important, both in terms of Taiwan's interests, but also in terms of domestic politics was reinserting Taiwan in the world. Taiwan had been rather isolated and marginalized because of Chinese policy.

And so, he started what was called travel diplomacy. He went to play golf at a couple of Southeast Asian countries, and he got the idea that he wanted to visit the United States. He had gotten his PhD from Cornell University and he wanted, as an alumnus, to go give a speech.

This was problematic for the United States because at the time that we normalized relations with the People's Republic of China, we had said that our relationship with Taiwan would be unofficial.

James Green: And so how did that manifest itself that kind of unofficial relationship?

Richard Bush: The previous Republic of China Embassy in Washington was closed down and an organization called the Coordination Council for North American Affairs, was set up and it was a de facto embassy, doing all the duties of an embassy. Similarly, the Congress created the American Institute in Taiwan, which was a nominally private organization, really a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. government, which conducted U.S. policy and programs in and with Taiwan.

And this fiction allowed Beijing to believe that we obviously didn't have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and so Taiwan had been reduced in political status from them and from where they had been before. The details of our one China policy, including the idea that our relations with Taiwan would be unofficial, wasn't really spelled out in any agreement with them.

We reserve the right to define it for ourselves.

James Green: You mean how we would conduct these unofficial relations?

Richard Bush: Yes. But there was I think a general belief at the time that for the President of Taiwan to come to the United States for public events was getting close to the officiality line. Senior Taiwan leaders had quietly passed through the United States on their way to other places, transiting, and we define this as okay.

James Green: And just, for the geography part, why would a Taiwan leader have to come to the United States at all? Why couldn't they transit somewhere else?

Richard Bush: Many of Taiwan's diplomatic partners, were in Central and South America or the Caribbean. And there isn't really any other place that you could transit through to those places. And for the United States, it was useful to have these transits because it was a way for whoever was sort of supervising the transit to meet with their senior officials and check signals on the policy issues of the day.

But a true visit for the deliberate purpose of coming to the United States, that was a bridge too far. The State Department resisted it. Lee Teng-hui really wanted it. He hired a lobbying firm to help him get it. And this lobbying firm mounted the most aggressive campaign in Congress that I'd ever seen up until that point.

James Green: Wow.

Richard Bush: So, the denouement was in May of 1995. The House of Representatives passed by almost a unanimous margin a resolution urging the Clinton administration to let Lee Teng-hui have his visit.

James Green: And on the lobbying side, what was the point that the lobbyists made? I mean, members of Congress must have been compelled by something other than a very convincing lobbyist. What was it, do you think, that members of Congress thought of that they were supporting when they were supporting, a Lee Teng-hui visit to the United States?

Richard Bush: I think it was mainly in the area of values and the comparison between Taiwan and China. Taiwan was democratic, it was everything we wanted it to be. China was still coming out of the Tiananmen era, everything a democracy wasn't. And so, this was a way at a time of our sort of unipolar hegemony to make a statement about what America stood for. That was probably the logic.

Up until then, the view of the State Department as expressed to the Chinese was that this was not consistent with our policy, but President Clinton redefined what policy was.

China responded very badly. They cut off some unofficial contacts that had developed with Taiwan. They refused to grant agreement for Jim Sasser, who the Clinton administration had put up for Ambassador to China. A lot of elements of our relationship were put on hold.

James Green: You had mentioned to me before, speaking of the Chinese reaction that you had had a conversation with Yang Jiechi about this. I don't want to interrupt the flow, but I wonder if you could just explain what the view was or how you talked about it to a senior Chinese diplomat?

Richard Bush: This was a conversation about February 1995, three months before the resolution was passed. And Mr. Yang, who then was the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Chinese Embassy, was seeking my analysis of what was gonna happen. And would the Congress go ahead and in some way force President Clinton's hand so that Lee Teng-hui would be allowed to come on what the Chinese at least thought was the opposite of an unofficial relationship.

And I offered Mr. Yang my view that, based on the political dynamics I observed in the House of Representatives and the head of steam that was being mounted behind this idea, I really doubted that it was going to be possible to stop this visit. That Congress is going to go ahead full steam. There was nobody opposing it and therefore China had to consider the possibility that it would happen.

James Green: That Congress would pass a resolution and then the White House would be under political pressure to grant a visa for Lee Teng-hui to visit his alma mater.

Richard Bush: Yes. Or if President Clinton ignored the suggestion that the resolution offered, it would pass legislation, binding legislation, to require the executive branch to issue a visa.

James Green: And what was his reaction? What do you recall about his…?

Richard Bush: I don't remember his reaction, I'm sure he wasn't happy, but I felt that it was my obligation to give him an honest assessment of where things were. The problem with this, one of the problems with this visit, was that although we were very happy that Taiwan was now a democracy, we developed concerns about some of the policies that the democratically-elected leader came up with. And that, his desire to come to the United States, conflicted with our definition of the one China policy and with our larger equities in the U.S.-China relations.

And added to that was the fact that there wasn't a whole lot of consultation on this.

James Green: Between the U.S. and the PRC.

Richard Bush: And between the United States and Taiwan.

James Green: I see.

Richard Bush: The Taiwanese just wanted to do it.

James Green: I see.

Richard Bush: And, they didn't want to hear no. And they were using political leverage to get what they wanted. I mean there were Taiwan officials who were opposed to this, but Lee Teng-hui was the president and he was going to go ahead. And, it led to a bit of soul searching on our part about how we manage the politics of cross-strait relations or the Taiwan politics of cross-strait relations, while sort of conducting what we hoped would be a cooperative relationship with China. If Lee Teng-hui wanted to come to the United States, it was going to be harder to engage in those cooperative areas.

James Green: So, Lee Teng-hui comes here.

Richard Bush: Yes.

James Green: He speaks to his alma mater, then what happens?

Richard Bush: China, as I've said before, suspends parts of the U.S.-China relationship, it suspends parts of the China-Taiwan relationship. It begins military exercises that obviously have Taiwan in mind. There was never any danger that China was going to go to war, but it did want to engage in coercive diplomacy, making shows of force to make a political impact in Taiwan.

And so, there were several during the latter half of 1995, and then in early 1996, there were more, and they were more focused. This was in the run up to the Taiwan presidential elections in March of 1996 where Lee Teng-hui was running for reelection. The most provocative and serious thing was a couple of mixed missile exercises where missiles were being launched into areas off the coast of Taiwan.

Again, not at Taiwan, but in a threatening way. And this created a great deal of consternation in the United States and concern in the Clinton administration that somehow this situation could spin out of control.

James Green: And what do you think the PRC leaders were thinking about when they selected target zones outside the main ports of Taiwan to lob missiles?

Richard Bush: I think their belief was we need to show Taiwan that we can close off their economic lifelines and that to some degree we can impose an embargo, drive up shipping rates, and so on. At the time of these missile tests, there was an effect in Taiwan. Taiwan's stock market crashed. The value of the new Taiwan dollar against the U.S. dollar plummeted.

There were long lines outside the American Institute in Taiwan, seeking visas to the United States. And there shows a force did have an impact. It did not change the results of the election, though. And if their intention was to try to reduce Lee Teng-hui's vote total, it probably had the counter result.

These shows of force also caused a lot of concern in the East Asian region. This was not the China that they were used to. One of these missiles flew fairly close to the southernmost island of Japan. So, it became a problem for Japan as well.

James Green: And so at that moment in your career, you're just getting ready to move—depending on which exact year month we're talking about—to become the national intelligence officer for East Asia, which I'm sure there was a lot of interest in the policy community in what was happening.

What was that shift like just career wise from going from being on Capitol Hill for many years to being part of the executive branch albeit in a briefing intelligence community analyst role?

Richard Bush: I made that move in the summer of 1995 after Lee Teng-hui’s visit. I had a good bit of interaction with the Intelligence Community because Congressmen Solarz and Congressman Hamilton for whom I worked after that were frequent consumers. And so, I knew people who did China and Taiwan and other things in the CIA.

It was quite a culture shock moving from the most open part of our government to the most closed. I was very impressed with the professional dedication of all the analysts and others that I worked with. And I learned a lot from them, not only on subjects that I didn't know much about, like North Korea, but also on subjects that I did know about. And so, these people are a great resource for me in the interactions I had with policymakers.

James Green: The next step of your career that I'd really be fascinated to hear about is as you were moving over to become the chairman of AIT. And you talked a little bit before about kind of what AIT is and what it does, but can you just kind of describe what that organization is and then what your role was in that?

Richard Bush: I said before that we had made a pledge to the People's Republic of China, at the time that we establish diplomatic relations that we would have unofficial relations with Taiwan. That required the creation of an organization that was non-governmental, but to which American officials could be detailed or reassigned so that they could do whatever their job was with respect to Taiwan in this organization.

AIT in Taiwan essentially does the work of an embassy in another country. And it has a representation from a variety of US agencies. The Washington Office of AIT, of which I was the head, serves an administrative function, working with the State Department and the big office in Taipei.

I was also a member of the policy team here in Washington, participating in discussions on all kinds of issues. I was the most senior person associated with the U.S. government who went to Taiwan, gave speeches about U.S.-Taiwan policy.

I offered my advice on how we should adapt and adjust to the political situation in Taiwan and prepare for contingencies. One of the things that was going on when I started at AIT in 1997 was the run up to the 2000 election and…

James Green: You’re talking about the election in…

Richard Bush: In Taiwan.

James Green: Taiwan.

Richard Bush: The presidential election in Taiwan. Sorry. And there was a possibility that the candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party who was likely to be Chen Shui-bian, who had been mayor of Taipei, the capital city, that he might actually become president and that would be a big change for the United States and for China, which viewed the Democratic Progressive Party as promoting Taiwan independence and therefore anathema.

A lot of the work in preparing the U.S. government for this possible transition was done by our office in Taipei, building up communications links to Mr. Chen and to the people around him. But it was also something that happened here in Washington, as well. And we facilitated two visits by Chen Shui-bian to Washington in the spring of 1998 and spring of 1999, so that he could hear directly from U.S. policymakers their view of Taiwan, its relationship with China, its relationship to the United States.

James Green: And do you think that had an effect on his policies, not to spoil the end, but once he was elected? Do you think that those introductory visits here and discussion of U.S. policy interests had an effect on where Taiwan policy ended up?

Richard Bush: I think it did, it did for a while. There was a feeling in the Clinton administration that actually Chen Shui-bian might be a good interlocutor for China because he could speak for the Taiwanese majority, rather like Richard Nixon was able to do the deal with China because he spoke for conservatives who had been anticommunist. Chen Shui-bian stuck to basically a middle moderate path for a couple of years. He was hoping among other things that China would be willing to engage him and work out some kind of relationship of coexistence between the two sides of the strait. China was not willing to do that.

James Green: And do you think that was a missed opportunity on the mainland's party? Or do you just think ideologically and intellectually and emotionally, they just couldn't bring themselves to deal with someone like Chen Shui-bian?

Richard Bush: Well, all of that is true but it was still a missed opportunity. They have an obligation to adjust to reality as well as anybody else.

So, summer of 2002, Chen Shui-bian decides to move in a different direction that he's not going to position himself in the middle of the political spectrum. He's going to play to his base, and if that involves hints that he's moving towards independence and provocative actions vis-à-vis China, that's good.

James Green: Just stepping back some, why—and it's fascinating that a two-year window of moderation happened—but from the mainland's point of view, why is independence and moving Taiwan away so sensitive and so important for mainland leaders?

Richard Bush: From the day it was established, the government of the People's Republic of China has believed that the territory of Taiwan is within the sovereign territory of China. It had been taken away by Japan and in the Chinese view it was returned in 1945. That happened also to be the view of the Republic of China, Kuomintang, view in Taiwan, until Lee Teng-hui came along.

And so the idea that Taiwan could be a separate country, which is what some of the DPP wanted, was a challenge to their fundamental interests and Chinese like to draw the comparison between their situation and the American Civil War, that independence people on Taiwan are like Robert E. Lee and, and so on and they’re Abraham Lincoln. And so we should be sympathetic with their situation.

So, the period from 2002 to 2008 when Mr. Chiang left office was a rocky time. The communication between our two sides wasn't great because we basically disagreed with the political and policy course that Chiang was taking. China was also very concerned about the direction and there was to an extent that the United States and China operated on parallel but similar tracks to deal with this situation. It wasn't a situation where we conspired with China to deal with us, but our interests were similar and we each acted in somewhat similar ways to deal with it.

James Green: And the U.S. interest in this case was what regarding Chen Shui-bian?

Richard Bush: We have said for decades that our abiding interest concerning Taiwan is peace and stability in the Taiwan area and a belief that the differences between the two sides should be resolved peacefully, a belief that neither side should change the status quo unilaterally.

We don't want China to use force against Taiwan, but neither do we want Taiwan to engage in highly provocative actions that challenge China's fundamental interests and may lead China to decide that the only way to protect its interest is to use force.

James Green: And you think those interests haven't really changed much in the last how many decades, several decades?

Richard Bush: No, no. This started in the 1950s. There has been an addition to that and that is the idea that the differences between the two sides should be resolved not only peacefully but in a manner that's acceptable to people on Taiwan. I think this is just a statement of reality. It's a democratic system, so if you don't do it in a manner acceptable to Taiwan, it's not gonna happen. That is a little too populous for Beijing, I think.

James Green: And on the Beijing side, they had a tough time dealing with Chen Shui-bian, they couldn't kind of figure out a policy that made sense. It was a lost opportunity really for a lot of those years. Where do you think they are now in dealing with Taiwan? And on the U.S. side, going forward what do you think our principles should be as there will be shifts in both Beijing and Taipei?

Richard Bush: The good years for the People's Republic of China were 2008 to 2016, that was when the leader of the KMT, Ma Ying-jeou, was president and his strong belief was that the way to protect Taiwan's interests across the board was to engage China, particularly in the economic area, but that China would be less likely to engage in coercive behavior against Taiwan if it was getting something out of the relationship and Taiwan wasn't challenging its interests.

That worked for a while, but then sentiment grew in Taiwan that Taiwan was growing too close to China, was becoming too economically dependent on China, and so a line had to be drawn. There were other sort of political problems going on, but the result in the 2016 Taiwan presidential elections was a sharp defeat for the person seeking to be Ma Ying-jeou’s successor and the election of Tsai Ing-wen, the leader of the DPP and a former official in the Chen Shui-bian government, and an advisor to Lee Teng-hui before that.

It's somebody whom they believe, China believes, is intent on making Taiwan a separate country, whether she is or not. And so, they have taken a rather tough approach to her since she became president, setting a rather high bar for any kind of engagement or coexistence.

Taking a bunch of measures to, in a way, punish her, punish Taiwan. And so, that's where we are. I think that some in China might say that the soft approach that China took from around 2005 on has failed and maybe a different harder approach is necessary. So far, the U.S. government, both the Obama administration and the Trump administration, believe that President Tsai has operated in a very moderate and cautious way despite political pressures that she do something else.

It believes that she's not trying to change the status quo unilaterally. It objects to China's various measures to punish her and punish Taiwan. And so, we're in a situation not the same as twenty years before, but it has the same kind of tensions, the same kind of risk that it might spin out of control.

What's better, at least, is that Tsai Ing-wen understands very clearly the need to have good relationship with the United States and to keep the United States informed of everything she was going to do. And so far, she's been successful.

James Green: And do you think the mainland has earned any lessons from Chen Shui-bian that will be helpful or do you think they are caught in some ways in their own prism of how they view Taiwan that they won't learn anything from, say, the Taiwan missile crisis or other historical events that over the last twenty years in which they've gained a fair amount of experience?

Richard Bush: I think the lesson they learned from the Chen Shui-bian period is that we, China. can outlast this troublemaker.

That we have enough tools to restrict and deter. If we're lucky, we can get the United States to help us. But basically, we're more powerful than Taiwan is. And so, we can contain the situation and hope that another more friendly Taiwan president is elected at some future time.

James Green: And the trend lines that people in Beijing feel like are in their favor. Do you think if that changes, does that change the Chinese calculus, if they feel like they can't wait out or there is some recent reason where they feel like things are not really going their way?

Richard Bush: Well, two parts to the answer. First of all, there's going to be a local election on November 24th, and I don't know what the results of that we're going will be, but depending on what the results are, China may conclude that the political tide is swinging back towards its interests, swinging away from the DPP. And so, our strategy of playing for time and exerting pressure has worked.

James Green: By ours, you mean the PRCs?

Richard Bush: Yes. At the same time, there's probably a realization that Ma Ying-jeou was perhaps the best Taiwan president they were ever going to get, and they didn't get from him everything that they wanted. And, under Ma, the evolution towards, political reconciliation and even unification didn't go very far at all. Ma had one advantage that future leaders of the Kuomintang probably won't have, and that was that he was a mainlander, they felt simpatico with him and his view of China writ large. It's more likely that the future leader of the Kuomintang, a future Kuomintang president of Taiwan, will be a Taiwanese.

James Green: Meaning that their family wouldn't have come from Mainland China in 1948, 49.

Richard Bush: Yes. Yes.

James Green: And so, they'll have that struggle to deal with a leader who doesn't have those ties to Mainland-

Richard Bush: That's right. And there will be a suspicion that even though they are KMT, that they may really be Taiwan independence in their hearts. Well, look at Lee Teng-hui. He was president under a KMT regime, but as a Taiwanese, he, in their view, tried to take it in a direction that was incompatible with their own.

James Green: I'd just like to end asking given the PRC leadership these days under Xi Jinping in which there's a kind of narrowed area for research and for scholars and for kind of understanding the United States and a range of things. How do you think the current administration in China and a narrowing of the academic space affects the way the mainland deals with Taiwan or with the United States regarding Taiwan?

Richard Bush: Since the 1980s, China has developed a really good cadre of people who understand Taiwan politics, Taiwan economy, Taiwan society, and Taiwan history. They're not perfect in their conclusions, there's some things they understand better than others, but they do have the expertise that is useful to PRC leaders if the PRC leaders are prepared to use it.

And under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, there were institutional arrangements where expert opinion could get to the leaders and shaped to some extent the decisions that were made. My impression of the relationship between Xi Jinping and the expert community is that a lot less expert information is flowing up, and Xi Jinping sets the tone for what people have to say.

And that is a somewhat dangerous situation because it leads to misperception, it leads to miscalculation. It creates a bubble around the leader; not a good situation.

James Green: Mr. Bush, thanks again so much, great to hear about your amazing career in Washington and spending all this time working on East Asia. Really appreciate it.

Richard Bush: Thank you. It's a great pleasure.

James Green: Richard Bush, speaking with me from Washington, D.C. You’ve been listening to the U.S.-China Dialogue Podcast from Georgetown University. I’m your host, James Green.