Playing the China Card

When Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger arrived in China last week for a fortnight's tour of oilfields and industrial centers, he was the fourth high-level member of the Carter Administration to visit a nation that the U.S. does not formally recognize. Schlesinger was hoping to sound out Chinese leaders on ways to end that anomaly. Jimmy Carter would like to recognize the Peking regime, preferably before the 1980 presidential campaign gets fully under way, but the effort involves major diplomatic difficulties, and it may provoke a political storm in the U.S. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, who is traveling with Schlesinger in China, reports:

The establishment of full diplomatic relations with China will require that Carter, Congress, the Chinese Communists and Nationalists all take part in a grand deception in which no one is really deceived.

The basic problem is still Taiwan, just as it was when Richard Nixon began the normalization of relations with China six years ago. The Communists insist that the U.S. close its embassy in Taipei, abrogate its 24-year-old mutual defense treaty with Nationalist China, and accept the Communist claim that the offshore stronghold is simply a province of the People's Republic. "We are talking about recognition," Chinese Vice Premier Teng Hsiaoping said during his current visit to Tokyo, but "on these three conditions we are waiting for the U.S. to make up its mind."

The Carter Administration is prepared to oblige on all three counts, as long as nothing really changes. For six years, the U.S. has been dealing with two Chinas while formally recognizing one China, Taiwan. Washington is willing to shift its formal recognition from Taiwan to Peking only on the condition that Taiwan's independence and close ties with the U.S. be preserved.

The diplomats therefore must try to come up with some formula by which the American embassy in Taipei would be turned into a nongovernmental institution that could still perform all the functions of an embassy. The U.S. needs to watch out for $7.5 billion in annual trade with Taiwan and $500 million in American investments there (Taiwan is the U.S.'s twelfth largest trading partner; Communist China is the 23rd). In addition, the Administration is determined to provide for the maintenance of Taiwan's 500,000-man armed forces.

Peking will also have to agree to the continuation of an American military connection with Taiwan, and it may have to provide assurances that it will not try to assert its claims on the island by force. Peking may eventually meet these conditions, but so far its leaders are unwilling to discuss them in explicit terms. Whenever the subject comes up, the Chinese stiffen, saying Taiwan is an "internal matter" in which "China brooks no interference."

Even if a deal with the Communists can be worked out, the act of transferring formal recognition from Taipei to Peking would raise a host of legal and legislative problems. The U.S. is tied to Taiwan by 59 bilateral treaties and agreements, plus many more multilateral ones. How many of these pacts could or should survive "derecognition"? What new legislation would be required to keep them in force? How could the U.S. continue to supply arms to a government whose legitimacy it no longer formally recognizes? Government lawyers have been preparing briefs on these and other questions, and the State Department has retained some private law firms, including Lord. Day & Lord in New York City, as "consultants" to study the legal ramifications of derecognition.

The biggest problem is political. A number of conservative Senators have already declared their opposition to recognition of Peking if it entails -- as it almost surely must -- abrogation of the defense treaty with Taiwan. Just before the Congress recessed in mid-October, Barry Goldwater of Arizona introduced a resolution that would require the Administration to get the advice and consent of the Senate before it could abrogate any post-World War II mutual defense treaty. Goldwater maintains that since ratification of the 1955 treaty required approval by two-thirds of the Senate, abrogation would require the same ma jority. If Carter seeks to act without consulting Congress, Goldwater told TIME, "I strongly feel I would introduce a bill of impeachment against him.''

White House and State Department officials dispute Goldwater's claim that two-thirds of the Senate must approve cancellation of the treaty, but they say they have every intention of consulting with Congress before they make any major steps on China. And they do want to press ahead. Presidential National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski is eager to play what he has called the "China card" in the ongoing poker game of U.S. -Soviet relations (Moscow has already roared in protest against both the term and the concept). But Brzezinski and other policymakers realize that whenever they play the card, they are going to have trouble with conservative critics on Capitol Hill. Therefore they are moving quietly to build bipartisan support for normalization. For example, the Lord, Day & Lord attorney who has be come an "outside counsel" to the Carter Administration on this problem is Herbert Brownell, 74, who not just coincidentally was President Eisenhower's Attorney General and has been an active and influential member of the Republican establishment.

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