The great obfuscation of one-China

WHEN Donald Trump, then America’s president-elect, said on December 11th that “I don’t know why we have to be bound by a one-China policy” he ripped aside one of the oldest sticking-plasters in the world of diplomacy. That he stuck it back on again two months later, telling Xi Jinping, China’s president, that he would honour the one-China policy “at President Xi’s request”, does not alter the fact that an American leader had questioned a basic feature of Asian security. Nor does Mr Trump’s reversal solve problems with the one-China formula, on which peace between Taiwan and China has depended, that were evident well before his election. If they worsen, the two sides’ frozen conflict could heat up.

The one-China formula is not so much fraught with ambiguities as composed of them. China itself does not actually have a one-China policy. It has what it calls a one-China principle, which is that there is only one China, with its government in Beijing. It regards Taiwan as a renegade Chinese province and refuses diplomatic recognition to any country that recognises Taiwan as a state. Yet this rigid principle can be bent. In 2015 President Xi met the island’s then-president, Ma Ying-jeou, for what would have looked to innocent eyes very much like a bilateral summit of heads of state. And China looks the other way, albeit with some fulmination, when America sells arms to Taiwan—a traffic which, in 1982, America said it would phase out, but continues to this day.