An innocuous-seeming law causes a ruckus

FEW pieces of legislation sound more anodyne than the Taiwan Travel Act. The bill, which both houses of Congress passed unanimously and President Donald Trump signed into law on March 16th, aims only to “encourage visits between officials from the United States and Taiwan at all levels”. Yet it risks triggering a diplomatic brouhaha. China regards the prospect of visits between American and Taiwanese officials as a violation of America’s “one-China policy”, under which America pledged to maintain only unofficial relations with a place that China regards as a renegade province. “We urge the US side to correct its mistake,” says a spokesman from China’s foreign ministry.

Steve Chabot, a Republican congressman from Ohio and author of the bill, says that his legislation has “no provocative intent”. Taiwan, after all, is America’s 11th-biggest trading partner, outstripping Brazil. And the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 commits America to helping Taiwan defend itself. Mr Chabot worries that insufficient communication between the two sides could hurt Taiwan’s, and by extension America’s, security in the face of a more assertive China.

Since 1979 only six American cabinet-level officials have visited Taiwan, but no president has. When Gina McCarthy, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, travelled to Taiwan in 2014, it was the first time an American cabinet official had visited the island in 14 years. When Taiwanese officials travel to America they must keep a low profile. Taiwanese presidents have usually been granted only “layovers” in America, which allow them to stay for just a day or two. Taiwanese leaders have had to lobby hard just for the privilege of making a pit stop in the lower 48 states. In 2006 American officials refused to grant Chen Shui-bian, then Taiwan’s president, a layover in New York or San Francisco, offering him instead a refuelling stop in Alaska or Hawaii. His dignity slighted, Mr Chen called off the trip.

America’s longstanding reluctance to send officials to Taiwan and overbearing rules concerning the hosting of Taiwanese officials are self-imposed restrictions. Nothing in American law touches on the legality of high-level exchanges between America and Taiwan. Rather, it seems that past practices have become institutionalised. It is also unclear how, by merely encouraging (as opposed to mandating) more visits between officials from the two nations, America contravenes its one-China policy. That policy is “a flexible construct”, says Richard Bush of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank.

Even so, some analysts warn against antagonising China just when America needs its co-operation on North Korea’s nuclear programme. Shortly after America granted a visa to Lee Teng-hui, then president of Taiwan, in 1995, China launched missiles into the Taiwan Strait. America had to send in two aircraft-carrier battle groups to persuade China to back off. It was America’s biggest military showing in the region since the Vietnam war.

America has been quick to act on the new law. On March 20th the State Department dispatched Alex Wong, a deputy assistant secretary, to Taipei for a three-day visit. On the agenda is a dinner with Taiwan’s president. The next day China sent its sole aircraft-carrier through the Taiwan Strait. That might not be a coincidence.