Professor William Kirby, the incoming Director of the Harvard Asia Center, discusses relations between the PRC and Taiwan in light of the recent rise in cross-straits tensions. He also comments on the Asian economic recovery, China's current challenges, and the future of the Asia Center.

William C. Kirby is Professor of History and the Chair of the History Department of the Harvard University. He also serves as the Director of the Harvard Asia Center.

HAQ: From your conversations with business and government leaders in Asia, do you think they are optimistic or pessimistic about the economic future of Asia in the near-term and in the longer term?

WK: Much depends on whether you're talking long- or short-term. In the long-term, I think there's a strong sense of optimism and even in the short-term a sense of recovery from the disasters of the last several years economically. The greater concerns in China and Taiwan are on the political side, not on the economic side.

In Japan and Korea the optimism for economic recovery is more cautious, but with rather greater optimism now than a year ago. And in Indonesia, to my knowledge, I think very few people are terribly optimistic...

HAQ: Do you think the continuation of the cross-straight tension constitutes a major threat to the stability of Asia?

WK: It constitutes at best an enduring irritation in the center of Asia and has with it unless some progress is made the capacity for some very significant destabilization. Obviously, a war the absolute worst scenario in the Taiwan Strait would do more than anything else to destroy not only the peace in the region but also the interconnected and growing prosperity of the region. A war in the Taiwan Strait would destroy China's international relations overnight. It would destroy Chinese - Japanese relations, not to mention Chinese - American relations. It might destroy Taiwan, Shanghai, and Nanjing, too. Obviously this would be a catastrophe for all parties. There has been a certain stability since 1958, with the exception of the crisis in 1996, and that's a very long period of peace and, with the exception of Mainland China for much of that period, of growing prosperity in East Asia. So it is possible to manage political situations without finally solving them. Since I don't believe that there is an easy, short-term political solution to Taiwan's relationship with the PRC, it is one in which one would hope that ever greater levels of integration lead to some form of agreement politically on the areas where both have an interest to agree politically. I think that's very possible, and with some greater modicum of good will and trust on both sides that each is even probable. But it is trust and goodwill that are actually singularly lacking on both sides. 

HAQ: The question always is, given how irrational actually going to war with Taiwan is, under what circumstances do you think China would mobilize armed action against Taiwan?

WK: You could argue that war is always an irrational act, and yet many states enter into military conflict out of rational calculation or national interest or the stability or longevity of their regime. It was not rational for Russia to support Serbia to the hilt in 1914, but it did , at the cost of the world entering the First World War. Many people said before the beginning of the First World War, that it was inconceivable given the level of economic integration. Now, I believe that war is never inevitable until it starts, but there has been a great proclivity in human history, and including in recent history, for war. I don't believe that economic and cultural interaction automatically brings greater peace and understanding, although it may help in that regard. There are strong international forces that would argue for a peaceful resolution of this issue. An external view of the People's Republic's interest vis-à-vis Taiwan might not include war against Taiwan. But just as clearly there are those in the PRC military and political establishment for whom military action against Taiwan is on the menu, and they are not necessarily irrational people. Just as clearly there are those in Taiwan who would seek to defend themselves by military means for lack of other means. So, war is conceivable, and anyone who thinks that war is not conceivable is in a historical Never-Never Land.

HAQ: The [July 9th] statement about state-to-state relationship that [Taiwan's president] Lee Teng-hui made recently has escalated tensions somewhat between the two sides. Do you think that's a result of electoral incentives in Taiwan that are prompting him to make statements about Taiwan independence?

WK: [President Lee] would argue that he's not making a statement about 'Taidu,' or Taiwan independence, but is simply stating a fact: that the Republic of China has existed for a long time; it is a state; and it now recognizes that the People's Republic is also a state; therefore there are state to state relations if there are relations at all. I don't personally quibble with the fact that what he is stating is absolutely true and factual. But, of course, any time you change the terminology of a political relationship or of a negotiation, which is built on a considerable amount of mythology that there is one China, that Taiwan is part of it even if one disagrees about the nature of that Chinese entity, whether it is one or several states any time you change that you should have a strong and coherent reason for doing that. Perhaps that will emerge over time. There is no question that Taiwan is a state in any political science definition of a state. The People's Republic is a state. One of the problems, as you know, is that the Chinese language is not as nuanced as others for dealing with the difference between state and country. It was possible to talk about 'one country, two governments,' or 'one country, two systems,' in Chinese very clearly, but you can't say 'one country, two countries!' That is to say the so-called 'liang guo lun,' the two guo principle; now guo means both state and country. We could suggest that maybe these negotiations proceed in a language that is better for such nuances, like German. In the absence of that, I think that one needs some greater flexibility and goodwill on both sides, recognizing reality but also finding some areas on which they can agree in order to move negotiations away from the incredible hostility on both sides. This hostility is caused by, among other things, the great fear on Taiwan, the menace of the PRC, the total lack of trust on the part of the Taiwan electorate in the ultimate aims of the PRC leadership, and the total lack of trust in the PRC leadership in the leadership of Taiwan. It's a very bad set of dynamics right now where you have the PRC seeking to enter into negotiations with Taiwan while calling its leader a renegade traitor and scab. Usually that is not a means of engagement. And, of course, you have in Taiwan the sense that the PRC has given the people of Taiwan very little reason to seek association [with it].

The legacy of the ROC government? ROC military facility decaying on Penghu Island

HAQ: What would you recommend to third party nations' observers that are, in a sense, also actors in cross-straits relations? In considering the US, but also other nations that have interests in the region, what would you see as an optimal response on their part to this dispute that's been ongoing?

WK: The most important thing that certainly the United States and other Asian and Pacific actors have done is to urge that whatever happens, however the dispute is resolved, that it be resolved peacefully. East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century. It is peace and economic growth, and peaceful forms of economic and cultural interaction between Asia and the rest of the world that has made this possible. So, anything that avoids a conflict that could draw in, unhappily again, outside powers such as the United States or revisit, for example, Japan's interests in the Taiwan area would be the last thing that anyone would want. So the first thing, simply put, is peace. Second, the United States does not want to mediate this. Every effort we have made at mediation between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party or Taiwan and the PRC has not been very successful. It is not something that we're necessarily good at. But we could remind people of things that they have already agreed to, for example, the 1993 agreement to define 'one China' differently.

The starting points now are in areas where they can agree. On trade and economic relations, the PRC and Taiwan are increasingly a de-facto a single tariff area. Is there an area for potential association in a formal way to encourage the People's Republic to permit Taiwan to be included as Taiwan really ought to be in a whole range of international organizations in a manner that would not affect the PRC's claim on sovereignty but would also not conflict with the actual reality of the ROC's control of Taiwan? The PRC is the big brother in this relationship, and it has the capacity to be generous to Taiwan on this issue in a manner that might do much to defuse that issue internally in Taiwan. Taiwan is a major economy. It has a working government. It plays an important role in East Asia and beyond East Asia in the world. To have it excluded from these organizations and to have both of these governments seeking their legitimacy by pursuing the King of Tonga doesn't strike me as the best use of their diplomatic talents.

HAQ: Let's talk a little bit about China itself. What do you think are some major challenges facing China today? Do you think the Chinese government can deal with these challenges successfully?

WK: The Chinese government since 1979 has been very successful in economic development, and successful enough, simply by surviving, in the realm of political development. It has been a remarkably successful twenty years, if one takes out the crisis of 1989 from that calculation. Yet there are now huge internal challenges. The reform of state industry, and most directly related to that, the banking sector, is enormously daunting. You have a banking sector that by any other international standard of measurement is bankrupt and has no prospect for easy solvency. That banking sector [and] its health are directly related to the health of the state sector, which is not healthy! And the approach of saving state industry by corporatizing it strikes me as wishful thinking. The idea that you would take the same enterprise that has been losing money even by socialist accounting methods and sell stock for it to a lot of people who will not have control of the management, and assume that simply because it becomes a publicly held company in that sense, it therefore becomes a better managed company, I think is a dream. Corporatization is not necessarily privatization in the PRC.

From the point of view of the state economy, the health of the state economy is directly related to the health of the central government, which still does not have, apart from its ability to milk the state economy, state industries, which are in some sense wholly owned subsidiaries of the Chinese Communist Party, sufficient funds for running the central government. The central government still does not have anything that resembles what one would consider a modern, rational, or even national tax system on which to survive in the absence of its control of the state industry. So, these are major issues that ultimately come to the question of the role of the Party and its domination of the central government and how it would survive in the absence of its revenue from impoverished state industries. Those seem to me to be open questions, and they can only be solved in the long run by a combination of economic and political reform. There is an enormous push now for economic reform. There is great energy and vision on the part of Zhu Rongji. There seems to be a real poverty of thought about political change. But it will happen sooner or later, and the question is whether or not it happens in a planned and orderly way.

HAQ: What do you think is the most appropriate political change for China now that could accompany this process of economic reform? They already have the grassroots village elections and some other municipal elections, and that seems like a good first step. [Authors like] Barry Naughton say that the problem now is that if you massively restructure the state-owned sector, you are going to end up with a lot of unemployment and the Party would lose a lot of legitimacy as a result. The questions is, what sort of political change would alleviate some of that pressure?

WK: I wouldn't dare to provide a model of what China's political future ought to be. Chinese will do that. I certainly wouldn't suggest that they mindlessly emulate the American experience of increasingly corrupt electoral politics. And I think there is a range of potential experiences which they could study. The model that most Chinese leaders have not wanted to follow is the Soviet Union. Look at poor Mr. Gorbachev. At least he has his own foundation, but you can't provide a foundation for everybody in the Party leadership. And look at the mess that Russia is; most Chinese don't want to follow that. Is it possible that they could follow the Guomindang (The Nationalist Party) model of gradually opening up the system so that you have a working opposition and so that you have the capacity to have legitimate opposition as a sounding board that opens up the political system? The Guomindang has managed to hold on to power. The Guomindang has the capacity right now to lose power, but if it loses power it also has the capacity to regain power. I don't think anybody would imagine that if the Communist Party of China were to lose power now under the current circumstances in China that it would be in their capacity to regain it in the future. But the big problem, of course, is that Taiwan is not a very useful model, because it had a kind of built-in organized opposition in the dangwai group of Taiwanese excluded from the political scene in the '50s and '60s. So, I think China desperately needs to legitimize some form of opposition. There are hollow political organizations that could be given some life. You have these puppet opposition parties that might be reinvigorated to some degree, but some means of opening up the political dialogue, the kind of dialogue that they called in the late Qing reform the kind of 'yanlu,' the 'path of words,' that go beyond, in this case, simple remonstrance with the ruling system. No government lasts forever. There has to be some preparation for as to what kind of political system will take the place of the PRC. But unless that happens, it's conceivable that no unified political system will take its place. And if you look at the history of the 20th century, the big question of the 20th century to me, [is] what kind of government will ultimately replace the 2,000-year tradition of Chinese imperial rule? This has been a series of experiments, not one of which has been politically stable. So, to the degree that that question remains unanswered, China remains politically unstable into the next century.

HAQ: What, if any, is the role of the Asia Center in promoting economic and political development in Asia?

WK: Well, let me take a step back to comment on what the Asia Center is. Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia. The job of the Asia Center will be multi-fold, I think. One is to try to coordinate the development of Asian studies at Harvard: to promote the study of Asia in a way that cuts across national boundaries; to promote the study of Asia in a way that cuts across our internal organizational boundaries between the schools law, business, faculty of arts and sciences, and so on so that we can work more as a united university in the study of Asia. And then, third, to serve really as a meeting place here at Harvard but also in Asia on issues that are of common concern to Americans and Asians. One of these, of course, is economic development. One of these, surely, is also political change in Asia [and also] security issues in Asia. But also among them are other issues: cultural interactions and differences, historical questions. One of the projects that Professor Vogel has organized is dealing with the past in order, as it were, to proceed in the present in Chinese-Japanese relations looking over the history of wartime relations. These relations were, of course, not so happy, but these are issues that must be dealt with in some way. This is an area in which Harvard can play a catalytic role. The decisive role in Asia's development will be played by Asians, but surely also in contact with Americans and others.

We are hardly presumptuous enough, and certainly shouldn't be, that we would have a leading role in the development of Asia economically. Even Harvard isn't that rich. And the track record of our political scientists, for example, in ordering the world's policies, or our economists in reforming the world's economies, for all of the great and singular successes that one can highlight, is on the whole, to put it politely, uneven. There were Harvard people who tried to assist the development of constitutional government in China after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and some of them gave advice that helped Yuan Shih-kai develop a constitution for his dictatorship. I trust that is not our main mission. Our main mission is intellectual exchange, teaching, training Americans to know about Asia, educating and working with Harvard undergraduates so that knowledge about Asia is as important to their undergraduate education, ultimately, as knowledge about the European and American roots of this institution and of the United States. You can't be a leading educational institution educating into the next century, in our view, without having a strong knowledge of Asia.

HAQ: What are some of your personal goals as head of the Asia Center and what do you personally want to accomplish?

WK: I would hope we would begin a series of projects that would do more to bring the different parts of the university together in the study of Asia, for example, in the study of the professions in Asia. Some projects have already begun in this way in a very exciting and integrative fashion. Professor McElroy's project on the Chinese environment, for example, has brought together scholars from all quadrants of the university to study not only the scientific and ecological, but also political and cultural dimensions of China's environmental problems. The Asia Center assist the study[ of Asia], assisting individual faculty members in studying questions that go across national boundaries, cut across disciplines, and in particular cut across the more artificial boundaries of Harvard's departments and schools.

Another goal is to look to the resources we have and to see how we could do better to plan, in a sense, for the faculty and infrastructure that we will need to study Asia well into the 21st century. I don't worry so much about the students. We will have, both in the college and in the graduate school, an increasingly international student body. But our main agenda is really to try to integrate the study of Asia here at Harvard and to play as positive a role as we can in this institution.