ABSTRACT
When Lee Teng-hui gave his report on the state of the nation to the National Assembly on 19 May 1994, he stressed not only that the ROC cannot cut itself off from the Chinese mainland, but also that it cannot cut itself off from the world (Lee 1994a). The careful balance between mainland and foreign policy that he was emphasising was essentially a continuation of the strategy initiated by Chiang Ching-kuo. By the mid-1990s, this had come to be developed into a fine balance between exploiting Taiwan’s links with a trans-state Chinese ethnic identity on the one side, while devising various diplomatic methods to establish an international status for Taiwan on the other.
