ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Taipei, Beijing and Washington to advance differing interpretations of the cross-strait status quo. Taipei, in turn, committed to living with a political status short of formal statehood so as not to provoke a Chinese military attack. The US sought to preserve the uneasy equilibrium, both through deterring Chinese military action and by dissuading Taiwan from a declaration of independence that would trigger it. Taiwan’s leaders have had to acknowledge the shifting sentiments. Lee Teng-hui, KMT credentials notwithstanding, provoked Beijing’s ire during an interview in July 1999 in which he described cross-strait ties as ‘a special state-to-state relationship’. Unable to prise open fissures between Taipei and Washington sufficiently, however, and increasingly resigned to the fact that the People’s Liberation Army limitations precluded China from taking the island by force, Mao Tse-tung turned increasingly to the notion of Taiwan’s ‘peaceful liberation'.
