Just forty years ago, President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing for what he immodestly but accurately called â??the week that changed the worldâ?. Knowledgeable observers knew that the success of the visit â?? so crucial to Nixonâ??s 1972 re-election campaign â?? would turn on how he and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, dealt with the status of Taiwan. That question had been central to Sino-American relations since the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and establishment of the Peopleâ??s Republic of China in 1949, and it continues to be today.
For over two decades following the start of the Korean conflict in June 1950, the U.S. denied that Taiwan was part of China. Yet that had not been the original American position after World War II. During the war, in the 1943 Cairo Declaration, the U.S., the United Kingdom and China had promised that Japan, which had forced China to cede Taiwan to it in 1895, would have to return the island to China at warâ??s end. Thus, in October 1945, the victorious Allies authorized Chiang Kai-shek, then president of the Republic of China, to accept Japanâ??s surrender on the island.
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