The spirited 2019 New Year’s speeches of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and China’s President Xi Jinping have just reminded the world that, 40 years after the normalization of relations between the United States and China, the potentially explosive issue of Taiwan’s status that had long delayed normalization has still not been resolved. President Tsai tenaciously reasserted Taiwan’s determination to remain free and to deal with China on an equal basis. President Xi just as tenaciously reasserted Beijing’s determination to resume China’s sovereignty over the island and to use force, if necessary, to do so. So what were the consequences of normalization?
There were two major “losers” when, after long negotiations, Beijing and Washington finally established diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979. The most apparent was Chiang Kai-shek’s “Republic of China” government, which had fled from the Mainland to Taiwan three decades earlier and maintained its harsh dictatorship over the island after the Generalissimo’s death in 1975. The second big loser was the Soviet Union, which had rightly feared that a Sino-American rapprochement would unfavorably alter the world’s balance of power against Moscow, as it did.
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