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Bush, Richard C. At Cross Purposes: U.S.-Taiwan Relations since 1942. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2004. 320pp. $27.95
For years, "one China" has meant two completely different Chinas masquerading as one country-the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan (a.k.a. the Republic of China [ROC]). The PRC is huge, with a population of 1.3 billion, while Taiwan has only twenty-two million people in comparison. There are other differences as well: Taiwan is rich, with a per capita income in 2003 of over $23,000, versus the PRC's per capita $5,000; Taiwan's 5 percent unemployment rate is half, its 1 percent poverty rate is a tenth, and its seventy-seven-year life expectancy is five years more than those of the PRC. More importantly, during the past decade Taiwan adopted a multiparty democracy, while the PRC has only one legal political party that is holding tightly onto its autocratic powers-the Chinese Communist Party.
How can two such divergent Chinas possibly reunite? What role has the United States played in their sixty-year standoff? These are the questions that Richard C. Bush, former chairman and managing director (September 1997 to June 2002) of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT-the pseudo-American embassy in Taipei), asks in At Cross Purposes.
Bush starts with an extremely useful historical summary of the origins of...