In China and Taiwan, the death of Carter, who established diplomatic relations with Beijing and severed formal ties between the United States and Taipei, was met with mixed reactions.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping extended “deep condolences” in a message to President Joe Biden, according to the state-controlled Xinhua news agency.
In a commentary, Xinhua praised the former U.S. president for his role in normalizing U.S.–China relations and his “consistent devotion to promoting mutual understanding and friendship between the two peoples.” The mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) said Washington is now “in urgent need of political leaders like Carter,” whom it said had “the correct perception of China.”
The Presidential Office of Taiwan, or the Republic of China (ROC), also extended “sincere condolences” to Carter’s family and the people of the United States.
On the Chinese social media platform Weibo, most comments were positive. One user said the Nobel Peace Prize is honored to have Carter as a laureate. Another thanked the former U.S. president for allowing Chinese students to study in the United States and for enabling the improvement of the Chinese people’s living standards.
Diplomatic Relations
Carter had “a great deal of interest” in China from the time he was 4 or 5 years old, according to the former president’s own account in 2002. In the Baptist church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, he recounted in a speech, “the preeminent and most exalted people on earth were missionaries serving in China,” and the young Carter would donate five cents a week to help build schools and hospitals in the country.At the time, the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), which is now the main opposition party in Taiwan, had just defeated the warlords and established a national government in mainland China.
Around 20 years later, in 1949, months before the CCP established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the KMT was forced to retreat to Taiwan, Carter was a young Navy submarine officer deployed at KMT-occupied Chinese ports, keeping watch in case the CCP decided to take the ports.
Fast forward 28 years, and in 1977, five years after President Richard Nixon visited China, Carter entered the White House, determined to negotiate and establish full diplomatic relations with Beijing, he later said.
Wary of pushback from Congress, Carter bypassed the State Department and secretly sent negotiators to Beijing. He informed Taipei of the U.S. decision to switch diplomatic relations hours before Washington and Beijing published the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations on Dec. 16, 1978.
At the time, the U.S. decision to sever diplomatic relations with the ROC was met with anger in Taipei from both the KMT government and protesters.
Carter later defended his decision to bypass Congress, saying the president has the constitutional right to unilaterally declare diplomatic relations with any country.
On April 10, 1979, around three months after the U.S.–PRC relations took effect, Carter signed into law the Taiwan Relations Act, which was passed by Congress to replace the U.S.–ROC Mutual Defense Treaty. The act enabled unofficial relations to continue between the United States and Taiwan, including the selling of defensive weapons to the island.
Carter has said that his decision was built on the assumption that “any differences between Taiwan and China would be resolved peacefully,” although the PRC’s then-de facto leader Deng Xiaoping and his successors never promised not to use force to absorb Taiwan.
Yao-Yuan Yeh, chair of international studies and modern languages at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, said Carter’s decision made “perfect sense” at the time because the United States’ ultimate goal was to counter the Soviet Union. “However, for now, China has become the U.S. strategic competitor, and the U.S. national interest has changed to counter China, not Russia. President Carter might not have thought about this future when he decided to establish the formal relationship with China,” he told The Epoch Times.
Hu Ping, founding editor of the Beijing Spring magazine and a director of Human Rights in China, told The Epoch Times that it would have been more beneficial for Taiwan if Carter had insisted on having formal diplomatic relations with both. However, the KMT government at the time should share responsibility for what happened in the end, he said.
“For a long time, the United States and other Western countries wanted to recognize both, but the CCP refused that ... and Taiwan held the same attitude,” he said.
For around four decades after 1949, the KMT government’s goal remained to take back mainland China from the CCP. Martial law was in force on the island, and elections were suspended as there was no access to the constituencies in the mainland.
Following Carter’s announcement, the KMT suspended an election that was scheduled for December 1978.
During Carter’s visit to Taiwan in 1999, Taiwanese politician Annette Lu, who later became Taiwan’s vice president, confronted Carter, saying he owed Taiwan an apology for causing a delay in Taiwan’s democratization.
Carter defended his decision, saying it was the right one at the time.
Lai Jungwei, chief executive of the Taiwan Inspiration Association, said Carter’s focus on human rights and pressure from the United States accelerated the ending of Taiwan’s authoritarian rule.
“Although Taiwan and the United States severed diplomatic relations, in the 80s, [the U.S.] Congress’s concern over Taiwan’s democracy and human rights and U.S. arms sales to Taiwan were connected,” he told The Epoch Times.
“Therefore, the Chiang Ching-kuo administration was under enormous pressure. He had to democratize.”
Influence in the Mainland
The U.S. influence in mainland China, which is under the CCP’s totalitarian rule, has proved less successful.During Carter’s negotiation with Deng, the latter agreed to include freedom of religion in the text of China’s constitution and to allow the printing of the Bible, but refused to let Western missionaries return to China.
In 2002, Carter said that following his trips to China over the years, he became concerned over “the Chinese official interpretation of ‘freedom of worship’” given that there was “not really free religion there.”
The normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the CCP led to huge benefits for China’s economy.
Carter’s NGO, the Carter Center, has also observed and helped with rural elections in China, before the activities were shut down.
According to Yawei Liu, a senior adviser to the Carter Center’s China Focus program, Carter wrote to President-elect Joe Biden in 2021 to facilitate visa applications for Chinese students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hu said that U.S. engagement with China since Carter exposed the Chinese people to the idea of democracy, at least until the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989.
“Before June 4, 1989, the positive effect of U.S. government’s engagement policy was much greater than the negative ones,” he said.
“Exchanges of students and other exchanges opened the eyes of many Chinese people, making them realize that the so-called capitalism is much better than Mao Zedong’s socialism, and the freedom and democracy in the United States are much better than the CCP’s despotism.”
The effect was reflected in a replica of the Statue of Liberty erected by student protesters at Tiananmen Square before the CCP decided to send in the military to end the protests, he said.
The Tiananmen student protest and massacre is still a censored topic in mainland China. Estimates of the death toll vary, ranging from hundreds to thousands.
“After June 4, the United States maintained its policy of engagement, that’s a different issue, but we can’t retroactively negate all [of the positive effects]. It has had a different impact at different times,” Hu said.
