Research On The Issue Of Arms Sales To Taiwan In The United States

The bilateral relation between China and the U.S. is one of the most important relations in the world since the establishment of their diplomatic relations. Conflicts and cooperation always exist through decades of ups and downs. The most sensitive and core issue in the conflicts is Taiwan issue. Arms sales of the U.S. to Taiwan has become the major cause that leads to the tension in the bilateral relation. Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and the Taiwan issue is always the home affairs of China involving the core interest. The U.S. has become the only superpower since the collapse of the Soviet Union so its national interest is to maintain its hegemony in the world. The U.S. has been selling arms to Taiwan for a long time, which concerns the global interest of the U.S. and the national interest of China. In the development of the bilateral relation, the arms sale is a barometer of the relation between China and the U.S. Both countries made effort to negotiate and reach the August 17 Communique, which, however, didn’t fundamentally solve the problem. Both the U.S. and China are major powers, the comparison of national interests, especially the core national interests, is a very important perspective to look into the Sino-American relation which is increasingly significant but also complicated. The second part of the thesis focuses on reviewing the military relation between the U.S. and Taiwan and analyzes how the August 17 Communique signed by China and the U.S. influenced the arm sales to Taiwan. The third part digs into the influences on the national and core interest o f China brought by the arms sale of the U.S. to Taiwan. The forth part further explore China’s countermeasures against the arms sale by relating the arms sale with the way in which the Mainland is going to solve the Taiwan issue. Furthermore, from the perspective of the regional security in the East Asia and enhancing the capability to deal with the U.S. Pacific-Asia rebalance, the end proposes to build a new-type relation between the two major powers.