Word: mainland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three-year assignment in Moscow. He found it easier to get information on the Chinese Communists than the Soviets. One reason: the famed wall posters, which, says Clark, "tell us much about how the Chinese people feel these days about their leaders." Adds Clark: "On a trip to the mainland I found the officials engagingly candid about the conditions in their country...
Another of Carter's major concerns was to assure Moscow that the agreement with mainland China was not meant to challenge or provoke the Soviet Union, even though the U.S.-Peking communique condemned "hegemony," which is a Chinese code word for Soviet expansionism. To counterbalance that possibility, the communique pointedly said that the new step was not taken for "transient, tactical or expedient reasons," diplomatic language implying that Carter's China action was not in any way directed against Moscow. Vance told TIME: "We will treat the Soviet Union and China equally and not play one off against the other...
...were furious over the rapprochement with Peking. Utah Republican Orrin Hatch contemptuously called Carter's foreign affairs advisers "loose-jointed and weak-kneed diplomats" and declared that the President should have held out for a better deal on Taiwan. Said Hatch: "All he had to do was stand fast. Mainland China needs this relationship more than the U.S. does." Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater accused Carter of having committed "one of the most cowardly" presidential acts in history and threatened to sue him in court on the questionable ground that a President cannot cancel a treaty without the Senate's approval...
Carter sought to blunt some of the conservative reaction by indicating that normalization would lead eventually to a bonanza for the American economy. He spoke to reporters glowingly of "the new vista for prosperous trade relationships with almost a billion people." U.S. trade with the mainland now totals only about $1 billion a year. Says Ping-ti Ho, an expert on China at the University of Chicago: "The reason the Chinese have not bought from the U.S. is largely related to the absence of full diplomatic relations. Normalization will remove this barrier...
Very few of Taiwan's inhabitants fear an actual invasion from the mainland. China currently lacks the landing craft and other military equipment for such a move. Taiwan's armed forces of 474,000 men, including a well-trained air force of 316 combat aircraft, 165 of them F-5A/E interceptors that it has built under U.S. license, would make a direct assault on the island extremely costly. Furthermore, the U.S. is maintaining the right to continue selling defensive weapons to Taiwan. Privately, however, the island's officials worry about the possibility of a Communist submarine...