The United States’s so-called “One China Policy” is no longer realistic or tenable, according to former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.
“It may have been the case in 1972 that the people of Taiwan saw themselves as Chinese, but they don’t today,” Esper said during a July 26 talk at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
“A majority of them see themselves as Taiwanese. They have a new, distinct cultural identity.”
The One China Policy is the United States’s longstanding diplomatic acknowledgment of China’s position that there is only one Chinese government. It is separate from the One China Principle, which is communist China’s doctrine that Taiwan is a de jure part of the mainland….