1992 Consensus

Based on Wikipedia: 1992 Consensus

Here is one of the strangest diplomatic agreements in modern history: two governments that have been technically at war for over seven decades, who cannot even agree on which of them is the real government of China, somehow managed to agree that they agree—even though they completely disagree about what they agreed upon.

This is the 1992 Consensus, and it might be the most consequential diplomatic fiction of our time.

The Art of Agreeing to Disagree

To understand the 1992 Consensus, you first need to understand the peculiar situation in the Taiwan Strait. When the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, the losing side—the Kuomintang, or KMT—retreated to the island of Taiwan. They took with them the government of the Republic of China, which had ruled mainland China since 1912. The winning side, the Chinese Communist Party, established the People's Republic of China on the mainland.

Both governments claimed to be the legitimate government of all of China.

This wasn't just posturing. For decades, both sides genuinely believed they would eventually reunify China under their own rule. The Republic of China's constitution still technically claims sovereignty over the entire mainland. The People's Republic considers Taiwan a breakaway province that must eventually be reunited with the motherland.

By the early 1990s, the two sides needed to talk. Not about grand questions of sovereignty and legitimacy—those were too explosive—but about practical matters. How do you authenticate legal documents across the strait? How do you deliver mail? These mundane concerns required some kind of diplomatic framework, but any framework would immediately run into the fundamental problem: which China was the real China?

A Meeting in Hong Kong

In November 1992, representatives from both sides met in Hong Kong, which at the time was still under British colonial rule. This made it neutral territory—neither side was meeting on the other's turf.

The representatives weren't from the governments themselves. Direct government-to-government contact was politically impossible. Instead, they came from semi-official organizations that everyone understood were proxies for the actual governments. Taiwan sent the Straits Exchange Foundation, known as SEF. The mainland sent the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, or ARATS. These organizations had names that sounded like think tanks, but they were conducting what everyone knew was diplomacy.

The meetings produced something unusual. Earlier that year, in August, Taiwan's National Unification Council had passed a resolution that laid out their position: both sides of the Taiwan Strait uphold the One China principle, but with different interpretations. Taiwan's interpretation was that "One China" meant the Republic of China—their government, the one established in 1912, whose sovereignty extended throughout China even if its actual control was limited to Taiwan and a few small islands.

In November, the two semi-official organizations exchanged letters and phone calls. ARATS said it "fully respected and accepted" Taiwan's proposal that each side would verbally express its own interpretation of what "One China" meant. They agreed that political interpretations would be set aside when discussing practical matters like postal service and document authentication.

This was the foundation. Both sides said there was one China. Neither side agreed—or was required to agree—about which government represented that China.

The Consensus That Wasn't Named

Here's where the story gets stranger. The term "1992 Consensus" didn't exist in 1992.

It was invented eight years later, in April 2000, by a Taiwanese official named Su Chi. Su had served as secretary-general of Taiwan's National Security Council, and he coined the phrase right after a watershed moment in Taiwan's history: the election of Chen Shui-bian, the first president from the Democratic Progressive Party.

The Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, represented something new and threatening to the old framework. While the KMT had always maintained that Taiwan and the mainland were both part of one China—just temporarily divided—the DPP took a different view. For them, Taiwan was simply Taiwan, a democratic country separate from China. They had no interest in reunification and no attachment to the fiction that the Republic of China government was the legitimate ruler of Beijing.

Su Chi invented the term "1992 Consensus" as a way to capture what he saw as common ground that might survive the political transition. It was, in effect, a retroactive baptism of the understandings reached in those 1992 meetings.

This retroactive naming has made the consensus vulnerable to a particular criticism: how can you have a consensus if nobody called it that at the time? Former President Lee Teng-hui, who led Taiwan during the original 1992 meetings as a KMT leader, later expressed skepticism that any real consensus had been reached. Critics point to the lack of any formal agreement or declaration that both sides signed acknowledging the supposed consensus.

The Formula That Made Things Possible

Whatever you call it, the understanding reached in 1992 unlocked something important. In April 1993, the chairmen of ARATS and SEF—Wang Daohan and Koo Chen-fu respectively—met in Singapore. This "Wang-Koo summit" was the first high-level contact between the two sides since 1949. They signed agreements on document authentication, postal transfers, and scheduled future meetings.

The genius of the formula was its deliberate ambiguity. It allowed both sides to maintain completely contradictory positions while cooperating on practical matters. The People's Republic could tell its citizens that Taiwan had acknowledged there was only one China. The Republic of China could tell its citizens that its sovereignty over all of China had been respected. Neither statement was exactly true, but neither was exactly false either.

This is what diplomats sometimes call "constructive ambiguity"—language designed to paper over fundamental disagreements so that cooperation can proceed. It's a bit like two people agreeing to meet "around noon" when one person means 11:30 and the other means 12:30. As long as they don't examine the disagreement too closely, things can work.

Different Interpretations of "Different Interpretations"

The problem is that even the agreement to disagree has been disagreed upon.

Taiwan's KMT describes the consensus with a specific phrase: "one China, different interpretations." In Chinese, this is rendered as a compact four-character phrase that captures the idea elegantly. Both sides acknowledge one China, but each interprets what that means differently.

The People's Republic has never formally accepted this formulation. In official Chinese documents, the phrase "different interpretations" is repeatedly omitted. Beijing's position is that there is one China, that Taiwan is part of China, and that the People's Republic is the sole legitimate government of China. Full stop. The idea that there could be different valid interpretations of what "China" means—that Taiwan might legitimately claim to be the real China—is not something Beijing will endorse.

This asymmetry has led critics to argue that the "consensus" was really a one-sided deal. Taiwan agreed to something, and the mainland agreed to let Taiwan believe it had agreed to something slightly different.

The Consensus Under Pressure

Through the 1990s, the formula held, mostly. Relations warmed. But then things got complicated.

In the mid-1990s, President Lee Teng-hui began shifting Taiwan toward a more independence-oriented position. In 1999, he proposed his "two states theory"—the idea that Taiwan and the mainland had a "special state-to-state relationship." Beijing was furious. This seemed to abandon the one-China framework entirely. A planned Wang-Koo summit in Taiwan was cancelled.

When Chen Shui-bian of the DPP won the presidency in 2000, cross-strait relations entered a deep freeze. Chen initially showed some willingness to work within the 1992 Consensus framework, but faced backlash from his own party. The DPP's position was clear: there had never been any real consensus, and Taiwan was not part of China in any meaningful sense.

During Chen's eight years in office, government-to-government dialogue essentially ceased. But something interesting happened: business ties flourished. Taiwanese companies invested heavily in the mainland. Trade grew. The economic integration that the political framework was supposed to enable happened anyway, driven by market forces rather than diplomatic agreements.

The Ma Years: Consensus Renewed

The election of Ma Ying-jeou in 2008 brought the consensus back to center stage. Ma, a KMT politician, explicitly embraced the 1992 Consensus in his inaugural address, declaring that both sides had reached a consensus based on "one China with different interpretations" and that Taiwan would resume talks with the mainland on that basis.

What followed was a remarkable warming of relations. Direct flights between Taiwan and the mainland began in July 2008—previously, travelers had to transit through Hong Kong or other third locations. Trade agreements were signed. Chinese tourists flooded into Taiwan. The two sides seemed closer than they had been in decades.

The high point came in November 2015, when Ma met with Xi Jinping, the leader of the People's Republic, in Singapore. It was the first meeting between the leaders of the two governments since 1949.

Even then, the underlying disagreement surfaced. During their meeting, Ma brought up the "different interpretations" part of the consensus. Xi made no remarkable response. The mainland was willing to meet on the basis of the consensus, but it still wouldn't explicitly acknowledge that Taiwan's interpretation was valid.

The Tsai Era: Consensus Rejected

The election of Tsai Ing-wen in 2016 marked another dramatic shift. Tsai, also from the DPP, took a carefully calibrated position during her campaign. She didn't explicitly reject the 1992 Consensus, but she didn't accept it either. She spoke instead of "existing realities and political foundations"—language that Beijing found unacceptable.

Xi Jinping's response was to declare that the 1992 Consensus was "the greatest common denominator and political bottom line for peaceful development of cross-strait relations." In other words: no consensus, no dialogue.

The relationship deteriorated from there. In January 2019, Xi gave a major speech calling for adherence to the 1992 Consensus and proposing that Taiwan's future should follow the "one country, two systems" model used in Hong Kong and Macau. This was a significant escalation. The one-country-two-systems framework means something very specific: regional autonomy under Beijing's ultimate sovereignty.

Tsai responded the same day, making a statement that crystallized the DPP position: "The Beijing authorities' definition of the '1992 Consensus' is 'one China' and 'one country, two systems,'" she said. "We have never accepted the '1992 Consensus.'"

This was a direct rejection not just of the consensus but of the constructive ambiguity that had made it useful. Tsai was saying that the two interpretations of the consensus weren't equally valid—that Beijing's interpretation revealed what the consensus had always really meant, and it was unacceptable to Taiwan.

Hong Kong's Shadow

The timing of Xi's 2019 speech was particularly significant. The one-country-two-systems framework was already looking shaky. Hong Kong, which had been governed under this framework since the British handover in 1997, was about to erupt in massive pro-democracy protests. By 2020, Beijing had imposed a sweeping national security law that critics said destroyed Hong Kong's promised autonomy.

For many in Taiwan, Hong Kong became an object lesson. This is what "one country, two systems" means in practice, they argued. The promised autonomy can be revoked whenever Beijing decides it's inconvenient.

The KMT found itself in an awkward position. The party remained officially committed to the 1992 Consensus, but the consensus was now being linked in the public mind with one-country-two-systems, and one-country-two-systems was being linked with what was happening in Hong Kong. The party suffered a landslide defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

There was speculation that the KMT would finally abandon the consensus. They didn't—but they tried to reframe it. A party task force acknowledged that "public trust in the consensus had declined due to the actions of Beijing" and proposed describing it as "a historical description of past cross-strait interaction" rather than a framework for the future. KMT chairman Eric Chu later called it a "'no consensus' consensus"—an acknowledgment of how far the formula had drifted from anything resembling actual agreement.

The Constitutional Contradiction

There is a deep irony in Taiwan's internal debate over the 1992 Consensus. The Republic of China's constitution—which remains in force—still reflects the original KMT position that both Taiwan and mainland China are part of one China under the government of the Republic of China. This framework has never been formally amended.

The DPP, which rejects the idea that Taiwan is part of China, governs under a constitution that says exactly that. It's another layer of constructive ambiguity, this time within Taiwan itself. The constitutional framework allows Taiwan to maintain that it hasn't declared independence—which would likely trigger a military response from Beijing—while conducting itself as a de facto independent country.

This creates a situation where three different positions are simultaneously in play. The People's Republic says there is one China and they represent it. The KMT says there is one China and the Republic of China represents it. The DPP says Taiwan is Taiwan and the one-China framework is fiction. All three positions have some legal or political grounding, and none of them can be fully reconciled with the others.

What the Consensus Reveals

The 1992 Consensus, whatever its actual content, reveals something important about how intractable conflicts can sometimes be managed. For years, the deliberate ambiguity allowed both sides to cooperate without resolving their fundamental disagreement. Flights flew. Goods shipped. People visited family members they hadn't seen in decades. None of this required answering the question of which government was legitimate.

But ambiguity has limits. It works best when both sides have reasons to maintain it—when the benefits of cooperation outweigh the costs of confronting the underlying disagreement. As Taiwan's identity has shifted, with fewer people identifying as Chinese and more viewing Taiwan as a distinct nation, the political incentive to maintain the ambiguity has weakened. And as Beijing has grown more powerful and more assertive, its patience for arrangements that don't affirm its sovereignty has diminished.

The American position, as articulated by Raymond Burghardt, who chaired the American Institute in Taiwan (the de facto U.S. embassy), has been to encourage the framework's continuation without taking a position on its content. The United States has its own interest in stability in the Taiwan Strait and has generally supported whatever diplomatic fictions prevent conflict.

A Consensus About Nothing?

Surveys in Taiwan have shown declining support for the 1992 Consensus over time. The formula that once seemed like a clever diplomatic solution now looks to many like a trap—an agreement that locks Taiwan into a framework where the only possible outcome is eventual absorption by the mainland.

Yet abandoning the consensus entirely is dangerous too. Beijing has made clear that the consensus is the minimum requirement for any dialogue. Without it, there is no framework for talking at all, and the only alternative to talking is not-talking—or worse.

The 1992 Consensus, in the end, is less an agreement than a symbol. It represents a moment when the two sides of the Taiwan Strait found a way to work together despite irreconcilable differences. Whether that formula can survive the pressures of a changing Taiwan and a rising China remains to be seen.

In November 2015, when Ma Ying-jeou met Xi Jinping in Singapore, the two leaders shook hands for over a minute before the assembled cameras. It was the first such meeting since the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949. They discussed the 1992 Consensus—Ma emphasizing the "different interpretations" part, Xi responding with diplomatic non-response.

That handshake captured something essential about the consensus itself: a moment of connection across a vast divide, meaningful and historic, yet leaving the fundamental questions exactly where they had always been.