Overview of Reagan’s 6 Assurances to Taiwan

The following is the June 13, 2023, Congressional Research Service, In Focus report, President Reagan’s Six Assurances to Taiwan.

From the report

In the 1978 U.S.-PRC joint communiqué, the two countries announced that they had agreed to establish diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979. In an accompanying statement, the U.S. government said it would terminate diplomatic relations with Taiwan on the same date. With some Members portraying the moves as a betrayal of Taiwan, Congress passed the TRA, enacted on April 10, 1979. Among the TRA’s provisions is that the United States “will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services” as necessary for Taiwan’s self-defense. In 1982, with continued U.S. arms sales to Taiwan pursuant to the TRA a major irritant in the U.S.-China relationship, the Ronald Reagan Administration sought to address the issue through negotiation of a third U.S.-PRC joint communiqué.

In that communiqué, known as the August 17th Communiqué for the day in 1982 on which it was released, the PRC affirmed “a fundamental policy of striving for a peaceful reunification” with Taiwan. The United States stated that it “understands and appreciates the Chinese policy of striving for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question.” With those statements “in mind,” the United States stated “that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied [since 1979], and that it intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading over a period of time, to a final resolution.”

The Reagan Administration understood that the communiqué would be viewed with alarm in Taiwan. On July 10, 1982, a month before its release, then-Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger sent a cable to James Lilley, Director of the unofficial U.S. representative office in Taiwan, the American Institute in Taiwan, instructing him to seek a meeting with Taiwan President Chiang Ching-kuo. Eagleburger provided Lilley with talking points authorized by President Reagan. The talking points included a set of statements on what the United States had not agreed to in the negotiations with the PRC over the communiqué. Those statements later came to be known as the Six Assurances. Lilley first delivered them to President Chiang on July 14, 1982. Taiwan’s government subsequently requested U.S. permission to make the Six Assurances public. In a cable sent the day of the communiqué’s release, then-Secretary of State George Shultz provided Lilley with a reworded version of the Six Assurances for Taiwan’s government to release. The same day and the day after, in Washington, DC, then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs John H. Holdridge testified before Congress about the just-released communiqué. He wove references to the Six Assurances into his testimony, but did not label them as the Six Assurances or disclose that President Reagan had offered the assurances to Taiwan’s president the previous month. The three U.S. government versions of the Six Assurances are presented in Table 1.

The Language of the Six Assurances CRS has bolded the verb tenses

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