When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with his Chinese counterpart, Dong Jun, in Singapore late last month, he was treated to the usual litany of preemptive Beijing complaints alleging hostile U.S. intentions — “containment,” “encirclement” etc. — and U.S. bad faith by failing to honor the “one China principle.” Such charges have been repeated so often and so relentlessly that many Americans and others have come to accept them as historical fact.

Whether China’s professions of injured sensitivities are feigned or authentic depends on whether the communist leaders believe their own propaganda.

The bad-faith charge stems from the seminal document co-authored by Henry Kissinger and Zhou En-lai, the Shanghai Communiqué, the original sin of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations. Attempting to bridge the longstanding chasm between the Chinese and U.S. positions on Taiwan, Kissinger utilized what he, President Nixon, and many others considered “brilliant” wordsmithing.

In the Joint Communique, China emphatically stated its position on Taiwan: “[T]he Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China; Taiwan is a province of China; which has long been returned to the motherland. ... The Chinese Government firmly opposes any activities which aim at the creation of ‘one China, one Taiwan,’ ‘one China, two governments,’ ‘two Chinas,’ and ‘independent Taiwan’ or advocate that “the status of Taiwan remains to be determined.” Over the last half-century, that language became encapsulated in Beijing’s “one China principle.”

Kissinger apparently took no issue with China’s misstatement of history that........

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