Bush's visit to Peking fails to solve the Taiwan muddle
The scene was deceptively convivial. There was Vice President George Bush, smiling affably as his host, Chinese Communist Party Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping, raised a glass of mao-tai in a toast to Sino-American friendship. In fact, after two days of talks with China's top leadership, Bush had failed to mend a relationship between the two nations that has been deteriorating virtually from the day President Ronald Reagan took office. When Bush returned to Washington last week, he could only say that he was taking some unspecified "new ideas" back to...