Thomas Pickering and the 1999 Decision to Use a Chinese Treaty

By Roy Castellano · September 9, 2026

Confidential for years, a 1999 meeting shows the US adopting a Chinese-written treaty to handle Pyongyang while the real discussion on Taiwan remained off the record.

The people of the Korean peninsula lived in 1999 under the shadow of a nuclear flash, their safety dependent on the fragile patience of two superpowers and the erratic whims of a hermit kingdom. The cost of a single diplomatic misstep was not a lost election or a market dip, but the erasure of cities.

On October 28, 1999, Thomas Pickering, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and a career diplomat who later served as UN Ambassador, sat down for lunch with Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister and a senior diplomat who eventually led the Chinese Communist Party's Central Foreign affairs Commission. Because only an archival description of the cable survives in this file, I am reporting from that summary rather than the original diplomatic dispatch. The meeting, reported by Amembassy Beijing—the diplomatic mission tasked with monitoring the PRC's influence over its neighbors—was ostensibly about "International Issues and More on Taiwan." In practice, the recorded conversation was a choreographed exercise in managing North Korea.

Berlin and the September Prelude

By the time Pickering and Yang met in Beijing, the Clinton administration had already laid the groundwork for a thaw with Pyongyang. The record shows that talks held in Berlin, the German capital which served as the neutral ground for September sessions, had established the foundation for a high-level North Korean visit to the United States.

Pickering used this momentum to press his position during the lunch. He reminded Yang that the U.S. intended to normalize relations with North Korea at a faster rate, provided the DPRK took steps to address nuclear and missile concerns. To maintain a unified front, Pickering cited a previous briefing given to the Chinese charge in Washington by Wendy Sherman, a State Department Counselor and veteran negotiator who later became Deputy Secretary of State.

The connection between Sherman's briefing and Pickering's lunch is not a coincidence of scheduling; it was a strategic synchronization. By anchoring his arguments in Sherman's earlier words, Pickering was signaling to Beijing that the U.S. policy was not the whim of a single official, but a locked-in institutional pivot. The record notes that this approach was based on the Perry Report, which recommended that U.S. policy toward North Korea become "more comprehensive and integrated."

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The Chinese Draft Treaty

While the U.S. spoke of "comprehensive" policy, the actual mechanism for peace was being written in Beijing. The record reveals a startling admission: Pickering noted that a draft treaty tabled by China at the last round of the Four Party Talks "would serve as a useful basis for future discussion."

This is where the diplomacy turns into a surrender of initiative. The U.S. did not merely consult with China; it adopted a Chinese-drafted treaty as its own baseline for negotiation. Pickering went as far as to express appreciation for the "depth and strength" of Beijing's participation in the process.

If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the desk's reading is that the U.S. had effectively outsourced the diplomatic architecture of the Four Party Talks to Beijing. By accepting a Chinese draft, Washington acknowledged a strategic dependency. The U.S. was not leading the peace process; it was riding in the passenger seat of a Chinese vehicle, hoping that Beijing's "counsel" to Pyongyang to "exercise restraint" would be enough to keep the missiles in their silos.

Silence on Taiwan

There is a gaping hole in this record that is shaped exactly like a secret. The subject line of the cable explicitly lists "International Issues and More on Taiwan." Yet, in the summarized text of the meeting, Taiwan is never mentioned once. The entire report focuses on the Perry Report, the Berlin talks, and the North Korean missile moratorium.

This discrepancy is a flashing red light. In the world of diplomatic cabling, you do not put a topic in the subject line if it wasn't discussed. The pattern suggests that the discussion on Taiwan was the actual primary objective of the lunch, or at least the most sensitive portion of it.

The desk's reading is that the Taiwan conversation was stripped from this reporting summary because it contained concessions or tensions that could not be transmitted via the same channel as the North Korea updates. While the North Korea talks were played out in the open—complete with draft treaties and publicized reports—the real friction between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan was handled in the margins, kept off the pages of the summary to avoid internal scrutiny or premature leaks.

'Other Options' and the Shadow War

Throughout the lunch, Pickering maintained a cordial tone, but the record contains a sharp, clinical warning. He told Yang that while the U.S. hoped for cooperation, "Washington had to be ready to pursue other options if the DPRK did not cooperate."

In the lexicon of the State Department, "other options" is a euphemism for the things that cannot be discussed over lunch. The public record shows a U.S. government pursuing a path of normalization, but the record of this cable shows a government hedging its bets.

The pattern suggests that these "other options" refer to coercive military or intelligence operations handled via a separate, higher-classification channel. The irony is thick: Pickering was praising the "depth and strength" of Chinese diplomacy in one breath and hinting at the possibility of kinetic action in the next. Furthermore, the desk's reading is that the "verifiable assurances" Washington sought from North Korea were not predicated on diplomatic promises, but on clandestine intelligence capabilities that the U.S. could not detail in a cable reporting a social lunch.

The Perry Report Shield

Looking at the trajectory of this meeting, it becomes clear that the Perry Report served a purpose beyond policy guidance. It acted as a political shield. By repeatedly citing the report and Wendy Sherman's briefings, Pickering was justifying a pivot toward normalization that was likely contested within the Pentagon and the intelligence community.

The desk's reading is that the Perry Report provided the necessary cover for the U.S. to accept a Chinese-drafted treaty and move toward a "more comprehensive" relationship with a nuclear-armed adversary. It allowed the diplomatic corps to frame a strategic retreat as a sophisticated evolution of policy.

If a full release of the original cable were to occur, the desk believes it would reveal that the U.S. was far more desperate for Chinese cooperation than it ever admitted publicly. The withheld pages likely contain the real price of that cooperation—the specifics of the Taiwan discussion that were deemed too volatile for the summary. The pattern shows a U.S. government willing to let China write the rules of engagement in East Asia in exchange for a temporary moratorium on missile tests. The cost of this dependency was a loss of diplomatic autonomy, a gamble that the U.S. would ever truly regain control over the peninsula's fate.