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COMMENTARY
August 14, 2002
East side story
For all that is happening in the Middle East and could still happen between India and Pakistan it is necessary to keep one's third eye focused on developments between Taiwan and China. To my knowledge the U.S. administration continues to do this on a fairly generous scale; their worry and I think everyone's worry must be that at some moment when the U.S. is completely absorbed in events elsewhere China may attack Taiwan. The historical precedent would be the Soviet invasion of Hungary while the West was preoccupied by the Suez Crisis in 1956. Superficially relations between the U.S. and China are much improved since the spy plane incident early in the term of President George W. Bush. Among other things joint military consultations have been revived and the tone of diplomatic conversation between Beijing and Washington is better from both sides. According to sources in the Pentagon the Chinese have been positively helpful in the prosecution of the "secret war" against Al Qaeda and other "Islamist" terror operations; though there continue to be complaints about Chinese weapons shipments and technological assistance to Iraq Iran and other rogue regimes. In the UN despite some unpleasant rhetoric the Chinese delegation has punctiliously avoided making mischief serious enough to distract the U.S. But against this is the dramatic and continuous escalation of the mainland threat to the island of Taiwan which China persists in claiming as a province (though Taiwan has not been under mainland suzerainty since 1895 and was never really an integral part of any Chinese empire before that). American satellites continue to reveal a build-up of missile batteries air force and fleet facilities along the Strait of Taiwan in Fujian province right opposite the island. Some 400 surface-to-surface missiles are now aimed at Taiwan at least 40 of these deployed since the month of April. Formal Chinese military doctrine has centred upon an invasion of Taiwan since 1991 and the military build-up began to accelerate in 1999 -- a year before Taiwan's President Chen Shui-ban led his independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party to power in the first transfer of government by election in the whole of Chinese cultural history. There were headlines briefly after Aug. 3 when President Chen spoke publicly by videolink to a group of "pro-independence" activists in Japan. In that he said Taiwan, China, on each side of the Strait, are different countries -- a statement of fact that both he and his predecessor in the presidential office Lee Tung-hui had made many times before. He also mentioned the desirability of an eventual Taiwan-wide referendum on the issue (part of his party's official platform since its formation). Both statements had been recorded in the Taiwan press made to other audiences in the fortnight before Aug. 3. But thanks to a sudden eruption of outrage from Beijing second-guessing by Taiwan's own opposition parties and a sudden dive on the Taipei stock exchange the world's liberal media focused on President Chen's recorded videophone remarks and reported him to have indulged in a "provocation" of the Panda. It could only be made to look like a gratuitous provocation by stripping away the context. On the other hand it was a conscious response to a very extensive provocation -- the military build-up the bellicose rhetoric and renewed efforts by Beijing to isolate Taiwan from the international community in trade and other areas. Mr. Chen's recent statements do reflect a new policy: to refuse to be intimidated by this Chinese offensive. His government now realizes it has been ill-served by two years of conciliatory gestures towards Beijing none of which have been reciprocated. Moreover at least for the short term Mr. Chen seems to have accomplished his end. His published remarks were met (except for one unfortunate reflex "tut-tut" statement from the U.S. State Department bureaucracy) by studied silence from the Bush administration. This in turn communicated to the Chinese leadership that their bluff was called. Over the last weekend I notice the Chinese official media in English have dropped their recent posturing over Taiwan. The brother of China's U.S. ambassador meanwhile smugly told the Washington Post he expected the Politburo would give Taiwan's president "another grace period" -- which is the face-saving way of conceding the round to President Chen. Western media have reported that Mr. Chen also "backed down" over the weekend. If explaining his remarks yet again in words of one syllable was a climbdown it was a subtle one. For he did this during a show of solidarity on Sunday from Lee Tung-hui who invited Mr. Chen to take the stage with him at a rally to celebrate the first anniversary of the ex-president's new party the Taiwan Solidarity Union -- which split away from the old Kuomintang over the independence issue and which has helped President Chen gain working control over Taiwan's Legislative Yuan. Point to Taiwan short term. But there is a longer term in this and it is obscured by uncertainty within the Chinese Politburo. For several years Hu Jintao has been presented as the designated successor to President Jiang Zemin at the core of a transition to the fourth generation of the Communist Party leadership. (Mandatory retirement ages term limits and the grooming of younger leaders were part of Deng Hsiao-ping's institutional reforms of the Party after he came to power in the late 1970s.) It has become increasingly clear that the older generation of President Jiang Li Peng and Zhu Rongji (a.k.a. "the butchers of Tiananmen") is unwilling to be displaced. There is now a great deal of intrigue in Beijing necessarily involving the disposition of China's desperately corrupt but colossally large armed forces. This adds to the danger that China may suddenly "try something" over Taiwan as part of someone's power play. The reality is that the political reforms started by the late strongman Deng also ended with him; only his economic reforms were continued after the Tiananmen massacre. The Jiang generation may not trust the Hu generation not to give the store away. And even if he retires formally President Jiang has been manoeuvring himself into a retirement job as chairman of the Central Military Commission -- i.e. the closet where the guns are kept. Well as some sage once remarked The world is a dangerous place. ... It was Albert Einstein and he continued: "... not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don't do anything about it." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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