WORLD AFFAIRS

Brinkmanship in Taipei

Taiwan's President registers a provocative note on the status of Taiwan but with the U.S. circumspect, China refrains from joining issue at this juncture.

P.S. SURYANARAYANA
in Singapore

BY any standard of diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region, there is nothing radically new about the latest fracas between the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, which remains home to those with historical reservations on the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland more than 50 years ago. The crisis at this time in the emotionally tangled relationship between the two sides is significant, though, for not only the rapid escalation of the diplomatic flare-up itself but also the practised skills of both parties to contain the fallout.

More than a half-month after Taiwan raised the stakes on August 3 by renewing its claims to be distinctive from China, Taipei's brinkmanship lost much of its diplomatic urgency and even political direction. This was, in no small measure, the result of a more circumspect position that the United States took than at any earlier point of time in similar or comparable situations on the Taipei-Beijing front across the Taiwan Straits that separate the two antagonists. Even so, by the beginning of the third quarter of August, with Taiwan refusing to accept People's China's terms, the crisis was really far from winding down.

JEROME FAVRE/ AP
Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian.

The latest, almost cyclical, crisis began with an extraordinary claim by the Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian that it was "a basic human right of the residents of Taiwan" to express themselves in a referendum on the question whether they should remain separate from China forever. While asserting this "right", during a video-conference with some protagonists of Taiwanese independence in Tokyo, Chen compounded his thesis with a more explicit formulation. In his view, there already existed "one country on each side of the Taiwan Straits". As soon as he made his punchlines clear, Beijing lambasted him for such political heresy and underlined, if that was necessary, the fact that there was but one China on this planet and that Taiwan was most certainly an intrinsic part of that all-inclusive state of the Chinese people.

With Chen opting to window-dress his glasshouse in the specific context of China's furious condemnation of his new hardsell of an old idea, the situation only turned murky. In a purported attempt to set the record straight regarding his vision for Taiwan, he succeeded in reinforcing it. He said that the two entities on either side of the Taiwan Straits could be deemed to possess "equal sovereignty even if they were not being acknowledged by the international community as two distinctive countries with all the attributes of statehood."

Why did Chen choose to confront China in this fashion? Official China itself let a theory gain currency. The assumption was that he probably wanted to jockey for position in a diplomatic trench warfare ahead of the possibility, which he perceived, that China might opt for a major leadership change before the end of 2002. The view in Western and East Asian diplomatic circles is not dramatically different from this hypothesis about Chen's penchant for political adventurism in the context of a possible move by China to reinvent its leadership later this year to face the "post-modern challenges of a terrorised global order."

Relevant to this informed speculation is the view from Taiwan. Not long ago, it was the turn of China to try and influence political changes in Taiwan. On one occasion, the Taiwanese reeled under a show of force by China along its side of the Straits in a manner that rattled the international community as well. Seen in this perspective, it is obvious that Chen thinks that he can, on this occasion, try to influence China's leadership stakes and policy calculations by forcing the Taiwan issue centrestage in Beijing.

The danger, though, is that a diplomatic version of Murphy's Law may determine the course of events on the China-Taiwan front if Chen wants to have his way in the face of Beijing's stiff opposition. A relevant question is whether what can go wrong will indeed go wrong on this highly militarised front. Beijing has once again reserved the right to use military force, if necessary, to ensure that Taipei does not declare independence in a bid to negate China's claims over Taiwanese territory. Taiwan is an offshore island where the Chinese Nationalists routed by their Communist compatriots in the late 1940s took refuge. Broadly, the international community is supportive of Beijing's one-China policy that treats Taiwan as a territory to be reunified with the mainland. China has often emphasised, more frequently in recent years, that it will prefer to take over Taiwan through peaceful means.

China's concerns in the latest crisis can be traced to the reading that Chen's hypothesis about the existence of two countries across the Taiwan Straits is a reformulation of the theory of two-states that his predecessor, Lee Teng-hui, had advocated in 1999. That theory sparked a diplomatic storm which blew over only after China came up with a White Paper on Taiwan in February 2000, as an updated version of the one issued in 1994. Now, while Beijing may yet respond to the new situation in similar fashion, a defining factor at work during the early days of the latest crisis was the studied attitude of the Chinese leaders in refraining from joining issue with Chen in a direct political face-off or a personality clash.

In a sense, China's task at this point has been made somewhat easy by the manner in which the U.S. decided against rushing to Chen's rescue in diplomatic terms in some ingenious fashion or other. Not far to seek is the reason that the U.S. does not simply want to be distracted by the Taiwan issue at this critical juncture in the globalised war against terror, which has a regional Asia-Pacific dimension too. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell recently said, in response to a question from this correspondent, that Washington was signing an anti-terror declaration in conjunction with the Association of South East Asian Nations on the basis of an invitation to do so. In the process, he let it be understood that the U.S. was beginning to sense some terrorism alert in South East Asia that adjoins the China-Taiwan front. Not surprisingly, the U.S. is not keen to encourage Taiwan in its new confrontational posture towards China.

For long-term global politics, though, there is no evidence at this stage that the U.S. will give up its largely benign disposition towards Taiwan and deliver it to the Chinese. In a sense, the U.S. can hope to confound China by putting Taiwan to geostrategic use in much the same way as the former Soviet Union sought to use Cuba, not entirely successfully though, to confront Washington at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s. It is in this sense that China is still very wary of America's plans for a theatre missile defence system that might encompass Taiwan in an overt or covert fashion.

Given Taiwan's value to China as a political expression of its nationhood and as an economic asset with a geostrategic dimension as well, Beijing has once again underlined its interests in this regard. However, the nuances of China's Taiwan policy go far beyond the international media hype about a military solution as an option within Beijing's calculus. Long-time Sinologists in the Asia-Pacific region, like Sheng Lijun and others with an intimate knowledge of Taiwan too, point out that China's White Paper on Taiwan did not in fact insist that Taipei should first rescind its theory of two states as a pre-condition for dialogue between the two sides. China seems to have indicated that it might use force under "three situations - if a grave turn of events were to lead to the separation of Taiwan from China in any name; if a foreign invasion or a foreign occupation of Taiwan were to occur; and if a peaceful settlement of reunification through negotiations were to get delayed for an indefinite period." Prior to 2000, China had set out "Taiwan's independence" and "foreign intervention" as the two situations that would be unacceptable. Occasionally, the possibility of Taiwan's acquisition of nuclear weapons was also talked about as a serious threat to China's interests. Now, while China tends to believe that any move by Taiwan to declare independence can trigger a war, there has so far been no deviation from the White Paper.