WORLD AFFAIRS

Reining in Taipei

P.S. SURYANARAYANA
in Singapore

Taiwan's referendum plans suffer a setback as a result of the change in the Bush administration's stance, effected by China's high-voltage diplomacy.

BY any standard of diplomacy, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has now scored a definitive point over not only Taiwan but also the United States in their triangular equation. The question, however, is whether the U.S., Taiwan's political patron and strategic benefactor for long, has still kept itself sufficient manoeuvring space for the future.

SIMON KWONG/REUTERS

President George W. Bush with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao at the White House on December 9.

The answer is a `yes'. President George W. Bush held out an assurance to China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in Washington on December 9 in terms that went far beyond the U.S.' previous overt diplomacy on the Taiwan issue. Bush said, at a photo opportunity, that he had just told Wen Jiabao that "we [the administration] oppose any unilateral decision by either China or Taiwan to change the status quo". Significantly, Bush's punch line was: "And the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan [Chen Shui-bian, in recent weeks] indicate that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose."

The catch phrases, with deep policy implications, were those relating to Bush's preference for the status quo and his opposition to unilateral decisions by either Taiwan or China to alter the ground realities concerning the interplay of the interests of all the three parties across the Taiwan Strait. The context is as important as the new pronouncement. Until now, the U.S. had consistently affirmed that it would "not support" the notion of Taiwan's `independence'. Significantly, there was no mention then of any U.S. opposition to such a proposition - in effect, a case of strategic ambiguity about Taiwan's eventual political status.

The present context is Taiwanese President Chen's move to hold a "defensive referendum" in March next year on the territory's political status. He has reaffirmed his intentions even after Bush disapproved the plebiscite move despite being an `ally' of Taiwan. With this, the stage is set for a definitive reality check about the regional geopolitical cross-currents, perhaps sooner rather than later. Washington's own long-term interests are at stake; and the new pronouncement, important as it is, is certainly not the last word.

The accent that Bush placed on the relative importance of the status quo does render the new American stance a matter of implicit nuance rather than a policy of explicit positioning. Nonetheless, given Bush's pledge to do what it takes to defend Taiwan in any military confrontation with China, his latest re-definition of America's `one-China' policy can be interpreted, at the lowest denominator, as a slight diplomatic tilt towards Beijing and away from Taipei.

In the same new context, though, there is nothing really new in the apparently rehearsed statement that Bush made in the presence of Wen Jiabao that, "the United States government's policy is one China, based upon the three communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act". For years now, these Sino-U.S. communiques and the legislation have been the basis of the ties between Washington and Beijing. It is the reaffirmation of this perspective that adds meaning to the shift in the U.S. diplomacy regarding the Taiwan question.

TAIWAN is home to the descendants and survivors of the `nationalists' who lost to the Communist Party of China (CPC) at the time the PRC was founded in 1949. Originally, the `nationalists' dreamed of reunifying Taiwan with the mainland under their own political banner. America's gradual rapprochement with the PRC, traceable to the `Nixon-Kissinger' diplomatic manoeuvres of befriending Mao Zedong in the early 1970s, reduced the game of those `nationalists' to a pipedream. Taiwan was also dislodged from its U.S.-sponsored position as a veto-empowered permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

Writing in the late 1990s on "the Sino-American alliance", which linked "Nationalist China" to the U.S., John W. Garver, an expert on the region, argued that it was `not' correct to view the denouement in the U.N. in the 1970s as Washington's "betrayal" of an ally like Taiwan.

In an earlier study on the `remaking' of America's "China policy", Richard Moorsteen, a Rand Corporation consultant, and Morton Abramowitz, a retired diplomat, had concluded in 1971 itself that any move by the U.S. for "a one-China-one-Taiwan" arrangement in the U.N. would only "seriously aggravate (Washington's) relations with Peking (Beijing)" then and in the future.

Chen is attempting to swim against the tide of recent history. In one sense, the current dynamics of Taiwan's internal `democracy' have much to do with the ambitious style and abrasive substance of Chen's politics, as seen from Beijing and the rest of the world. As the leader of a `pro-independence' party, he feels the need to raise the referendum issue ahead of the general elections in March next year. As a territory acknowledged by the international community, inclusive of the U.S., as an intrinsic part of the PRC under the `One-China' principle, Taiwan lacks the attributes of sovereignty. Yet, if Chen finds it difficult to come to terms with Bush's new formulation, the reason has to do with the perceived incompleteness of the current shift in emphasis in the U.S.' policy on Taiwan.

LAWRENCE JACKSON/AP

Taiwanese President Chen Shui-ben.

For Chen, the new opportunity for a "defensive referendum" has been provided by a Bill that the Taiwanese Yuan or Parliament passed in Taipei on November 27. The Bill, which had become a toy in Taiwanese politics, did not authorise any plebiscite on such issues as changing the island-territory's name or anthem or flag or `Constitution'. Yet, Chen has sought to make the best of what is to him a bad bargain by propagating the idea of a "defensive referendum" which, if he eventually manages to have his way, will be held to coincide with the general elections. The idea, as first seized by Chen after a legislative vote, was to ask the people of Taiwan whether they would like to preserve their present distinctive non-PRC identity in the event of a military threat from Beijing.

Chen's strategy, apparently, is to confound the Opposition Kuomintang Party with a `nationalist' lineage and put his own Democratic Progressive Party in the driver's seat before the polls. However, China's vigorous diplomatic offensive compelled Bush to change tack, if not sides.

Beijing, which considers Taiwan to be an inalienable part of the PRC, had begun exposing Chen's political game plan even before the "defensive referendum" was passed by his territory's Parliament. The first target of Beijing's political offensive in this specific context was Chen's moves for the adoption of a new Taiwanese `Constitution' by December 10, 2006, and for its promulgation by May 20, 2008. The timing of these plans could be seen to coincide with China's preparations for the holding of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.

It required no great insight for China to suspect that Chen's calculation was to march towards `independence' during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, a period when the relatively new leaders of the PRC would be, in his reasoning, too busy to want a political or military fight on their hands. Such a reading compelled Wen Jiabao to declare, prior to his departure for Washington, that China would be willing to pay any price to prevent the independence of Taiwan.

Such was China's high-voltage diplomacy that Bush chose to warn Chen. For Chen, it happened even as he had just claimed that he would be able, with the help of his `brain power', to `manage' the question of a "defensive referendum" through suitable interactions with the U.S. In a damage control exercise, after Bush's rebuke, Chen chose to assert that his plan for a "defensive referendum" was not really in danger. He said his plan, too, "is to avoid war" and to "free our [Taiwanese] people from [the] fear" of a possible military attack from China. That, in his view, was the meaning of the proposed referendum on the issue whether the Taiwanese would like China to remove the missiles `directed' against them. Even as Chen claimed that he also would "want to maintain the status quo" of Taiwan's distinctive identity, it became obvious that he would not like to give up the political card of `independence', however vaguely defined, until at least the next general elections.

At the other end of the U.S.-China-Taiwan spectrum, Bush has not fully endorsed Beijing's views despite his reaffirmation of the `one-China' policy. He has, in fact, asked China as well to refrain from any unilateral action. This certainly implies that the U.S. has still kept its options open on the Taiwan issue. However, authoritative Chinese sources told Frontline that the U.S. tended to look at Beijing through other prisms too, like its diplomatic ability to help solve the riddle of keeping the Korean peninsula a nuclear-weapons-free zone and the magnitude of China's emerging market.

In a strategic sub-text of the complex Taiwan issue, China is also watching keenly to see whether the U.S. would extend its proposed theatre missile defence (TMD) system to that territory as a sop to prevent it from resorting to a unilateral declaration of independence. It is in this sense that a Chinese strategic expert like Xia Liping has argued that Beijing's non-renunciation of the use of force as the last resort to keep Taipei away from `independence' would indeed provide "the guarantee that the Taiwan issue might be resolved peacefully".

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