Beijing's new Taiwan strategy:
Washington By Ting-I Tsai
TAIPEI - What began as an election gambit
that would give Taiwanese voters the chance to
express their belief that Taiwan is a sovereign
country now has the country's ruling party
scrambling to avert what it believes would be a
diplomatic setback and vindication of rival
China's new approach in influencing the island.
When Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian
announced his decision in June 2007 to initiate a
referendum, he thought it could have the same
effect as two referendums held together with the
2004 presidential poll. Although they failed to
pass because fewer than the required 50% of
eligible voters participated, Chen claimed they
were decisive factors in his narrow victory.
But after suffering a lopsided defeat in
January's legislative
elections that dented its
confidence, the ruling Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP) has sensed that the referendum might
not have as big an impact on this election as
originally thought.
It now fears that
failure of its proposed referendum and another one
proposed by the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) on
re-entering the United Nations under the name
"Republic of China" or any other "practical" and
"dignified" name would send an inaccurate message
to Beijing: that Taiwanese people do not want to
be independent of China and that its efforts to
indirectly restrain Taiwan by pressuring
Washington to interfere in the island's affairs
are effective.
Unlike its previous
approach of directly threatening Taiwan over its
holding of referendums in 2004, Beijing pressured
Washington this time around to deliver its
message.
"Beijing's approach is brand new
and totally different from the past," said a
former senior Taiwanese cross-strait affairs
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The
official contended that the DPP government had
failed to recognize the change and come up with a
way to counter it.
Beijing has repeatedly
warned Washington since 2005 that Taiwan would
likely declare independence before President Chen
steps down in May 2008. Chinese officials
suggested numerous scenarios under which this
would happen to their Washington counterparts,
including Taiwan's declaring independence by
adopting a new constitution, President Chen's
creating an incident in the Taiwan Strait to
escalate tension, and simply declaring
independence based on a positive outcome in the
UN-bid referendum.
To push Washington to
further restrain Taiwan, China's Taiwan Affairs
Office deputy director Sun Yafu warned in December
that Taiwan's referendum on the UN bid could lead
to a scenario similar to that of the Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus. The de facto
independent republic located in northern Cyprus
declared its independence in 1983, and while it
has only been recognized by Turkey since then, its
status has remained unchanged.
Furthermore, two US academics, Drew
Thompson and Nikolas Gvosdev, both from the
Washington-based Nixon Center, noted in January
that Beijing's concerns about Kosovo's
independence declaration would complicate the
issue of Taiwan's international status.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said
on Tuesday that Taiwan has no right to acknowledge
Kosovo's independence.
Washington has
applied heavy pressure on Taiwan, first urging the
DPP government to cancel the referendum and then
simply publicly opposing it. On January 17, US
Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told
journalists in Beijing that Taiwan's UN referendum
is "provocative" and "a mistake". That came
shortly after US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice voiced opposition to the referendum in her
annual press conference in late December, saying
that it unnecessarily raised tension in the
region.
Beijing, on the other hand, has
remained relatively quiet on the subject. One of
the few times it criticized the referendums
publicly was on February 2, when Taiwan's Central
Election Commission finalized the schedule to hold
the referendum along with the March 22
presidential election.
According to an
article by Shi Yinhong, professor of International
Relations at Renmin University, Beijing started to
shift away from its policy of harshly condemning
Taiwan between 2000 and 2001. At the same time,
Beijing concluded that it should gradually
convince the administrations in the White House
through the upcoming administrations to accept the
unification of China, and have Washington make a
political choice between Taipei and Beijing.
"China should prepare for war with a
serious and determined attitude, and continually
maintain and escalate American's fears and
concerns over a war across the Strait," Shi wrote.
"This would be a crucial reason for the US to
slowly accept China's unification."
In a
rare television interview broadcasted on February
2, Shi Hwei-yow, the director-general of Taiwan's
National Security Bureau, confirmed that China's
military buildup against Taiwan has been more
ambitious than ever.
Based on the
observations of Taiwanese and Chinese analysts,
Chinese President Hu Jintao has been the key force
behind the new approach to handing Taiwan affairs,
developed after consulting academics from various
fields rather than relying solely on China's
Taiwan experts.
Huang Jing, a
Washington-based Chinese academic, suggested that
President Hu has realized that Washington has been
a key player in the Taiwan-China dispute and he
has tried hard to align the strategic interests of
Beijing and Washington related to Taiwan.
With doubts over how far Washington could
be trusted, the new approach prompted a division
of opinion among Chinese scholars. In
November, Yuan Peng, director of the Institute of
American Studies under the China Institutes of
Contemporary International Relations, publicly
argued that Beijing should tentatively trust
Washington at least once on Taiwan's referendum
issue, while a Beijing-based Taiwan expert, who
spoke under the condition of anonymity, argued in
an interview, "I might be old-fashioned, but I
never thought America should be allowed to get
involved in Taiwan affairs."
Under
pressure from Washington, and faced with the
possibility that the two referendums will fail to
meet the participation threshold (as was the case
with two separate referendums held alongside the
January 12 legislative polls), DPP presidential
candidate Frank Hsieh has urged President Chen to
consider initiating a third referendum that
ensures Taiwan's international space and could be
endorsed by both the ruling and opposition
parties. He has also suggested endorsing the KMT's
proposed referendum.
Most Washington-based
academics, however, believe the move has come too
late.
Richard Bush, senior fellow and
director of the Brookings Institution's Center for
Northeast Asian Policy Studies, noted that the DPP
is trying to make the best of a bad situation that
it created itself.
"It [Washington] tried
every way it could to convince President Chen not
to go forward with this process, but he did so
against our advice. Why would Washington accept a
process that leads to an outcome it opposes?" Bush
noted.
Alan Romberg, senior associate and
director of the East Asia Program at the Henry L
Stimson Center, echoed Bush's view by arguing,
"Now that they [DPP] see the potential
consequences, it is simply too late to rewind the
clock."
Whether the DPP can come up with a
third referendum backed by both parties remains to
be seen, but some pro-KMT academics have warned
that the KMT would suffer from even worse
diplomatic isolation if its presidential candidate
were to win the March election but the referendums
failed to pass.
According to an analyst
close to the DPP, holding a referendum that could
explicitly detail the desire of Taiwan's people
for international space would be its preferred
scenario at present.
The US has also tried
to nudge China not to obstruct Taiwan's
participation in the international community. In
an interview with the Council on Foreign
Relations, Negroponte noted that Washington has
urged Beijing to be "a little bit more generous
toward Taiwan in regard to some of those
organizations [global institutions that don't
require being a state to hold membership]" and
repeated US concerns toward Beijing's military
buildup on the People's Republic of China's side
of the Taiwan Strait.
Some Beijing-based
academics are concerned that a divide between
Beijing and Washington would develop should the
KMT's referendum, which Washington hasn't really
opposed, pass.
In a presentation given in
Washington recently, Bonnie Glaser, senior
associate at the Washington-based Center for
Strategic and International Studies, suggested
that Beijing recognizes that it will face
unprecedented challenges in responding to Taiwan's
demands for greater international space and
reductions in its military threat toward Taiwan in
a meaningful way if the candidate Beijing
apparently favors, the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou, wins
the presidential election. Ting-I
Tsai is a freelance journalist based in
Taipei. (Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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