TAIPEI - Recently in Taipei, as yet another delegation from mainland China cut
the ribbon to an investment fair and Taiwan's hotel industry anticipated
ever-rising numbers of mainland tourists, the island's President Ma Ying-jeou
had his eyes fixed on monitors.
Shown on them weren't the rosy graphs of the Taiwan bourse, nor was the
president surrounded by economists and party officials. In the midst of
Taiwan's military top brass, Ma was inspecting a spine-chilling
cyber-simulation of missile attacks on Taiwan by the People's Liberation Army
(PLA).
With increasing economic cooperation and people-to-people
exchange in the past two decades, there are growing calls for both sides across
the Taiwan Strait to formally sign an agreement to end the state of war that
has existed between them since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang
(KMT) troops were swept out of the mainland by Mao Zedong's army and fled to
Taiwan. The first step would be for their militaries to build mutual trust.
But all recent signs show that closer economic ties and improvements in the
Taiwan government's relations with Beijing are of little help in reducing
military hostility across the strait. One month after their signing of the
economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA), China's and Taiwan's
militaries seem still light-years away from the establishing mutual trust.
Beijing on one hand tries to woo retired Taiwanese military personnel, while on
the other keeps increasing its firepower aimed at Taiwan, which in turn
continues asking the US to provide advanced weaponry. While Taiwan, just as any
other country or region in the world, appreciates doing business with China, it
wants to keep China's military at bay. To ensure this objective, Washington's
arms are needed, and for the sake of guaranteeing American goodwill the
Taiwanese government is willing to pay billions of dollars.
"Now that we have improved our relations with China, it's time to strengthen
ties with the US through the purchase of excessively priced arms," said
Professor George Tsai, political scientist at Taiwan's Sun Yet-sen Graduate
Institute, in an interview with Asia Times Online. "This is important because
to feel safer, we still need the US as a power balancer between China and us,"
said Tsai.
Taiwan still has a standing request for American weapons worth US$6.4 billion,
including Patriot missiles, Black Hawk helicopters, communications equipment
for Taiwan's F-16A/B fleet, Harpoon missiles and mine-hunting ships. Apart from
these, the Taiwanese government seeks to obtain advanced F-16C/D fighter
aircraft and diesel-electric submarines.
It is not that China wouldn't try to influence Taiwanese military circles to
change allegiance from Washington to Beijing.
Just across the strait is Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian province on the
mainland. Xiamen University is home to the Taiwan Research Institute (TWRI),
founded in 1980 when China had just started its economic reforms and opening up
after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). TWRI was the first
academic research institution on mainland China to specialize in Taiwan
studies. It boasts of a collection of tens of thousands of Taiwan-published
books, newspapers and journals and even as much as 300 gigabytes of material of
Taiwan's Kuomintang-leaning (Nationalist) newspaper, the China Times.
In mid-July, the TWRI invited hundreds of officials, scholars and retired
military personnel from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland to participate in a
symposium on the occasion of the institute's 30th anniversary.
Among the objectives was to think up ways to build and improve cross-strait
military trust. Whoever intended to participate had been asked to apply with an
essay of 8,000 words, and was offered the free use of conference rooms - but
had to pay travel expenses.
One Taiwanese military man chosen to take part was Wang Jyh-Perng, a reserve
captain of the Taiwan navy. When Wang ventured his view on why there was not -
and why there shouldn't be - such a thing as cross-strait military mutual
trust, he wasn't actually pelted with eggs, but he was criticized in unison by
participants from both the mainland and Taiwan.
Wang began making his case by emphasizing a fundamental difference between the
armed forces of Taiwan and the mainland. Taiwan's military has in its history
already twice neutrally watched the handing over of power from one political
party to another. Whereas the Taiwanese military is used to dealing with
peaceful changes of administration, China's PLA has always been firmly under
the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
Wang further pointed out that even with improving cross-strait relations, there
would always be a part of Taiwan's population in vehement opposition to
unification. Those voices, said Wang, would not exit Taiwan's domestic
political stage.
Another argument he presented against China-Taiwan military cooperation was
that this would significantly interfere with the West Pacific strategies of the
US-Japan alliance. Although both countries applaud the increase in cross-strait
economic exchanges, it's certain that neither Tokyo nor Washington would be
watching happily over an inching of Taiwan's and China's militaries towards one
another.
Yet perhaps the weightiest circumstance that Wang brought into account was that
the majority of the Taiwanese public opposes military cooperation with China.
He pointed to recent opinion polls conducted by Taiwan's most often-quoted
polling institute revealing that while more and more Taiwanese support the ECFA
trade pact, the number who are in favor of the procurement of US weapons has
grown by 5% from a year earlier to 53%.
To establish a foundation for military cooperation, the mainland has been
promoting cross-strait exchanges between retired military top brass. Beijing
wants aging high-ranking members of China's and Taiwan's armed forces slowly to
build mutual trust, even bypassing the political leaderships. However, Taiwan's
Defense Minister Gao Hua-chu and Nationalist-leaning think tanks have
repeatedly voiced strong objections to establishing such semi-officials
channels.
According to Wang, by turning to retired Taiwanese high-ranking military
personnel, China has it in mind to influence the old cadre within Taiwan's
military and their offspring, the so-called Whampoa faction. Whampoa refers to
the elite military academy established by the Kuomintang in the mid-1920s in
Guangzhou, where what was later to become the first generation of top brass of
Kuomintang troops was trained before the Nationalists fled to Taiwan after
their 1949 defeat in the civil war.
Since the Whampoa faction has never given up hopes of eventual unification
between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, Beijing sees
the group as a likely conduit to Taiwan's military leadership.
Wang reckons that this was a miscalculation on China's behalf. Beijing's
conduit won't work because high-ranking military personnel with a Whampoa
background are outnumbered by top brass of Taiwanese descent, he says.
Taiwan's Ministry of Defense assesses that the PLA plans to boost the number of
short- and middle-range ballistic and cruise missiles facing Taiwan to 1,960
before the year's end. As a response to the threat, Taiwan requested the US to
supply the island with three Patriot missile-firing batteries and related
equipment, among other weapon systems.
On the day President Ma observed the computer simulation of a Chinese missile
attack, American arms manufacturer Raytheon, the world's largest missile-maker,
announced the Patriot contract was close to being signed.
Professor Tsai, who said that Taiwan ought to keep the power-balancing US happy
through weapons procurements, believes that the growing number of mainland
missiles should be seen in the context of a possible replacement of Taiwan's
relatively mainland-friendly Nationalist government after Taiwan's next
presidential elections in 2012.
Still, according to the professor, apart from a feared government change in
Taipei, China is likely to have further reasons for its arms buildup: "China is
huge, and a huge country must protect its borders."
Jens Kastner is a Taipei-based writer.
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