A thorn in the side of Sino-US ties
When Condoleezza Rice visited China in July as US national security adviser, she hoped to persuade Beijing to give stronger support to Washington's efforts to get North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme.
But Dr Rice, now secretary of state, found that it had another priority: Taiwan. She was told by mainland leaders that the Taiwan question was an important and delicate issue in Sino-US ties. They said that the Bush administration should not encourage Taiwan's independence by offering to sell anti-missile systems, submarines and maritime patrol planes, worth about US$20 billion, to Taipei.
This linkage between the two major potential flashpoints in Northeast Asia still bedevils Sino-US relations. Beijing's mistrust of America over Taiwan makes the mainland more reluctant to co-operate fully with America to disarm North Korea, even as Kim Jong-il said this week that his country would return to multilateral nuclear disarmament talks hosted by Beijing if the US met certain unspecified conditions.
Indeed, recent developments have intensified Chinese suspicions that the US and its ally, Japan, want to bolster Taiwan while containing and weakening mainland China. Last Saturday, the US and Japan agreed that one of their common strategic objectives was to encourage the peaceful resolution of issues concerning the Taiwan Strait through dialogue. It was the first time in the 50-year history of the US-Japan security pact that both partners had expressed common concerns over cross-strait tensions. The joint statement came just two weeks before the National People's Congress convenes. It is expected to pass an anti-secession law, which could legally bind the mainland's military to attack Taiwan should Beijing judge that the island was intent on becoming independent.
The US is also resolutely opposed to a plan by the European Union to lift its arms embargo on China by July. It will be replaced by a code of conduct which European officials say will ensure that arms and technologies are not exported if they could be used by China for external aggression or internal repression. But US and Japanese officials and lawmakers are not convinced. They worry that ending the embargo will lead to sales of advanced arms that could be used against their military forces in a crisis over Taiwan or North Korea.
CIA director Porter Goss told the US Congress last week that Beijing's military modernisation and build-up was tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. 'Improved Chinese capabilities threaten US forces in the region,' he said.
Under the Taiwan Relations Act, the US might decide to intervene on Taiwan's side if Beijing attacked. The director of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby, told a Senate panel on February 16 that not only would mainland missiles be able to strike key Taiwanese military and civilian facilities, they would also be capable of targeting US and allied military installations in the region, either to deter outside intervention in a crisis over Taiwan or attack those installations if deterrent efforts fail.
He said that China was also developing and buying anti-ship cruise missiles that could be launched from the land, air and sea. With more advanced guidance and propulsion technologies, these missiles would have a better chance of penetrating shipboard defences and could also be used to attack targets on land.
'These systems will present significant challenges in the event of a US naval force response to a Taiwan crisis,' said the vice-admiral. 'In the next 10 years, we expect other countries to join Russia, China and France as major exporters of cruise missiles.'
Michael Richardson is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. This is a personal comment
