20041220

By Antonio Chiang
The only real loser to emerge from the recent elections seems to be the People First Party (PFP). As for the Chinese National Party (KMT), the outcome gave a boost to its declining morale. Although the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) seized two more seats, they have been portrayed as the loser. All in all, the unexpected outcome of this election has humbled the DPP and given the KMT a chance to start over.

In more than 10 elections held over the past 20 years, there have been few major swings in power. In others words, losers in a legislative election are likely to make up lost ground by doing well in the mayoral and county commissioner elections that follow. The distribution of votes in this country is remarkably stable and whatever politicians may do to woo voters, they have never achieved a drastic change in this distribution.

Long-term supporters of the DPP are likely to be relieved by the outcome, seeing the result as positive. First, without a majority, President Chen Shui-bian no longer has to worry about fulfilling the promises he made during the campaign. Reckless attempts to carry out these promises could lead to disaster. Nor will he feel forced to resign within two years, as he promised to do if he did not perform well in his second term, which could have triggered a succession struggle.

Second, from now on Chen no longer has to keep pace with the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). He should take a moderate approach and let Lee take care of the "deep green" supporters.

Third, former president Lee Teng-hui has seen much of what he fought for achieved. He has led his people into the land of Canaan and he can now take a rest.

Fourth, the KMT can start over. Its has correctly differentiated itself from the PFP, and with its increase in popularity, there is hope for internal reform.

Fifth, the outcome of the election gave KMT Chairman Lien Chan a chance to step down graciously from his chairmanship. If PFP Chairman James Soong decides to follow suit, the political scene will definitely become much brighter.

Sixth, Beijing can stop being anxious. As the opposition parties counterbalance each other in the legislature, Chen's government cannot make any rash moves.

Seventh, the US can stop inspecting what Chen does or says on a daily basis, as this constant finger pointing hurts the dignity of the Taiwanese people.

When Chen smells victory, he often loses his cool. On this occasion, his campaign rhetoric was so strident that although the campaign focused on peace and security, he still managed to frighten many moderates. Faced with failure, Chen coolly examined his actions. The outcome of this election was basically a no-confidence vote, which not only questioned his campaign tactics and the promises he made, but his style of leadership. The decisions he made will face criticism within the party.

The DPP has always stressed democracy within the party, but after a few years in government, the practice of "what I say counts" has gradually emerged. The arrogance of the DPP has appeared in various forms, and the party's failure in the election will have been a good thing if it forces party members to examine their conduct.

The overall development of this society is advantageous to the DPP, but being on the right side of history doesn't mean that you will rule, or that you can maintain power. The conceited will be punished and those who battle against adversity will be consoled. It is the same in politics as it is in life.

So this unexpected outcome to the elections has brought an unexpected harvest.

Antonio Chiang is a former deputy secretary-general of the National Security Council.

Beijing's anti-secession bill, although still in the pipeline, may trigger counter-moves in Taiwan, including a memorandum for independence, a China expert with a Washington-based think tank said Saturday.

Alan Romberg, senior associate and director of the East Asia Program of the Henry L. Stimson Center, noted that the anti-secession bill will cause more fallout than consolidation for China.

The most crucial issue at present is that leaderships in both Taiwan and China refrain from making the opposite side feel that achieving the goal is hopeless, Romberg said during a seminar sponsored by the US-China Policy Foundation.

If Beijing adopts the anti-secession bill, it is highly probable that Taiwan will adopt a series of counter-measures that would be hard to be opposed even by the pan-blue opposition parties, Romberg said.

Romberg said that Beijing did not show pleasure with the defeat of President Chen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the Dec. 11 legislative elections as widely expected. Instead, it mounted new wave of verbal attacks on Chen and reiterated its belief that Chen will push for Taiwan's independence even harder than before.

Romberg said that he thought otherwise and that Beijing should have taken the opposite approach.

Noting that hopes still exist for the Taiwan Strait, Romberg said that Beijing should adopt "active and positive" approaches toward Taiwan to avoid driving the it farther away.

Quoting a Confucian proverb, Romberg said, "improve the nation's humanity and virtue if people far away defy."

Romberg said that Beijing should try its best to understand the cross-strait situation as well as what the Taiwanese people are thinking.

REVERSAL: Active-duty military officers will be assigned to AIT, taking over from contractors and marking a departure from previous US policy
AFP , TAIPEI
In a reversal of its long-standing policy, the US will post military officers to its mission in Taipei for the first time since 1979, leading defense journal Jane's Defense Weekly said.

From the middle of next year, active duty military personnel will replace civilian contractors at Washington's effective diplomatic mission in Taipei, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the weekly said in an article that will be published on Wednesday.

US Army Colonel Al Wilner, a former helicopter pilot, will be the first to arrive, Jane's Taipei correspondent Wendell Minnick told reporters yesterday.

The move marks a crucial reversal of the US defense department's long-standing policy of not assigning military officers to the country, the weekly said.

"Washington has become less concerned over any potential protest from Beijing amid growing unease over China's military ambitions in the Asia Pacific region," it said.

With a lack of diplomatic ties, military affairs between Washington and Taipei have been handled by contractors working for the US Defense Intelligence Agency and Defense Security Co-ordination Agency.

"Washington has become less concerned over any potential protest from Beijing amid growing unease over China's military ambitions in the Asia Pacific region."

Jane's says the change results from a bill passed by the US Congress in 2002, allowing for the posting of US military personnel to Taiwan if it is deemed to be "in the national interest of the US."

US government employees, including military personnel, are currently required to retire before they can be hired by the US mission in Taipei.

US personnel assigned to the mission will not wear uniforms and will serve for three years, compared with the two-year term offered to civilian contractors, the weekly says.

The change should also cut costs as civilian employees are higher paid.

The naive faith that a pan-green failure to secure a legislative majority two Saturdays ago would lead to relaxed relations with China didn't even last a week. That this was the mantra adopted by the foreign media in its entirety after the elections just goes to show how the collective fascination with a rising China seems to lobotomize commentators who should know better.

China is in the grip of a raging nationalism based on a virulent sense of historical wrong. It has the imperial ambitions of Wilhelmine Germany with the sense of historical victimhood of the Third Reich. "Relax" isn't a word in China's diplomatic lexicon.

The message China received was that intimidation works. It ignores -- probably is entirely ignorant of -- the pork-barrel nature of Taiwan's legislative election campaigns, and therefore President Chen Shui-bian's ability to get out his voters with his irrelevant campaign. What China thinks it sees is voters' rejection of Chen's campaign themes, which it interprets as a result of its own saber-rattling. So, since intimidation works, let's have some more -- also a Hitlerian tactic, by the way.

Thus we can expect at the weekend China's rubber stamp parliament to pass the "anti-secession law," whose purpose is to forbid the secession of any part of what China considers its national territory. Its purpose is to mandate military attack on Taiwan should it declare independence; or, according to some speculation in the Hong Kong papers, remember that no draft of the law has been released yet -- even if it fails to reunify by a certain date.

There are a number of things that might be said about this law. The first is that it is absurd; whoever heard of one country making laws for another?

The second is that, absurd though it might be, it is clearly indicative of China's hegemonic intentions.

China is determined to be master of the Western Pacific, something it cannot be while it does not control Taiwan. Those with strategic interests in the region, the US and Japan, need to wake up to the fact that China's intention to take over Taiwan is not based on some nonsense about the inalienability of historically Chinese-controlled territory -- note that China has made no claim to Outer Mongolia.

China wants Taiwan because it wants regional dominance, for which the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" is the key. There is a lot more at stake here than questions of Taiwanese identity.

Since the US has been so critical of Chen "proposing to change the status quo," it will be interesting to see if they rap China's knuckles in the same way.

It is hard not to see yesterday's news that serving military officers are to be stationed here for the first time since 1979 as anything other than a response to China's plans, though the US move was probably planned long beforehand.

The new law might have the benefit of waking the US up to how it has let itself be hopelessly manipulated by Beijing for the last year or so into putting pressure on Taiwan and working against its better, strategic interests.

But the important message that has to be understood in Washington and broadcast to Beijing is that the new law will be a disaster for any kind of cross-strait dialogue. Taiwan has been willing to talk for a long time. It simply wants to do so without preposterous preconditions which nobody could possibly find acceptable.

This leaves the ball in Beijing's court to soften its stance and allow talks to take place. Actually Beijing needs an internal debate about how best to woo Taiwan. But all the regime understands is pressure. It thinks pressure works and it is about to go some way toward criminalizing the suggestion that pressure should be abandoned. This is a great and dangerous leap backwards.

UNILATERAL: China's anti-secession draft bill is a move aimed at changing the status quo and will trigger action in Taiwan, a former US official said
By Wang Hsiao-wen
STAFF REPORTER

The noted US academic Bruce Herschensohn warned Saturday that China's plan to draft an anti-secession law amounts to change in the cross-strait status quo, a subversive move that could test Taiwan's limits and put a strain on relations with its allies.

Herschensohn, a former deputy special assistant to former US president Richard Nixon and a member of the Reagan transition team, said the anti-secession draft law may negate Taiwan's sovereignty if it is enacted.

"The anti-secession law is a very serious problem, and what may be even more serious is the possibility of [Taiwan] losing diplomatic relations [with its allies]," he said.

Herschensohn did not predict how the US State Department will react to Beijing's anti-succession law, but he believed that the US government will have the courage to say that China is unilaterally changing the status quo.

Herschensohn also believes that US President George W. Bush's pledge to protect Taiwan remains unchanged, despite the US military commitments in Iraq and elsewhere.

Bruce Herchensohn, former deputy special assistant to former US president Richard Nixon and professor at Pepperdine University in California.
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES

"On April 25, 2001, President Bush said that he will do whatever is necessary to defend Taiwan. He made the statement aloud in public," Herschensohn said.

"As long as he does not retract the statement, the pledge is still valid. And I can't imagine him turning his back on Taiwan," he added.

Herschensohn also said he had little doubt that the US would defend Taiwan in the event of a military conflict with China.

"I am convinced that the US will come to Taiwan's aid immediately if China attacks. There is no possibility that the US will withdraw its pledge. If the US does that, it will not be the US I have known all my life. It will do away with our traditions. It will do away with all these things that all the presidents have said since 1949. It will suddenly negate everything that we have built up including President Bush's passion in seeing democracy develop all over the world," Herschensohn said.

Regrettably, Herschensohn said, the "one-China" concept has been intentionally misinterpreted over time by the US State Department. The flaw in understanding the term stems from an erroneous interpretation of the 1972 Shanghai Communique signed by Nixon.

Herschensohn revealed that Nixon, upset by the US's switching of diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC, wrote a letter to the then President Jimmy Carter five days after Carter gave a speech on Dec. 15, 1978 about the upcoming communique.

"Nixon sent the letter to tell President Carter the risks he is imposing on Taiwan," Herschensohn said. "President Nixon wrote at the end of the letter: `I am not writing this for the record, I am writing this because I want you to know those risks.'"

But the "one China" principle and the "one country, two systems" formula do not address the current political reality anymore, and viable alternatives are not being thought up because of the Bush administration's preoccupation with the war on terror, Herschensohn said.

"It is a policy of postponement. It is like postponing something that has to be eventually solved. The resolution has to fall on the side of freedom for Taiwan. But we need China to help us in the war on terror and we'd like to say China has helped us," he said.

Herschensohn also cast a positive view on US-Taiwan relations after the resignation of US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who "represents the bureaucracy more than the president," he said.

"I think Taiwan will be better off with Condoleezza Rice [as US secretary of state] who has immediate access to the President Bush."

WORSENING SITUATION: The Japanese foreign minister made the remarks after Tokyo and Pyongyang traded harsher rhetoric over possible sanctions on the Stalinist regime
AFP , Tokyo
Japan's Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura yesterday urged China to work harder to help end the North Korean nuclear problem, noting the Stalinist state had shown no sign of returning to multilateral talks.

"People in the US administration suspect China is not doing much" in order to solve the standoff, the minister said in a televised debate on public broadcaster NHK.

"It is important that China ... tackle this issue seriously and exert a greater influence, though I believe they have made efforts in the past," he said.

China, North Korea's closest ally, urged Japan and North Korea last week not to do anything to complicate the resumption of international multi-party nuclear talks, cautioning Tokyo against imposing sanctions on Pyongyang.

North Korea says it would regard any sanctions imposed on it by Japan as a declaration of war and would hit back with an "effective physical" response.

Many Japanese support sanctions after North Korea provided Tokyo with the wrong ashes to support its claim that two Japanese it kidnapped during the Cold War had since died.

Machimura told NHK that "there has been no sign from them that they would agree" to the resumption of talks, also involving South Korea, China, Russia and the US.

But the Japanese minister warned the nuclear issue would not be allowed to drag on for many years.

If the issue prolongs further, "it would become inevitable that the issue would go to the Security Council and that the United Nations will take severe measures, including sanctions," he said.

"They should recognize the time given to North Korea is actually not so long," he said, while adding Japan did not have specific plans to bring the nuclear issue to the UN at present.

Three rounds of six-way talks to end North Korea's nuclear ambitions have taken place since the standoff erupted in October 2002.

North Korea boycotted a fourth round of the talks scheduled for Beijing in September, citing Washington's "hostile policy" toward the communist state.

Citing outgoing US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, a ruling-party lawmaker, said Washington would support Japan if it imposed sanctions.

"Mr. Armitage clearly told me ... the true intention of the United States is that they support Japanese economic sanctions" no matter whether they would be mild or severe, Takeo Hiranuma said.

Hiranuma, chairman of a parliamentarian group for kidnap victims pushing for sanctions against Pyongyang, made the remark in a interview on the private Asahi network after meeting US officials.

It contradicted a briefing last week by Yuriko Koike, the state minister in charge of frontier territories who said Armitage and Michael Green, the Asia chief of the US National Security Council, had voiced caution to sanctions.

As for a Japanese newspaper report Saturday that US President George W. Bush would not aim to topple the regime of Kim Jong-Il in his second term, Hiranuma said he had the same impression from meetings with US officials.

"I got the impression that they would not take tough measures that would ruin the window [of dialogue] completely as they have six-party talks with Kim Jong-Il for now," he said.

In a new bid to increase pressure on North Korea, Japan would soon start work to prepare a Japanese version of US law aimed at improving human rights in North Korea, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said yesterday.

The Japanese legislation would ban aid to North Korea except for humanitarian purposes until human rights issues there improve including the problem of Japanese kidnapped by the North's agents, the economic daily said.

China's relations with Southeast Asian countries are on an upswing, as demonstrated at the recent ASEAN summit in Laos. The Free Trade Agreement with ASEAN countries is supposed to become the economic powerhouse for regional economies.

The leading English newspaper of the largest Southeast Asian country, Indonesia, was full of praise. Mindful of the fact that it will hurt Indonesia's manufacturing sector from Chinese exports, the Jakarta Post still opined: "Nevertheless, taking a deeper look, it can be concluded that the potential upsides will outnumber the downsides, and the potential gains will outweigh any losses." It approvingly quoted Indonesia's Trade Minister Mari Pangestu to the effect that "a FTA with China will lead to the formation of a regional production center with China as the core and countries in the region as alternative supply sources or complements to China."

The telling thing about this view is that ASEAN countries seem increasingly resigned to become the spokes in China's juggernaut. According to the Jakarta Post, "Not only that [economic gains], the FTA with China will bring another, bigger gain to the region, i.e. stability. The FTA with China will complement China's signing of a non-aggression pact with ASEAN -- the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation."

Not long ago, countries in the region feared China's expansionist designs. The dispute over the ownership of South China Sea islands was a constant thorn in China's relations with a number of Southeast Asian countries. It is interesting that even though these issues are still unresolved, China has been able to sideline them through its charm offensive and the prospect of economic benefits.

What has brought this about? Economics. The US is still the global economic powerhouse; it reportedly absorbs about 40 percent of China's exports, accounts for about one-third of Japan's exports and 20 percent of exports from South Korea, Taiwan and ASEAN countries. Despite this, there is a perception that China is an emerging superpower with limitless scope for economic opportunities for the region.

The US is also suffering from an image problem and because of the war in Iraq and its focus on global terrorism, Washington appears to be neglecting the Asia-Pacific region. China has been able to slip into this political vacuum, emerging as a benign power interested in lifting the region politically and economically.

On the other hand, the US appears heavy-handed in pushing Asian countries into according top priority to fighting terrorism. Some of these countries, like Indonesia and Malaysia, are predominantly Muslim where America's priority of fighting terrorism above all else doesn't always go well with the sensibilities of many local people. China has no such problem.

It is not suggested that the regional countries have turned against the US. They would still like the US to be around, and not having to live as China's satellites. In any case, it will take China many years (if at all) to replace the US as an economic powerhouse. However, with China's growing political and economic clout, they wouldn't like to be on Beijing's wrong side. In other words, the US will find it increasingly difficult to have regional allies against China.

For the present, China is keen to have the US on its side, and it isn't keen on challenging the US supremacy. According to Robert Sutter, "They [Chinese leaders] recognize that rising powers of the past, such as imperial Germany before World War I and imperial Japan before World War II, became powerful in ways that challenged the prevailing international order. In the event, other powers aligned against and destroyed them."

As one Chinese diplomat has put it: "With the US, we don't believe we are rivals?We believe cooperation with the US is very important for us. We are not interested in competing for world power. We have too many people to worry about." In other words, China wants to mind its own business, and is not worrying about US global dominance. In fact, China is keen to establish the Asia-Pacific region as its co-prosperity sphere, without committing the mistakes of imperial Japan. It hopes to achieve what Japan couldn't by emphasizing its "peaceful rise" (or "peaceful development") by neutralizing or co-opting the US.

There are problems; Taiwan is an obvious one. China can't annex Taiwan, with the US committed to defend it. With a view to pressure Washington into watering down its Taiwan commitment, it is following a carrot-and-stick policy. The recent comments by US Secretary of State Colin Powell seemed designed to politically placate Beijing, without weakening US resolve to defend Taiwan if attacked. But as a global power, if the nature of its relationship with China is competitive and combative (as is the case over a period), Washington can't afford to let China walk away with Taiwan.

Japan is another problem because of its security alliance with the US, and because Tokyo increasingly regards China as a security threat. In its recently released defense policy document, "China, which has significant influence in the region's security, is pushing forward its nuclear and missile capabilities." It adds, "It is also trying to expand its scope of naval activities and attention must be paid to these developments."

Who would blame Japan after detecting a Chinese submarine and a survey vessel in its waters. Beijing has some leverage on the North Korean nuclear proliferation issue, where the US needs its help. Will it deliver? And is the US prepared to pay the price of turning the Asia-Pacific region into a Chinese lake? It doesn't fit into the US global strategy.

Sushil Seth is a freelance writer based in Sydney.