Chinese war games leave US unfazed

`REGIONAL STABILITY': Beijing and Moscow are set to invade a peninsula in Shandong, but few think it signifies a major change in regional politics

By Charles Snyder

STAFF REPORTER IN WASHINGTON

The Bush administration has described a planned joint Chinese-Russian military exercise in the Yellow Sea north of Taiwan as one that could advance the "mutual goal of regional stability" in East Asia, despite some reports that paint the exercise as being eerily similar to a rehearsal for a joint invasion of Taiwan.

The exercise, prominently reported in the Washington Post Monday morning, is to start Thursday near the Russian city of Vladivostok, before moving to the Yellow Sea and China's Shandong Province.

The simulated land, sea and air operation would "seize a beachhead on China's Shandong peninsula in advance of an inland offensive" according to a senior Russian military official quoted by the Post.

INTERDICTION

The Russians would "deploy strategic, long-range bombers, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, which will fire cruise missiles at targets," on the surface of the sea, the report says.

As part of the strategy, the exercise would try to "prevent the vessels of any other countries from approaching the area" of the operations, the Post quoted a Russian military official as saying.

The Pentagon, in its recent annual report on Chinese military modernization, has painted a picture of a Chinese attack on Taiwan in similar terms to the description of the joint Russian-Chinese exercised planned for next week.

Most Washington academics and other China specialists agree that such plans would be elements in any Chinese attack on Taiwan, including efforts to prevent the US from coming to Taiwan's aid militarily and the reliance on some 700 ballistic missiles deployed against Taiwan.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that the US has been "advised" about the Chinese-Russian exercises and "we are following the exercises."

But he said that the US would not be observing the joint Chinese-Russian exercises.

He asserted that the White House expects the exercises "will be conducted in a manner that supports the mutual goal of regional stability shared by the US, Russia and China."

Asked whether the US is concerned about the planned exercise in view of Russia's increasing supply of sophisticated weapons to China, McCormack said only, "we would hope that anything they do is not something that would be disruptive to the current atmosphere in the region."

McCormack did not mention Taiwan in his remarks.

TAIWAN FACTOR

The planned operation is well north of Taiwan, because Beijing was unsuccessful in efforts to get Russia to agree to hold it closer to the country, the Post cites Russian reports as saying.

"China tries to put the Taiwan question into every issue, but for Russia that was never the purpose of the exercises," the Post quotes a Moscow think tank analyst, Dmitry Kormilitsyn, as saying.

The exercise will simulate a mission to aid a state where law and order has broken down because of terrorist violence, the report said.

However, Beijing's official Xinhua news agency painted the joint exercise as strengthening China and Russia's capabilities in "jointly striking international terrorism, extremism or separatism."

The use of the word, "separatism," indicated Beijing might try to enlist Moscow's support through the joint military exercises in its effort to retake Taiwan, the Post report noted.

UNCONCERNED

Meanwhile, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) played down the joint exercise, saying only that it wasn't "real."

MND Spokesman Rear Admiral Liu Chih-chien yesterday said the China-Russia joint drill is not really a "joint drill" because the two countries hadn't formed a joint command for the exercise. As a result, the two militaries would operate independently in the drill, Liu added.

Liu said that since Russia proposed using strategic bombers to join the drill, the MND thinks the purpose of Russia joining the military exercise is to promote its advanced strategic arms to China, one of its biggest arms markets.

Liu said the MND would closely follow the exercise.

Speak with one voice on China

President Chen Shui-bian has recently stressed that China's rapid military buildup is a threat to Taiwan and the international community.

When addressing the Democratic Pacific Union and the World Federation of Taiwanese Associations, Chen asked the international community and pan-Pacific nations to view China's military expansion and ambition as presenting "uncertainties that continue to threaten human security." In an interview with the Australian over the weekend, Chen highlighted concerns that many Chinese brides or academics may actually be Chinese spies. And when meeting with last year's Nobel laureate in economics Edward Prescott last Thursday, Chen said that China's proposal to hold talks with Taiwan on direct cross-strait passenger charter flights was "a political trick."

A look at recent China-related policies undertaken by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration however, leads one to wonder whether the president and his government are all on the same page.

The Taipei Airlines Association last Friday got the go-ahead from the Cabinet-level Mainland Affairs Council to talk with China on both passenger and cargo charter flights across the Strait.

The council earlier this month announced that China is willing to deal with the agency commissioned by the council on the issue of opening up the nation to Chinese tourists. The council hailed China's response as a breakthrough in cross-strait relations.

The government currently allows only two categories of Chinese people to visit Taiwan: those who live in a third country, and those who live in China but come to Taiwan on business or en route to other countries.

The latest relaxation is expected to allow 365,000 Chinese tourists per year, or 1,000 people per day, to visit Taiwan for a maximum of 10 days. They will enter Taiwan through either Hong Kong or Macau. Premier Frank Hsieh said "we hope Chinese tourists can come to Taiwan as soon as possible ... We will provide a safe and comfortable environment for them."

But is the DPP government really prepared for the huge influx of Chinese tourists? Can Hsieh promise a safe and comfortable environment for the Taiwanese public after Chinese tourists start flocking to Taiwan?

There's reason for concern. Recently officials have seen an increase in cross-strait movement -- by both legal and illegal means -- in which Chinese criminals and spies enter Taiwan and conspire with domestic criminal gangs. This poses a serious threat to the nation's security, and the National Security Council (NSC) has warned that such ne'er-do-wells' activities in this country are aimed at influencing Taiwan's economy, social order and politics.

Chen has often spoken of China's schemes against Taiwan and urged the public to stay vigilant against Beijing's "united front" tactics, which aim to sow division here.

If Chen really means what he says, he should pressure his own party, and agencies mapping out China-related policies, with the same words of warning.

US needs `Taiwan hands'

By Sing Young

It is refreshing for Nat Bellocchi to honestly point out that "China and the US may want to involve themselves in the next presidential election -- both in terms of developing platforms and the choice of candidates -- much earlier than they have done in the past. They should write their plans in pencil, not ink." ("Identity issue raises its head again," Aug 10, page 8).

Bellocchi's advice would be best delivered directly to the US government, because China definitely does not need it to jump into the game.

For years now, China has succeeded in seizing Taiwan's Mainlander-dominated mass media, those Chiang-era monopoly remnants which still dominate the nation's media market. Several major media outlets in Taiwan are now awash in "red cash" and are totally or partially under China's control. These media outlets have created and have been actively marketing the brand of "China, the rising future" with repetitive soundbites of "Taiwan, the fallen desert."

Such branding efforts have provided Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP) chairmen with a "red, bright" image to package their trips to China, where they have been officially crowned as China's proxies in Taiwan. Not all Taiwanese fall for it; but many do, especially the younger ones. Now, China is aggressively utilizing its proxies in Taiwan to gradually become the agenda-setter within Taiwan, hoping to eventually become the effective ruler of Taiwan while tolerating a nominally elected ruling machine.

In the mean time, the US has been letting the Taiwan situation run on auto-pilot. The media's reports of US President Bush referring to President Chen Shui-bian as an S.O.B. without any denial from the US, Bush's public accusation that Chen was "willing to unilaterally change the status quo" and the meeting of the US representative in Taiwan, Douglas Paal, with the foul-crying candidates of the KMT and PFP right after last year's presidential election while avoiding contact with the incumbent candidate -- all of these public displays of the US have discredited Chen and the DPP; resulting in swing voters tilting towards the pro-China camp. One of the effects was the DPP not gaining a majority in the legislature in last December's election; thus, the continuing deadlock on the defense budget. And yet, there have been reports recently about the US suspecting that the DPP is behind the deadlock, again without denial from the US.

As a person who shares most of the US' values, I can't help but wonder what the US wants or whether the US knows what it wants at all.

Chen and DPP officials definitely deserve their share of the blame for the Taiwanese government's almost disastrous relationship with the US. Their faults are more behavioral in nature than intentional. As a citizen, I have vehemently criticized Chen and the DPP.

However, as a people, the Taiwanese have never had the chance to be in the governing position until the year 2000. There has been no political culture and sophistication within the Taiwanese tradition to facilitate an effective government. We as a people have been fighting against rulers from outside for the past 400 years or so. The Manchu rulers deemed us "unruly" due to the headaches our ancestors caused with "a minor rebellion every three years and a major one every five years." We have been able to fight the rulers, but we have never had the chance to establish the collective ability and tradition of ruling ourselves. This is an unrecognized but profound factor in today's Taiwanese political landscape -- and a fact the US needs to realize.

The truth is that the Taiwanese have not learned to speak and act diplomatically and have yet to learn how to communicate in unspoken terms, as is common in many delicate international situations. It is a particularly difficult task for a non-entity to speak up out of a semi-existence. Furthermore, the Taiwanese, in reality a linguistically Sinicized Austronesian people, have only straight words in our not-so-rich and long-suppressed vocabulary, which have to be publicly expressed in translated terms by our leaders in their not-so-perfect Mandarin.

We will get there. But for now, the US needs to be able to tell the diplomatically "mature" talk of foxes from the clumsy words of a friend. Understanding and patience from the US would allow our clumsy leaders to grow under awkward circumstances.

The fact that "China hands" have bet their careers on their claimed knowledge of China certainly plays a key role here. Their personal "successes" lie, as most of them show, in detours through China. This is true for "China experts" in both the public and private sectors. Case in point: Keith Bradsher of the New York Times with his March 7 article which described the Taiwanese (Mainlander-dominated) police's announcement of a suspect in the assassination attempt on Chen as "spinning the sort of story once found in dime-store novels." Bradsher sent the dispatch from Hong Kong, only a few hours after the police's disclosure in Taiwan; he never set foot to Taiwan for that article and based his subjective claim entirely on hearsay out of Hong Kong.

Endorsed by the New York Times, his baseless claim has been used by the pro-China camp inside Taiwan to further justify their absolute opposition to the DPP on any issue, the military budget being but one of them. US policymakers have to take such phenomena into account.

The US also needs to realize that dropping a "China hand" into Taiwan to act for the US is the same as dropping a Germany expert into Switzerland: It doesn't work. Taiwan has its very own complexities. The same principle applies to country study and intelligence interpretation on Taiwan. Just as Canada cannot be treated as the US, a policy based on "Taiwan is China" has gotten off on the wrong foot from the very start.

The US needs "Taiwan hands," badly.

Sing Young

Taoyuan