"I might be confined and I'm so carefully watched, I don't think I could meet her even if I tried," Hou said by phone.

Arbour spoke yesterday at the opening of a UN human rights conference and met in private with a senior Chinese official, State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan, for about 45 minutes. She declined to comment on the meeting.

Arbour was expected to press for legal reforms meant to clear the way to ratifying a key UN treaty on legal rights.

China routinely detains human rights, religious and other activists in advance of major political events in order to prevent protests or attempts to meet with foreign officials.

Human rights groups criticize China for suppressing religious groups, harassing labor and political activists and enforcing a birth-control policy that limits most urban couples to one child.

Speaking at the UN conference with Arbour, Tang repeated China's insistence that the country's economic growth has improved the basic human rights of its people.

"Every country should choose its own way to promote and protect human rights to meet the fundamental interests of [its] people," said Tang. "There is no uniform standard with regard to national human rights action plans."

Tang said Beijing has "worked hard to promote regional and international human rights cooperation."

Hou's 18-month-old group gives legal information to Chinese farmers and others about such problems as illegal land seizures -- a volatile issue that has prompted widespread protests.

Hou said about a dozen police surrounded her apartment building on Monday but didn't detain her, while others went to her office.

Hou started the group after studying human rights and refugee law at Harvard University Law School and Oxford University. It is supported by the US-based National Endowment for Democracy.

The group has published a manual advising farmers and others of their legal rights and how to deal with Chinese courts, Hou said.

"We're trying to engage farmers and let them know more about their rights," she said.

China steps up efforts to fight terrorism

AFP , BEIJING

China was stepping up efforts to fight terrorism internationally, and especially to curb Muslim Uighurs seeking an independent state in the nation's western-most Xinjiang region, state press said yesterday.

"China faces a real terrorist threat and a long-term latent threat," Zhao Yongchen, vice public security minister for terrorism, was quoted by the Beijing News as telling an international law enforcement symposium.

"From the most recent 10 years, the terrorist threat that China is facing mostly comes from domestic and international `East Turkestan' terrorist forces and international terrorist organizations."

China had joined 10 of the 13 major international anti-terrorism treaties and was working to pass legislation that fell in line with international practices, Zhao added.

Muslim Uighur separatists, who maintain a distinct ethnic identity from the Chinese, have been fighting to re-establish an independent state of East Turkestan in Xinjiang since it became an autonomous region of China in 1955.

They accuse the ruling Chinese of political, religious and cultural repression in the name of counter-terrorism efforts that were significantly stepped up after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US.

China maintains that East Turkestan separatists have links with groups like al-Qaeda.

Last week China's top official in Xinjiang, Wang Lequan, said he was stepping up a crackdown on pro-independence and separatist activities in Xinjiang ahead of the 50th anniversary of its takeover on October 1.

Wang also confirmed the arrests of a handful of activists who he said have carried out terrorist, separatist or extremist activities endangering national unity and social stability.

"They want to sabotage our 50th anniversary celebrations but we can't passively wait for these things to happen, so we have actively strengthened pre-emptive measures," said Wang, Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang.

The German-based World Uighur Congress alleged that authorities have been carrying out mass arrests of pro-independence Uighurs ahead of the October annexation anniversary.

Wang denied mass arrests but said authorities always come down hard on individuals engaged in extremist activities.

Hero or villain? Lien must decide

The answer to whether there will be war or peace in the Taiwan Strait does not rest with Taipei, but with Beijing. Unless it is for the sake of self-defense, Taiwan will never send troops to attack China. Beijing's position, however, is different. It has a history of saber-rattling and sending troops to neighboring countries to teach them a lesson.

Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan plans to raise NT$300 million (US$9.2 million) to set up a Taiwan Strait "peace foundation."

The purpose seems noble, but the focus of its activities should be to lobby Chinese leaders, not locals.

In order to achieve his "goal of lasting peace" across the Taiwan Strait, Lien should concentrate on convincing Beijing that regardless of what happens on the political stage in Taiwan, it must not give in to rash impulses and launch an attack. Every effort must be made to find peaceful and rational ways of negotiating a solution to any cross-strait political or military conflict, and this is the message that he should be carrying.

As long as Lien is willing to play this role and enlighten Beijing and the Chinese people on the importance of peace, his efforts might do more good than harm.

However, over the past few months, Lien and his party have adopted the wrong approach on any number of matters: resuming cross-strait negotiations and signing a "peace accord" on a party-to-party basis, promoting cross-strait exchanges without the input of the government and improving communication between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party.

Following the meeting between Lien and Chinese President Hu Jintao, it became clear that the KMT had focused its attention on the promotion of Taiwan's agricultural produce in China. Then, last week, the KMT inaugurated a liaison office for Taiwanese businessmen working in China. The party is also planning to host a cross-strait economic forum in Taipei in October.

It appears to be turning out, then, that Lien is only interested in changing the attitude of Taiwanese rather than of the Chinese who are threatening them.

As unlikely as it is, if Lien is able to reduce Chinese prejudice and create a situation in which Beijing agrees to some form of genuinely respectful understanding or agreement, and does so without damaging Taiwan's dignity or national security, then Lien's peace foundation will have a certain meaning and value.

But if Lien wishes to use his foundation as a political weapon, drawing on economic and political support from China in an attempt to undermine Taiwan's democracy and assist the KMT regain power, as is most likely, then he and it should be condemned.

Lien's foundation could make a positive contribution to cross-strait peace, but it could also serve to further disrupt Taiwan's politics.

All depends on the decisions he will have to make. A slight difference in direction can have markedly different consequences, and there is often only a very fine line between the heroes and the villains of history.

Purveyors of peace

By Huang Jei-hsuan

Some pan-blue-camp leaders, with the aid of pro-China media in Taiwan, have been trying to pass themselves off as purveyors of peace.

And, by packaging incremental surrender as a "peace process," they are attempting to hand over Taiwan piecemeal to China. Moreover, as part of their reprehensible plan, they've been blocking the passage of the special arms-procurement bill -- again, all under the pretense of peace.

But the consequence of surrender -- or "unification" -- would be the loss of peace.

Because of its strategic location, the US-Japan alliance cannot afford Taiwan falling into unfriendly hands. Combining their aversion to "unification" with the fact that a substantial portion of Taiwanese object to "unification" under any circumstances would almost guarantee a never-ending "non-peaceful" struggle.

In other words, what pan-blue leaders are selling here regarding "unification" is nothing but a faux peace.

The pan-blue leaders' refusal to pass the arms-procurement bill is no less harmful to peace.

One reason is that China's aggression derives its energy mainly from the perceived imbalance in military power across the Taiwan Strait. But with the absence of a credible deterrent capability -- a problem the arms-procurement bill is attempting to address -- the imbalance will only worsen with time. That in turns increases pressure from hawks within China and encourages further aggression.

Worse yet, Taiwan's continuing difficulty or reluctance in forging a consensus to strengthen its defense capabilities could be viewed by Beijing as the first step that would lead to eventual disarmament -- an open invitation for invasion.

It's worth noting that even if the arms bill is eventually passed, some damage will already have been done.

For instance, the success of deterrence depends heavily on the ability to ward off the enemy by means short of violence. Hence, there is a necessary psychological element that might have been lost or at least weakened because of the pan-blue leaders' behavior.

The top priority is always to scare an enemy without engaging in combat. Doing this requires that Taiwan at least demonstrate the resolve to adequately arm itself and fight. Pan-blue-camp leaders have so far shown the opposite.

One remedy might be a grass-roots campaign to educate the public and to raise people's awareness of Taiwan's defense needs. The public must be told that only with adequate deterrence can Taiwan be assured of the continuing commitments of the US-Japan alliance, which in turn will guarantee cross-strait peace in the near and medium term as a more stable and longer-term solution is sought.

Meanwhile, the pan-blue leaders' misrepresentation that anything to do with strengthening defense is tantamount to an arms race or warmongering is an underestimation of the intelligence of the Taiwanese people.

It's not everyday that a group of politicians from a small country can hold the key to the well-being of almost one-third of the world's population. But these pan-blue leaders have elevated themselves into this crucial role solely by mortgaging Taiwan's future.

Their continuing recalcitrance in blocking the arms bill might erode US trust and eventually force the US to re-evaluate its commitment to Taipei, leaving Taiwan with fewer choices.

This might be the design of the pan-blue leaders. But it's hardly that of the Taiwanese people.

Huang Jei-hsuan

California

Don't whitewash the past, Mr. Ma

By Chin Heng-wei

To contend for the 2008 presidential elections, Taipei Mayor and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou recently attempted to establish a link between the history of his party and that of Taiwan by offering up a new theory, stating that "the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] was founded after the KMT, and we have had party members in Taiwan since 1897. Therefore, the KMT's relationship with Taiwan is longer and deeper than that of the DPP. The KMT is also a local party, because 70 percent of our party members are from Taiwan."

Ma also asserted that "We [the KMT] are not foreigners, we have belonged to Taiwan from the beginning."

Should we, therefore, conclude that the KMT is a local political party? On the contrary, Ma's attempt to localize his party only indicates the "foreign" nature of the party. Isn't it because of the KMT's policy to prevent the Taiwanese people from forming political parties that the DPP was founded? Weren't democracy pioneers such as Lei Chen and Lee Wan-chu all thrown behind bars after announcing their decision to form a new political party in Taiwan? Is it dementia that has made Ma so forgetful of the past atrocities committed by his party? Or is it because he is too wrapped up in his bid for the 2008 presidency to remember anything?

A foreign regime is simply a colonial regime. The goal of the KMT's colonial policy was to "reform" the Taiwanese through its party-state ideology. As the whole nation was dominated by a single party, many Taiwanese were forced to support the party, and under such pressure to internalize this loyalty, many suffered from the phenomenon described by the commentator on colonialism, Frantz Fanon, in his book Black Skin, White Mask.

Thus, to explore the nature of the KMT as a foreign regime, we need to analyze the power structure of the party, which Ma said is composed of "70 percent Taiwanese." In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his army and began to establish a dictatorship and single-party rule. As a result, a handful of Mainlanders ruled the nation and kept a tight grip on the Taiwanese through Martial Law and the White Terror.

Let us review the numbers. Between 1950 and 1960, although the Cabinet had been reshuffled four times, all Cabinet members were Mainlanders. After 1962, only two Taiwanese politicians were appointed to the Cabinet. Even in 1984, Mainlanders still predominated in the Cabinet and the three lawmaking bodies of the nation.

At that time, 78 percent of legislators were Mainlanders while 20 percent of them were Taiwanese, this despite the fact that Taiwanese accounted for 80 percent of the population. Moreover, members of the Legislative Yuan, the National Assembly and the Control Yuan did not face elections. Looking at where power is concentrated within the KMT, we can see that in the 1970s, Mainlanders accounted for 85 percent of the core members of the party, and this situation did not change until the 1980s.

When former president Chiang Ching-kuo passed away, the presidency went to his vice president, Lee Teng-hui. This gave rise to debate within the KMT because, according to the Constitution, Lee was able to become president, but the party could not let him take the position of party chairman.

The main reason for this was that the "party" was the crucial element within the party-state system, and they could not allow the party mechanism to fall into the hands of a local. Even recently, Mainlanders such as Tao Pai-chuan, former senior adviser to the president, still clung to this idea. And now we see how Ma Ying-jeou easily beat his opponent, Wang Jin-pyng, , in the KMT chairmanship elections. What is this if it isn't a throwback to the party-state system?

This situation permeates the army and the police force, where the insignia bear the KMT party emblem and the official anthem is a KMT party song. Mainlanders dominated the higher echelons of both the army and the police from the beginning, with a presence of over 90 percent. These figures may be falling gradually, but they are still very high, and remain in the high 80 percent bracket.

The same could be said for the media. In 2001, after the transfer of power to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Mainlanders in the United Daily News  outnumbered locals by a ratio of four to one, and in the China Times it was 66 percent against 34 percent. You can just image what the ratio would have been during the martial-law era. The heads of these major newspapers vied with each other to please the KMT's Central Standing Committee, putting the interests of the party-state first.

During the 1970s the United Daily News was in bad shape, and had to be bailed out by Formosa Plastics president Wang Yung-ching. This didn't stop Chiang Ching-kuo from preventing Wang's intervention in the media, however: after all, while it was alright for locals to engage in business, there was no way they could be allowed to influence how the party was represented in the news. Wang had no choice to but admit defeat and withdraw. This example alone goes to show how powerful the Mainlanders were.

In the same way, government and the ideological apparatus of the nation could not be allowed to fall into the hands of locals. Locals were "the governed," whereas the Mainlanders were the ruling class. Retired veterans got treated better than farmers or laborers. If this is not looking after the Mainlander group, I don't know what is.

Access to education is another case in point. The economist Luo Ming-ching  conducted a survey of household registration statistics and discovered that in the university entrance system prior to educational reform, males from Mainlander families were two or three times more likely to find a place in university than their local counterparts of the same age. The disparity was even greater for admissions to National Taiwan University.

And this was just for admissions: how much more bias could one expect elsewhere in the system? Language and culture were also Sinicized, and local language and culture fiercely suppressed. The recent controversy over using the word Taike as a derogatory term is a residue of this.

So is the KMT a foreign party? Seen in the context of this history of immigration into Taiwan over the past half a century, it is undeniable.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has said that one cannot frivolously consign the past to the past, as it is not so easily avoided. I'm afraid that Archbishop Tutu's words do no favors to people like Ma who see fit to whitewash the past.

Chin Heng-wei is editor-in-chief of Contemporary Monthly magazine.

Can democracy defeat terrorism?

Promoting democracy and freedom in the Middle East will root out terrorism, the Bush administration says in defense of the invasion of Iraq, but democracy means more than just elections -- and its future in Iraq, as well as the future of the country, remains uncertain at best

By Joseph Nye

The Bush administration provided three major rationales for going to war in Iraq. Only one remains at all credible: the need to transform the Middle East through democratization and thereby undercut support for terrorists. But does this argument really have any more basis in reality than the administration's previous claims of an "imminent" threat from weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's alleged support for al-Qaeda?

With post-invasion inspectors concluding that no WMD stockpiles existed, and intelligence agencies now convinced that the Iraq war's net effect has been to boost al-Qaeda recruitment throughout the Islamic world, the Bush administration is understandably emphasizing the claim about democratization. Indeed, it has become a dominant theme of Bush's second term. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it in a recent speech in Cairo, "Freedom and democracy are the only ideas powerful enough to overcome hatred, division and violence."

Cynics view this as merely an argument of convenience, one that has gained in prominence only because the other two rationales for the war collapsed. More importantly, skeptics also doubt the validity of the administration's argument linking democracy and reduction of terrorism. After all, British citizens in one of the world's oldest democracies carried out the recent terrorist attacks in London. Similarly, an American citizen carried out the worst terrorist attack in the US before Sept.11, 2001.

The skeptics have a point, but they go too far. For one thing, it is still too early to judge the merits of the argument. A full assessment of the Iraq war and its effects on the Middle East will take a decade or more. Clearly, the January election there was a positive step for the region. In the last six months, there have been national elections in Lebanon and local elections in Saudi Arabia. Egypt has amended its Constitution to allow its presidential election to be contested. Further elections are scheduled in Iraq and the Palestinian Authority. As Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader said, "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq."

Perhaps that outcome shouldn't seem so strange. After all, as the columnist David Brooks recently observed, "If there is one soft-power gift that America does possess, it is the tendency to imagine new worlds."

In other words, the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent increase in the rhetoric of democracy in the Middle East, may have changed frames of reference about the status quo.

Democracy, however, is more than just elections. It also requires tolerance of minorities and respect for individual rights, as well as the development of effective institutions for resolving political conflicts in divided societies. If this occurs in Iraq, it may provide some post hoc legitimization for the war.

But such an outcome remains in doubt. In the short run, the invasion of Iraq has created an intensifying insurgency and incipient civil war. The presence of foreign troops creates a stimulus for nationalist and jihadist responses. The future of Iraq, not to mention democracy there, remains uncertain at best.

Nevertheless, we can still conclude from the Iraqi experience that while the development of democracy can be aided from outside, it cannot easily be imposed by force. While it is true that Germany and Japan became democratic after American occupation, it required their total defeat in a devastating war, and a seven-year occupation. Moreover, Germany and Japan were relatively homogeneous societies with some prior experience of democracy. It is hard to see such conditions repeated in today's world.

The Bush administration may be correct in arguing that the extremely high costs and risks of promoting democracy are less than the costs and risks of allowing the authoritarian status quo in the Middle East to persist indefinitely. But democracy is not the only instrument for a transformation that addresses the roots of terrorism. The development of civil societies, economic growth and openness to the world are equally important. So is employing young men, educating young women, and addressing values of liberty and justice, which means ameliorating the sense of indignity in the region that stems from issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Moreover, democracy alone will not convert the current crop of extremist jihadis to peaceful change. If anything, too rapid a democratic transition may destabilize governments and enhance the extremists' opportunities to wreak havoc.

But, in the longer term, the slow, steady progress of democratization can provide a sense of hope for moderates, creating a plausible vision of a better future -- the essence of soft power -- that undercuts the message of hate and violence promoted by the extremists. Democratization can surely help remove some of the sources of rage that fuel terrorism, but it is only part of the solution.

Joseph Nye is a professor at Harvard University and author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.