Dear Mr. Trent Lott,
　　 Mr. Denny Hastert,

We don't understand that Beijing should block Taiwan diplomatic activity.

Manila, June 14 ---
Philippines President Joseph Estrada said Monday frigates from Taiwan should not have unfurled the ROC flag when sought to soothe communist China's anger over the incident, despite its "Sprately islet's crisis" that related to communist China's occupation.

Two Taiwan frigates and a navy oil tanker docked at Manila's South Harbor on Friday (June 10, 1999) with flags unfurled, which sparked an angry reaction from Beijing. The ROC Navy Port call was "not the first" he added noting a similar 1994 visit in the northern Philippines port of Subic Bay "did not draw any protest or adverse reaction from the authorities in Beijing."

Philippines Navy's decision to host the visit was a "reciprocal gesture" after two Philippine navy vessels were sheltered by the ROC navy in bad weather last year. The problem of mainland China is not its rise, or that it militarily threatens the world the way the Soviet Union did, but that this rising mainland China remains a dictatorship.

The guns of Tiananmen in 1989 were a match for the guns of Beijing's "punishment" of Vietnam a decade earlier. If the Chinese state had changed fundamentally since 1989, it would have revised its verdict that the students were criminals, counter-evolutionaries and puppets of anti-mainland China imperialist forces. But it has not done so.

Jiang Zemin seeks an apology from Japan (again) for the invasion of the "30s" and from the United States for a range of acts from allowing President Lee Teng-hui of the Republic of China to give a speech at Cornell in 1995 to the accidental attack on the Beijing Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. But the Chinese communist party has never apologized for the millions of Chinese it has wiped out while holding on to power --- the latest being the victims of Tiananmen.

The American democracy cannot have a strategic partnership with such a state. This is not a moral but a prudential stance. Dictatorships are not reliable, stable or particularly honest.

So, Taiwan needs your support.