COMMENTARY
Taiwan leader took huge risk aiming verbal volley at China

By Tom Plate

Why play with fire?

Journalists were among observers during the simulated bombing of a building in an air-raid drill in Shanghai on Tuesday. The exercise took place after Taiwan's president made remarks favoring independence. Associated Press

The island is regarded by Beijing as a runaway province of mother China and is officially recognized as independent by just a handful of nations (and not by the United States or the United Nations).

As it turned out, Chen's verbal volley earlier this month that Taiwan was an "independent, sovereign state" — a phrase designed to mollify extremist Taiwanese nationalists and bait Beijing — did not trigger World War III.

Fortunately, Beijing is too busy percolating its economy and working out the kinks in its impending leadership transition to unleash China's military pit bulls, ever eager to eat Taiwan for lunch.

And Taiwan quickly backtracked. It dispatched a high-level emissary to Washington to testify that Chen hadn't lost his mind, and then canceled a naval exercise considered provocative by Beijing, all the while working private channels aimed at calming down China's easy-to-irk leaders.

If Chen pulls such a domestic political stunt again, people should start calling for his resignation. Imagine if President Bush were to address a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention and pledge to protect the sanctity of any Taiwan referendum with the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Bush, whatever his shortcomings, would not display such poor judgment.

Taiwan's Chen is at least as sharp as our U.S. president. So why would he want to rattle China's cage this way, insisting on formal sovereignty that only a sliver of the world would honor anyway? And, then to pour it on, hinting at the need for a referendum that China has repeatedly declared a cause for war, even as Taiwan is unofficially independent anyhow?

Chen was clearly primping for the hard-core, pro-independence part of his party, of which he is leader as well as the country's president. It's true all leaders have domestic constituencies which require much stroking.

In Taiwan, not many people would welcome a merger with the mainland that would paint the place red. On the other hand, not many people would welcome a war with the mainland that could render many of them dead. That's why the ambiguous status quo under which one is neither red nor dead but alive and doing well on Taiwan — which, of course, is an evolving democracy and increasingly modern economy — is the preferred (if emotionally unsatisfying) policy option.

Taiwan knew Chen had gone too far. When Tsai Ing-wen, a senior Taiwan policy official, jetted to Washington to smooth over Chen's blunder, one was to infer that the Bush people were all a-flutter. In fact, a good chunk of the Bush foreign-policy team — the China hawks eager to pursue a costly missile defense system that could be justified by cross-straits tension — dig Chen's style. The other wing, thankfully, consists of saner fowl. It wants to steer clear of World War III.

Thus, when Chen taunts the government of Jiang Zemin, he pleases not just his own domestic hawks but slakes the thirst of like-minded U.S. birds in Washington as well. They are precisely the ones who quietly but effectively flock behind the enormous arms-appropriations and sales that Taiwan's deterrence of China arguably requires.

But China is spreading its military wings more and more — worrying that, unless it does, its invasion threat should a referendum occur would prove mere bluster and bluff. That makes Taiwan's case for more U.S. arms even more compelling. And that plays into the hands of arms merchants, who then proffer lusty campaign contributions to like-minded politicians.

On the whole, Chen has had a balanced and intelligent presidency. His recent rhetorical rocket reflects not only the pressures of Taiwanese politics but also a personality split on the China question in the Bush administration. Say what you want about Clinton's approach, but there was little discernible division in his administration on the need to engage China aggressively.

In Washington now, there is nothing but division, infighting and backbiting.

Washington's internal dual dynamic has the potential to bring conflict to East Asia.

Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.