EDITORIAL
Threat from China remains manageable

Anyone trying to put an alarmist spin on the Pentagon's annual evaluation of China's military needs to go stand in the corner and cool off.

Why would anyone want to make the situation in Northeast Asia, with its dangerous North Korea crisis, sound any worse than it is?

The latest report is little different from those of recent years, except at the margin. China now has 450 missiles capable of striking Taiwan.

It's an unfortunate provocation, but not a new one.

China has accelerated production of these missiles, not only to hold Taiwan at peril but also "to complicate United States intervention in a Taiwan Strait conflict," the Pentagon says. The missiles are improving, allowing them to reach places such as Okinawa, with its U.S. Marines.

That potential threat pales, of course, by comparison to the more than 20 ICBMs targeted for many years at the mainland United States. We've learned to live and prosper in spite of such threats.

Make no mistake; China is determined to achieve reunification with Taiwan, and it is unhappy with President Bush's departure from the studied ambiguity of previous administrations to state plainly that the United States would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.

The U.S. military often says China doesn't have the ability to invade Taiwan; it lacks sufficient landing craft. But invasion isn't necessary. It wouldn't require many missile hits to Taiwan's precious infrastructure, plus a submarine shipping blockade, to bring Taiwan to terms. China's invasion force would then alight from airliners in business suits, carrying brief cases.

But that scenario is unlikely, as long as cool heads prevail. Beijing understands that its economy must grow at least 7 percent a year simply to keep pace with the massive unemployment caused by shutting down and privatizing its rusting state-run enterprises. That growth, upon which social stability depends, is largely dependent on huge and rapidly growing Taiwanese investment on the mainland.

In many ways, in fact, Taiwan and China are integrating even as Taiwan talks with increasing boldness about independence. Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese now live in China, working at tens of thousands of Taiwanese enterprises worth billions of dollars. It would be foolish for either side to interfere with this mutually beneficial symbiosis.

The same logic applies to the growing relationship between the United States and China. While military planning in both Beijing and Washington reflect assessments in some quarters that the two powers may be headed for eventual conflict, it doesn't have to be that way.

Nothing exemplifies the converging interests of these two nations more than reports that China persuaded North Korea to participate in six-way talks on resolving the nuclear crisis. It's a bright ray of hope in what has been a dangerous and intractable standoff. The United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia benefit from a non-nuclear North Korea and a peaceful and stable Korean peninsula.

A greater willingness to listen and discuss, rather than bluster, will take us a long way from worries about military confrontation.