By Tom Plate

You really have to wonder about China's position on Iraq.

Internationally respected China expert Richard Baum assesses the Chinese stance this way. ''The French -— and now the Russians — have given China the cover they need to express their unhappiness with U.S. war plans without at the same time adopting a high oppositional profile,'' opined my UCLA colleague. '' 'Safety in numbers' seems to be China's modus operandi of choice, in this instance as in others.''

It's Washington's problem

There's no quarreling with Baum, scholar and gentleman. For Beijing, the Saddam Hussein problem is at best an unwanted distraction. The Communist Party and the government are convinced that the key to their survival in power is continued economic growth and generally have faint interest in any international issue unless it impacts their economy. That Saddam's a monster and Iraq may be harboring anti-Western terrorists are Washington's problems, not Beijing's.

And so China is hiding behind France's skirt in opposing military action without explicit U.N. approval — all the while avoiding having to declare whether it will exercise its veto. The truth is, it won't have to with Paris and Moscow doing the dirty work. Nice, eh?

But it's not hard to imagine Beijing's coy timidity someday backfiring on its long-term effort to restore China to its former global greatness. Suppose that Beijing had made the Machiavellian decision to support President Bush by announcing that no matter what happened, Beijing would not exercise its veto (knowing full well that France and Russia would) and had no fundamental quarrel with the United States' invocation of its rights to self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.

The benefits would have been notable. Besieged on all sides, President Bush would have been extraordinarily grateful indeed. Second, the Chinese would have crowded Japan's diplomatic space. Tokyo has publicly reiterated its general support for Washington, sailed a ship or two in the vague direction of Iraq to work the backwaters of the impending conflict and taken to the diplomatic phones to help hammer out a U.N. Security Council resolution that would allow the United States to move forward on Iraq.

China needn't have gone that far to score major points with Washington. Even a neutral position might have served Beijing's purposes, which include preserving its own military option regarding the offshore island of Taiwan. If it had supported rather than opposed Bush's assertion of self-defense and national security on the Iraq issue, it would have created the precedent for making a similar argument in the event of serious trouble with Taiwan.

Hand could be forced

Beijing has many times declared that a Taiwan declaration of formal political independence from the mainland would be a cause for war. The current government in Taipei has avoided such an overt provocation. But there's no guarantee that a future government might not go the extra mile.

That could force Beijing's hand.

Having required the United States to take recourse to the Security Council in order to justify its action against Iraq, the United States in return could logically throw that argument back in Beijing's face. The latter would, of course, argue that the Taiwan issue was entirely a domestic one — an internal rather than an international matter. But Taiwan, a vibrant democracy, has far more friends and admirers around the globe than Baghdad. Majority world opinion might force Beijing to submit the issue to the Security Council, the same standard now being put to Washington.

The Bush administration would laugh all the way to its veto, of course, and Beijing would have been hung out to dry on the very principle that it's now supporting.

A wonderful precedent

For those of us who care about Taiwan — not to mention the security of other countries in Asia — it's cheerful to hope that China's decision to reject unilateralism by the United States might prove a stumbling block in the court of world opinion if it were ever to try something militarily unilateral itself. China's decision to insist that all parties, in the words of outgoing Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan, "should strive for a political settlement of the Iraqi question within the U.N. framework," is surely a wonderful precedent.

By choosing safety in numbers, however, the Chinese have supported a precedent that may tie their own hands someday. Beijing ought to wind back the tape and imagine the benefit of having supported Washington instead of playing it so safe.

At least that's the advice Machiavelli would surely have given.

Tom Plate, whose column appears regularly in The Honolulu Advertiser, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.