Posted on: Friday, October 1, 2004

By Tom Plate

TAIPEI — If Vice President Annette Lu is Taiwan's Margaret Thatcher — unyielding, immensely quotable and never taking any intellectual prisoners — then easygoing Chen Tan-sun is its Harry Truman, courteous though gutsy, and pointedly plain-spoken.

Combine this sparkplug pair with its president, the acutely clever Chen Shui-bian, and you have a formula for driving Beijing nuts.

It is hard to dislike Foreign Minister Chen Tan-sun, who says what he thinks and rarely disguises his thoughts in cross-straits fog. Chen is a former U.S. citizen who returned last spring to his native Taiwan to assume his high post.

The government in Beijing is paranoid about Taiwan to the extreme, says Chen. It's incapable of understanding Taiwan's need to maintain its own identify because "it lives in an opaque, authoritative government." China is increasingly "doing everything possible to discredit our president," and has "for the last couple of months been trying to push us into a corner" and "to bring us to our knees."

That's quite a grievance list, but, in truth, Beijing would only dispute part of the indictment. Because China looks on Taiwan as a rebellious child that decided to take a hike from legitimate Chinese union, it views Chen, a former geophysicist, as a "dangerous" figure precisely because he is native Taiwanese — that is, not born on the mainland, not emotionally tied to it and far from politically loyal to it.

In this sense, then, he was a perfect choice for the position of No. 1 roving Taiwan ambassador in the current pro-independence government — except that China, with its rapidly growing global clout, systematically pressures other countries not to allow him to rove very much.

The result is that China's policy toward Taiwan has made its foreign minister something of a caged political animal — under house arrest in his own self-proclaimed island nation.

Chen Tan-sun regards Beijing and its policy of isolating Taiwan with open bitterness and sincere contempt. But he does make valid points. Beijing foolishly slapped down Taiwan's effort to become an associate member of the World Heath Organization — at the very time that SARS, AIDS and other communicable diseases were resisting containment and needed the widest possible degree of pan-Asian cooperation in order to be contained.

"Why do they think that everything we want to do is a plot against them?" asks the foreign minister. Why, he wonders, does China view us as "splitists" when our policy, he insists, is to maintain the "status quo"?

But in the next sentence he puts his geophysical finger on the core issue:

"We are a sovereign state."

Those are fighting words across the Taiwan Strait, rhetoric that could someday lead to war. For Beijing has repeatedly and publicly said, without deviation, that a formal declaration of sovereignty would lead to conflict.

I put this frightening possibility directly to the foreign minister, and he answered without a shiver or a blink that if the world's power centers insist that Taiwan surrender to Beijing's demands, "then it's the end of the civilized world. ... What kind of world is this?"

The two sides are not at war yet, of course. In fact, China mysteriously canceled recently planned military maneuvers, and Taiwan quickly responded by canceling its own planned drills. "Why did they do that?" Chen asks. "We don't care what their reasons were. We just wanted to show the People's Republic of China our good will."

Still, the rising tide of Taiwanese nativism on an island that regards itself as a separate state is being met across the waters by a rising tide of Chinese nationalism that wants Taiwan back in the loop — perhaps at any cost.

There are smart people on both sides, but it is hard to see much give at the moment in either of these positions. Taiwan is proud of what it has accomplished and, at least under the current government, seems defiant on the sovereignty issue.

As another top Taiwanese official put it to me, Taiwan is not a failed nation, not a "little baby to be fed by Mother China."

Taiwan asks for no handouts, and will fight, perhaps to its death, any forced Hong Kong-type handover.

If the current generation of leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait continues along this road, some measure of military conflict seems unavoidable. Maybe both sides can somehow manage to string the whole issue along until a wiser, more far-seeing generation comes into its own and agrees that this is no way for truly civilized people to behave.

Tom Plate, a UCLA professor, is founder of the Asia Pacific Media Network.