Posted on: Thursday, March 10, 2005

EDITORIAL
China's war threat untimely and risky

On one level, the Taiwan anti-secession law now before the Chinese National Peoples Congress should be no big deal. There appears to be little in it that's either new or surprising.

Chinese leaders since Mao have declared that Taiwan is part of China and that reunification, preferably peaceful, is just a matter of time.

But there are worrisome differences:

• First, fixing into statute what had been, in effect, political policy will limit Beijing's flexibility in negotiating with the Taiwanese. Hardliners will simply take a "the law's the law" stand.

That will splash cold water on recent signs of a thaw, such as the direct mainland-Taiwan air connection over the lunar new year holiday.

• Second, it provides a legislative blank check, much as Congress gave the Bush administration with its 2002 Iraq war resolution. The anti-secession law empowers the Central Military Commission and the State Council to decide when to employ "non-peaceful means."

• Third, the text of the law, which is scheduled to be passed into law Monday, has not been made public, and lawmakers have been warned not to leak it. Vague official explanations fail to inform Taiwan precisely where the line in the sand has been drawn.

Thus the Bush administration is entirely correct in promptly describing the law as "unhelpful" and "counterproductive." It's a threat to the overall warming between Beijing and Washington, and that threat will be compounded if Taiwan's legislature, which had been balking at the cost, is now frightened into buying an expensive U.S. defensive arms package.

China's anti-secession law may have been calculated to fill the vacuum left by Washington's failure to articulate a Taiwan Strait policy going beyond platitudes about peaceful resolution. China clearly feels emboldened to turn up the heat on Taiwan, believing that the world's need to trade with it immunizes it from any real sanctions.

China's military buildup, which includes submarines to effect a naval blockade and more than 700 missiles aimed at the island, appears designed to give it the ability to force Taiwan to surrender before the United States can intervene.

Such reckless thinking obviously courts disaster.

Beijing would be better advised to patiently allow economic integration between China and Taiwan to continue, while striving to make its domestic conditions more attractive.

Who can blame the Taiwanese for being utterly repelled by the prospect of rule by a regime that offers rampant corruption, widening disparity of wealth and political repression?