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[Page: S1376]
I want to have a good relationship with China, but I do not want it at expense of a free Taiwan that has a free press and a multiparty system.
Recently, I read an excellent column by Georgie Anne Geyer, who has had a great deal of experience in the field of international relations.
Her comments on the China situation should be of interest to all of my colleagues, as well as their staffs, and I ask that they be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.
The column follows:
Washington.--Now, let's see if I understand this:
Last summer, the more-or-less communist government in Beijing (population China: 1.2 billion) set its People's Liberation Army loose to make Taiwan (population: 21 million) sit up and take notice. First, Beijing stirred things up a bit by conducting ballistic missile tests off the Taiwanese coast--not exactly a neighborly act.
Then, the Chinese leaders provided Ambassador Charles Freeman, a specialist on China who was visiting Beijing this winter, with the astonishing news that they were seriously considering launching missile strikes on Taiwan this spring every day for a month. Freeman, who was for many years in our Beijing Embassy, took their warnings most seriously, and in a recent speech at The Heritage Foundation, went so far as to say:
`These exercises are not an empty show of force. They are a campaign of military intimidation that could, and may well as the coming year unfolds, extend into the actual outbreak of combat in the Taiwan Strait and even strikes against Taiwan targets.'
So what do our doughty leaders here do? Well, these warlike growls from Beijing did not seem very nice at all (wasn't China supposed to become capitalist now, anyway?). At first, our responses were just the kind the frontal-assault Chinese like to evoke in barbarians: ambiguous. The new American ambassador to Beijing, former Sen. James Sasser of Tennessee, went so far as to suggest, when asked at a press conference in Beijing what the United States would do if the Chinese did attack Taiwan, that, aster all, we had long recognized that Taiwan was a part of China . . .
And how the Chinese smiled behind their missiles.
Then, for once in the past three years of China-bungling, the administration actually did the right thing. On Dec. 19, it quietly sent the USS Nimitz to the Taiwan Straits, the politically treacherous waterway between Taiwan and China. This was important: It marked the first time American ships had patrolled the straits since the Nixon/Kissinger `peace' with China in 1976.
It is hard to ignore the Nimitz, if only because the nuclear-powered U.S. carrier comes with five escort ships equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles. But the master chess-playing Chinese also understood perfectly: This was exactly the way they had always played the `Great Game' in Asia.
Ah, but then the White House got cold feet over having done such an awful thing. `No, no, not us,' they said--in effect. `We didn't send that big bad Nimitz. (Would we do such a thing? Nobody here but us peacemakers.)' No, the decision to sail in waters that, for political reasons, we had not entered for 17 years had been made by the ship's commander alone--and that was because of bad weather in alternate waters.
Now, unfortunately or fortunately, Hong Kong has an active weather bureau, and those officious fellows there immediately took on what was clearly none of their business and said the weather had been just fine in those days. And so the Chinese, who don't know much about us either, wrote the whole thing off as just `more American lying.'
In the end, the threat was dispensed with, the Chinese remained undeterred, and American policy toward China was and is as imprecise and lacking in consensus as ever (Secretary of State Warren Christopher did not even mention the word `China' in a recent major foreign-policy address at Harvard).
Let us try to make some sense of all this:
China and, indeed, all of Asia are at a turning point whose outcome will assuredly shape the form of Asia, and our interests in it, for the next 20 years. In China, as Deng Xiao Ping comes to the end of his life. President Jiang Zemin is becoming more and more hard-line (he has even been wearing the once-hated Mao suits). Increasingly he has been placating the hard-line People's Liberation Army.
Gerrit Gong, director of Asian Studies for the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, recently met with the military command in Beijing, and told me that he sees the military pressures on the government as becoming intense. `The older military feel that the revolution is not over,' he said, `and that their comrades' blood must still be vindicated. They want to send a message to Taiwan and Japan that they're still strong.'
The Taiwan elections in March, plus Beijing's fear of American recognition of a potentially `independent' Taiwan, are what drives the Chinese. With their studied obstreperousness, blended with the constantly reinforced belief that they can bluff this administration, they are playing two games: (1) to threaten and contain the United States, and (2) to diminish the international standing or independent dreams of little, but rich Taiwan.
Emboldened by no real American policy--and now assured by the White House that the Nimitz was just `off course'--Beijing this last week took the first steps toward setting an actual timetable for the `reunification' of Taiwan with the mainland--after Hong Kong in 1997 and Macao in 1999. This is serious business.
Our former ambassador to Beijing, James Lilley, who understands these games, shakes his head at the seeming `mystery' that so many here see in how to deal with them. `The Nimitz was exactly the right signal to China,' he told me. `The sea is our battleground. Actually we are in the catbird's seat--but we are letting ourselves be jerked around.'
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