MSTKG
Miscellaneous Update
2-28-00
It is raining high level Clinton administration emissaries the China. This last month and a half has seen Stanley Roth and entourage make the journey and number two man at State, Strobe Talbott, make the trip.
Now it is Admiral Dennis Blair's turn. Blair is commander of the Pacific fleet, the successor to the newly esconced ambassador to Beijing, Admiral Joseph Prueher. Blair will be travelling to Beijing and also to Nanjing, the seat of the People's Liberation Army's Taiwan operation theater.
The Seventh fleet is reported to be monitoring the situation in the region closely due to Taiwan's presidential election and the CCP's possible actions. The Kitty Hawk is travelling by Taiwan now from Japan to make its' presence known. The Nimitz or another carrier may go to the region in the next few weeks before the March 18 election as well.
Undoubtably Taiwan's election period (election day is March 18) will be on the agenda for yet another consultative meeting. The US side will plead for the CCP not to do anything rash during the election period like they did in 1996 by shooting missiles at Taiwan.
The Roth and Talbott delegations both made that priority in their visits. But as soon as Talbott got back to US soil the CCP announced their new "White Paper" threatening to attack Taiwan if they so much as didn't agree to negotiate unification under one country two systems within an unspecified period of time.
According to the Clinton people, the communists did not even tell Talbott they were about to release the document.
As of this writing, Blair is in Beijing and is meeting with Xiong Guangkai and other high level communist officials. He is scheduled to visit the Nanjing military regional headquarters in the next day or two. It is from there that any military action against Taiwan would be orchestrated. And just in time for Blair's visit, the Sun newspaper of Hong Kong reports that the PLA is on alert.
Welcome, Admiral Blair.
So now, after Roth and Talbott -- with Sandy Berger on deck -- Blair takes his turn at bat. If things go according to form, immediately after Blair's visit the PLA will begin war games of some kind.
About six months ago the richest woman in Xinjiang (aka East Turkestan) was arrested by the CCP for some sort of subversion. Her name is Rebiya Kadeer (or Kadir) and she is an economic success story who was profiled years ago in the Wall Street Journal for building up a million dollar business.
The communist authorities saw her as a good story. She was born a poor ethnic minority in one of the PRC's autonomous regions. She propsered under Deng Xiaoping's reforms. She was appointed to the National People's Consultative Congress, one of those organizations designed to make it look like Chinese people actually have some say in their government. It meets once a year.
But there were problems in paradise.
Her husband had been active in the free East Turkestan movemnent. East Turkestan is another name for Xinjiang. Xinjiang means New Frontier and the name reflects the way China acquired it. It was territory expanded in to decades ago and after 1949 the CCP consolidated Beijing rule over the largely and traditionally muslim area. The main ethnic group there are called Uighurs and are not Chinese per se.
Not surprsingly given the way the communists rule, a movement to break from China and re-establish their own country, East Turkestan, emerged. It is analogous to the more famous resistance to communist rule in Tibet, but less well known.
One difference though is that unlike the Dalai Lama, the leaders of the East Turkestan movement do not renounce violence or work via non-violent means to acheive their goals. In the past few years violence over this "ethnic separatism" as it is often referred to has increased. There truly is a low-level civil war taking place. The most serious incident was an attack on a communist military outpost about a year ago where soldiers were killed and equipment destroyed.
There have also been terrorist type bombings as well in the Xinjiang region and in Beijing. A couple years ago a friend of mine visited Beijing and related how the cab driver told him his cab was often searched by the police for bombs and that they were to be especially suspicious of Uighur looking passengers.
The CCP leadership has tried to cover up the extent of violence and a number of bombings have been attributed to traffic accidents. There are a lot of reports of buses going off the road in China -- more than one would expect. It is possible some of these reports are cover-ups of this civil war.
Mrs Kadeer's husband was jailed and later went in to exile over the movement back in the 1960's. Five of their ten children went to live with him in the US. As Kadeer became successfull as a business women, her success became something the CCP could use for their propaganda machine. She was invited to be a member of the NPCC and held up as an example of the type of success a minority woman could acheive under the communist party rule. Her fame peaked with the cover story on her in the Wall Street Journal.
But she ran in to trouble for not renouncing her husband and for giving him information he was to use at a US Congressional hearing on the issue.
She was imprisoned along with two of her sons. One son was released and the other sentenced to prison, as was she.
That was last summer. Recently, the New York Times did an article on her because the US State Department decided to publicize her case and make a high profile request for her freedom (Fight Over a Chinese Prisoner Goes Public, by Eric Eckholm, 2-10-00).
This is good for her personally and the State Department is to be commended for it. But at the same time it sets the stage for yet another example of what has come to be known as hostage diplomacy.
In this scenario, the CCP release a political prisoner in exchange for some US concessions on whatever issue is important to the CCP at the time. Consequently, the Clinton adminsitration makes an unfounded assertion that things are getting better in China, as evidenced by the release, and takes credit for it.
One recent example of this is the case of Song Yongyi, a researcher and US green card holder, who was arrested in China for posessing "state secrets" earlier this year. The state secrets were actually old newspapers from the Cultural Revolution days that shed light on Zhou Enlai's role in things.
Song was jailed for months and later released. A US congressman actually had the gall to point to his release as being a step in the right direction. He ignored the much larger issue that Song should never have been arrested in the first place.
Song himself confirmed this hostage diplomacy aspect, saying after he was freed, "one young guard told me, 'You are a hostage being exchanged for WTO.'"
That the Clinton administration is making the Kadeer case public and high profile at this time indicates to me that they already have a tentative deal worked out for her release and exile. Then when she is released (with an unknown concession on the part of the administration) they will hail it as progress and cite their China policy for bringing it about.
It is a good scam both the CCP and the Clinton administration has going.
MSTKG
2-18-00
Talbott made it to Beijing on the 17th on crutches. He hurt his leg or ankle in Japan. The strategic partnership lives. Major topic of discussion is weapons sales to Taiwan, which the CCP don't want. The Clinton position is that the CCP must lower (or not build up more) their missile deployment in Fujian, off Taiwan.
He talked to high level Communists Qian Qichen (elder statesman for foreign affairs and former foreign minister) and General Zhang Wannian, who has met personally with Clinton in the White House.
2-15-00
The State Department's number two man, Strobe Talbott, will be in Beijing by the 17th for high level talks and consultations with the Chinese communist regime. He is the highest official to go to China since the May 99 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade Yugoslavia by US forces in NATO's Kosovo campaign. Accompanying Talbott is Walter Slocombe, an undersecretary of defense for policy who met last month in DC with Xiong Guangkai, a PLA General. This trip seems to be the follow-up for that fence-mending consultative visit. The engagement with the communist authorities seems to have been kickstarted and is going fast and furiously for the Clinton administration.
Talbott's mission will last all week, from the 14th to the 18th and includes a Japan visit. All the usual suspects will be on the agenda, Taiwan, Theater Missile Defense (TMD) and the "mistaken bombing" the communists insist is not a mistake.
The planning stages for this visit were reported about a month ago in the Japanese press and at that time it was denied that Talbott would be preparing the way for a visit between Madame Albright and her CCP counterpart, Tang Jiaxuan. Yet the current reports suggest negotiating such a visit is on the agenda.
Given that Slocombe is part of the entourage, it is fair to assume that setting up the visit of William Cohen to Beijing, a visit that was scheduled for last spring but was called off over the Belgrade bombing, is on the agenda.
Associated with that would be a return visit to DC by the CCP defense minister Chi "No One Was Killed In Tiananmen Square" Haotian. The plan is for Cohen to make the pilgrimage first, then later Chi will visit Washington again.
Also in the entourage are Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg.
MSTKG
2-10-00
The CCP have done something so petty it is hard to believe. Some overseas Chinese groups (like the International Federation of Chinese Scholars and Students; www.ifcss.org) and an Italian human rights group came up with $25,000 to give to families of victims of the Tiananmen square massacre. The same massacre Chi Haotian said didn't happen.
So a fellow named Lu Wenhe, a member of IFCSS and 20 year US resident, went to China to distribute the money. About $10,000 was prize money from the Italian group to Ding Zilin whose 17 year old son was killed. She is (or was) a professor at Beijing University and has been diligent in collecting the names of the victims killed in the massacre.
The police intercepted Lu and arrested him. Somehow they knew what he was doing. After three days of detention he admitted he was going to distribute funds. The CCP demanded he give the whole $25,000 to them in exchange for his release and return to the US. They made him write them a check and further made his father be responsible for the money. They did that as an extortion so that the check wouldn't be cancelled before they could get the money.
The check did get cancelled anyhow by people back in the states. So Lu's father may be in for a tough time. The communists may take everything he owns.
Such an act of pettiness over such a relatively small sum is hard to believe. But it is true and in the context of CCP rule, all too believable.
But one wonders why they make such a fuss over money for victims of a massacre that their defense minister says never even happened.
The CCP's new toy, a modern anti-US aircraft carrier destroyer bought from Russia is making its' way through the Taiwan Strait to its' home port in China's east coast. The China Times reported that it would pass through in the dead of night on the Chinese side of the middle demarcation line.
Related or not, a US carrier group is concurrently making a port of call in Hong Kong.
Taiwan's presidential election is getting a fair amount of play in the US media. Jim Mann has written about it (silly columns as well, quite uncharacteristic of Mann. He is the author of the excellent About Face). Stephen Mufson, one of the Washington Post's main China correspondents, is in Taiwan now doing interviews and coverage.
The China Times and Taiwan's english language news have each done pieces on Mufson's interview with Li Ao, ostensibly the New Party's presidential candidate. The New Party have become a fringe group and the stragglers left in it seem to be only Beijing's sycophants. Their support in the elctorate has fallen to the low single digit level, a huge drop from their 30% or so in the 1994 Taipei mayoral election (a 30% that got Chen Shui-bian of the DPP elected, the DPP's first major victory).
Li is running as their presidential candidate. But he is not even a member of the party and he has stated that people should vote for James Soong, one of his opponenents.
In the Mufson interview he presented the CCP and Kissinger line that the Tiananmen square massacre was reasonable and that any government would have done the same thing. He even brought up that favorite whipping boy of the CCP the Bonus March of the 1930's.
But Li has bad info on it. He stated the Army killed 12 people there when the army didn't even shoot. The only death was of an infant who died from tear gas (Li did correctly mention that).
The english report said that the exchange between Mufson and Li was heated. But Li thrives on controversey, so that's not surprising. Li had been jailed by the KMT, so he has cred. But, he seems rather silly. He claims to be a historian. His biggest claim is the rather unbelievable story that Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong May-ling) had an affair with Wendell Wilkie, republican candidate of the 1940's. Li presented a scenario of Chiang Kai-shek chasing Wilkie around some manor with a sword over the affair. Hard to believe. As hard to take seriously as Li's candidacy.
But this does bring up the question of just what or how are the US journalists going to cover the election. Interviewing Li Ao doesn't seem to be a major news story. If it is presented as important or Li's views as being mainstream or of any significant consequence, Mufson will be doing a disservice to the US readers who may not be familiar with Taiwan.
Soong May-ling circa 1950
Similarly, Jim Mann did a disservice in his recent articles. In the first he wrote an open letter to Lee Teng-hui imploring him not to cancel the election. But no one seriously ever thought that would happen -- or so rational people would think. The CCP and their New Party allies have been spreading such rumors for months. But it was always garbage. The Hong Kong papers where the rumors are fed to have printed a number of these conspiracy theory articles. They've said Lee would expand his term of office. Or he would cancel the election. One report even said he'd move the election up.
Why Mann gave credence to such nonsense is a mystery. There are all sorts of the same rumors and claims about Bill Clinton -- that he will declare martial law and call off the election so he can stay in office. I am wondering when Mann will write an open letter to Clinton beseeching him not to call off the election.
Another disservice Mann did was to misrepresent the financial scandal surrounding James Soong and all the mysterious banks accounts associated with him. Mann described it as a scandal over funds Soong oversaw for former politician's family members.
But that is not the scandal. That was in fact the explanation and excuse given by Soong to get out of trouble. The scandal is the millions of dollars are in the bank accounts of his family, including his son in his early 20's. The latest is that his son owns five houses in the US. The scandal is money marked for something else is being used by his family. Mann was off the mark. Because most Americans are getting their info from normally good journalists like Mann, his poor presentation of the facts is a great disservice.
2-1-00
The CCP have come out with a brand new threat or approach to Taiwan. Sing Tao of Hong Kong has been the harbinger of Beijing's messages and plans, which may be pure psych warfare, but could be serious.
What they reported on the 31st of January is that the next president of Taiwan must accept their idea of "peaceful" unification under the one country two systems scenario. But, if he doesn't, the communists will use force to unify under one country one system. That's a brand new one and it's reported to come straight from the top -- Jiang Zemin himself and the Taiwan work group.
The article's main news is that at the end of February, only a couple of weeks prior to Taiwan's March 18 presidential election, the PLA will hold large scale live action war games in Fujian province.
The games will be designed to defend against a sneak air attack, theoretically coming from Taiwan. The CCP figure that because this is a purely defensive practice, the US cannot be concerned and have no basis to send carriers like they did in 1996 when the communists shot missiles at either end of Taiwan in the run up to that presidential election.
The games will practice defending against Taiwan's F-16, Ching Kuos and Mirages, and US F-117 and B-1 stealths.
Sing Tao reported the next day that their brand new Russian built destroyer they took from their Russian suppliers on Dec. 25 will make its' way to the Pacific in February and the plan is to sail it through the Taiwan Strait.
These provocative and deliberately threatening actions are exactly what the US was hoping they would not do this time around. Stanley Roth even went to Beijing to ask them not to do this sort of thing this election. That this not happen was also a major topic for the "consultative exchanges" between the US and Xiong Guangkai last week.
Yet, no sooner did Xiong get back to Beijing than they begin to float these messages and plans.
It looks like Roth's visit and pleas and all the "goodwill" engendered in Xiong's visit they talked about have amounted to absolutely nothing.
To me it seems more like panic on the part of Jiang and Co. Not panic over Taiwan, but over their own precarious domestic position.
MSTKG
1-21-00
The 17th Karmapa, Urgyen Trinley Dorje
The Karmapa lama has fled Tibet to Dharamsala in India. It is said to be an embarrassing defection, of the monk to the Dalai Lama's outpost, for the Chinese communist party. This lama is only 14 years old and is a re-incarnation recognized by both the Dalai Lama and the Beijing regime.
Within a day or two Beijing announced they had discovered a new incarnation of a high level lama. That seems more than co-incidental. The lama they claim to have identified is the re-incarnation of a monk who is crucial for identifying the re-incarnation of the Dalai Lama.
Of course one wonders why the Beijing regime is involved in recognizing re-incarnated monks when they claim to not believe in any of that sort of spiritual thing. But their interest is obvious because power resides in the Lamas and the authority they hold in the hearts and minds of the Tibetan populace.
Beijing's recognition of the Karmapa was in line with their policy of controlling the monks politically. But the Karmapa leaving for the Dalai Lama stronghold is a blow to Beijing's authority.
Beijing has still not denounced the Karmapa lama or his flight. They say he was simply going there to get some black hats. They obviously hope he can be lured back. That would be a great coup in the war of legitimacy. If the 14 year old returns they can ask rhetorically how bad can it be if this monk voluntarily returns from the Dalai Lama camp, and also claim that this is an example of how they allow freedom in that the Lama needed some hats and they let him go get them. All the talk about repression in Tibet would be called evil Dalai Lama splittist propaganda.
But Beijing seems to be hedging their bets by finding this nascent re-incarnation. Their plan is to wait out the Dalai Lama, who is 65 years old now, and appoint their own after the current one dies. Proclaiming this new incarnation of the monk who identifies the re-incarnate Dalai Lama is setting the stage for this. They plan ahead.
There is some more to it that becomes murky. India, or some people there, apparently recognizes a different Karmapa Lama. Some people were saying that Beijing actually sent the 14 year old to India to get the hats because the possession of the hats is a sign of authority. In other words the conflict is between India and China, not the Dalai Lama and the communists.
The 17th Gyalwa Karmapa, Thinley Thaye Dorje
But, India has said they will not deport the 14 year old, who went there with his 24 year old sister and others.
MSTKG
1-17-00
This week Chi has visited Britain and met with the highest of the high of the British Empire Military.
Britain as you'll recall recently arrested Augusto Pinochet, General in the Chilean army who led a coup. Pinochet was arrested for crimes against the people of Chile.
Chi Haotian also led what was essentially a coup. Zhao Ziyang, the leader of China at the time did not want to kill the people. Deng Xiaoping and others disagreed and removed Zhao from power, placed him under house arrest -- where he essentially still sits today -- and moved the military against unarmed civilians under Chi's command.
How Pinochet can be arrested, but no Chi Haotian is beyond any reason or logic.
And he is in fact given an honor guard welcome -- he is feted.
It is hard to know why Britain and Tony Blair would hold such a double standard. By no standard can Pinochet's crimes be considered worse than Chi's crimes.
Chi also has never admitted or defended his actions. Just a few years ago he was in the United States, where he met with the Commander in Chief, William Jefferson Clinton, at the White House and also visited the Pentagon and met with top US brass.
Clinton and Chi at White House
Chi stated categorically that no one was killed in Tiananmen square.
This is a geographic sleight of hand that apologists and supporters of the regime like to use. They will say no one was killed in Tiananmen square. Their meaning is that in the actual area designated Tiananmen square, no one was killed by the soldiers.
Most killing did take place outside the actual square, but even this obfuscation is probably not true.
But Chi took it a step further and also went on to say that outside the square there was only some pushing and shoving.
So apparently it is OK for a Chinese general to massacre Chinese people for peacefully protesting for a more free country -- in fact it even get you a Scots Honor Guard reception in Britain and a 21 gun salute in Washington D.C.
But it's jail for a Chilean General in merry old England.
Officially the reason for the visit is fence-mending relating to NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia and for Chi and the Chinese to learn more about NATO and how it operates. Rumors also float that Chi wants to buy military technology.
Stanley Roth, an Assistent Secretary of State of some sort -- responsible for Asian Affairs, visited Beijing in mid January. Roth is the fellow who started the whole recent ball of wax over Taiwan going by trying to pressure Taiwan to accept a deal of some sort with the Chinese communists.
For a long time former Clinton officials, led by William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, had been carrying on a Track II "dialog" whereby these fellows would go to Beijing and meet with Jiang Zemin and Wang Daohan, the communist's Chairman of ARATS (the Associations for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait), and then saunter over to Taiwan and tell the Taiwan side what they talked about with their communist party strategic partners.
This Track II team told Taiwan they ought to make a deal with the Chinese communists and that the US wouldn't help Taiwan if the communists attacked.
All this was officially unofficial. One time when William Perry was on a protracted trip throughout the region where he started off in China as an academic (ostensibly) and met with Mr Wang of ARATS and other assorted PLA officers and communist officials at a conference in the a coastal city. He then travelled to Beijing for a photo-op and tete-to-tete with Jiang Zemin.
Then, according to his official itenerary, he did nothing, until he went on to Japan and S. Korea in his capacity as Clinton's Korean Affairs Coordinator (or whatever they call it).
Somehow the day he and his entourage spent in Taiwan talking to Lee Teng-hui and other Taiwan officials was left out of the official information from the State department about the trip.
Even when asked about Perry's trip to Taiwan -- where he was photographed at the airport and with President Lee -- the State department spokesman played dumb. He claimed to know nothing about it.
That sort of sillyness is what officially unofficial visits is all about.
But still, they are unofficial, officially.
Stanley Roth, though, in 1999 made this Track II officially official by going on record saying Taiwan and China should make some sort of interim agreements.
Roth is a decidedly official official in the State department.
Koo Chen-fu, the chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF -- counterpart of ARATS and Wang Daohan) did respond to Roth. He was quite nice in his response saying that Mr Roth's ideas were good ones and that they would very much like to come up with interim agreements involving technical and legal issues where there have been problems over the years.
That was a very nice way of saying, "butt out".
But Roth made it clear he did not want to butt out by responding publicly to Koo's comments and unequivocably stating the agreements he referred to were political.
Roth's comments, aside from breaking at least two of the six assurances that have long been US policy (that the US will not play an intermediary role between Taipei and Beijing and that the US will not exert pressure on Taiwan to negotiate with the Chinese communists), heralded a massive shift in US policy.
A month later Lee Teng-hui responded by re-phrasing Taiwan's policy with the simple term "state to state relations".
The US press went wild and the CCP followed suit.
Roth's current visit to Beijing comes at a time of "fence mending" all around . Chi Haotian was just in Britain, and on the the political side Roth was just in Beijing. And General Xiong Guangkai is coming to the US next week on the 24th of January. These visits are all inter-related and meant to do the same thing -- get the US - PRC relation back on track.
But the question is, just what is this "relation" about? Generally also, this means the CCP demands the US side with them on Taiwan (and the US acquiesces).
Roth was begging, pleading, that the communists don't do another "missile test" like they did in 1996 when they shot missiles near Taiwan during Taiwan's election.
Taiwan is having another one of those pesky presidential elections in March and the communists might think it's fun to do it again.
MSTKG
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