For those with an understanding of the history of China's foreign relations, the new White Paper on Taiwan should not have been too surprising. It fits perfectly into a pattern of Chinese strategy unbroken since the days of Mao Zedong(毛澤東).
Faced with, as they perceive it, an overwhelmingly hostile world -- and one is hard-pressed to think of any country with which China feels genuinely friendly -- China's leadership has consistently adopted an approach of probing and testing its neighbors. When they find a soft spot, they keep pushing to maximize their advantage; met with resistance, they withdraw and consolidate whatever they have gained.
The pattern has replicated itself many times, from China's guilt-trip approach to Japan, to its incremental advance in the South China Sea, to the border conflicts with India and Vietnam. And of course Taiwan, and our friends in the US, are a perennial target.
The White Paper is just the latest move in this ongoing chess game. It is obvious that Beijing is testing all the players involved, to ferret out the chinks in the armor, which will inevitably be singled out for more concentrated attack in the future.
So how are the test-takers faring? The record is, alas, mixed. The presidential candidates seem to only be shooting for a minimum passing grade, and at the rate they're going, they may not even get that. We are still waiting for stronger responses from Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Lien Chan (連戰);ironically, it is the most pro-China of the candidates, James Soong (宋楚瑜), who has made the clearest statements so far. Our worry is that if they fail the current test they will encourage further Chinese adventurism.
On the other hand, the various actors in Washington all look set to pass. White House spokesman Joe Lockhardt, when asked how the US would respond to a repeat of the 1996 missile crisis, responded, "like we did in 1996," a robust response which is surely the best way to deal with China. In power politics as China plays it, when a particular tactic fails to find a useful weakness, it is not permanently discredited, but stored away for a suitable interval, and attempted again when it seems that circumstances have changed. If China's leaders had any reason to suppose that the US would react differently to missile tests -- less confrontationally, for instance -- they would undoubtedly try to use such tactics again.
But the most important test-takers, the ones whose response will determine the success or failure of all the others, are the people of Taiwan. This is certainly not the first time that China has probed the will of the Taiwanese to stand up for themselves; on the contrary, all the panoply of military exercises, leaked reports to the Hong Kong media, etc, are aspects of a continuing process. The last time China engaged in this, in the runup to the 1996 election, people rallied behind President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), trusting him as the man who could hold China at bay.
This time around, sadly, there is no tough-minded patriarch to provide guidance. Taiwan's voters have to decide whether they are going to tough the situation out and give China a black eye by voting for the candidate who best characterizes a free Taiwan able face down China's intimidation. Or they can be influenced by China, vote for a candidate ready to downplay Taiwan's sovereignty in the search for a one-sided rapprochement, and then count the remaining days until Taiwan's Hong Kong-ization becomes a reality. The Taiwanese resolve to face down China has recently been been ambiguous -- look at the stock market in the wake of Lee's "state-to-state" announcement last summer. The White Paper comes as another test of that resolve and it is one that this country cannot afford to fail.
RSS