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Pan-blue attitudes toward the US perplexing

At the height of the Chinese civil war in 1947, George Marshall, the US special envoy to China, failed to mediate a peace settlement between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party. The KMT army was routed and retreated to Taiwan in 1949.

When the Korean War began in 1950, then US president Harry Truman sent the US Navy's Seventh Fleet to patrol the Taiwan Strait, effectively putting an end to Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) dream of "liberating" Taiwan and uniting China. The Seventh Fleet continued to protect Taiwan until the late US president Richard Nixon normalized relations with China in 1971.

China and the US exchanged diplomatic recognition in 1979, and in the same year, the US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, continuing armed assistance for the defense of Taiwan. During the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, China test-fired missiles over Taiwan and former US president Bill Clinton dispatched an aircraft carrier fleet to the Strait.

Over the past 50 years, the US has of course placed its own national interests first when providing military assistance for the defense of Taiwan. The first 40 years were filled with Cold War anti-communist, anti-Soviet and anti-China awareness and power politics.

Under the totalitarian rule of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), Taiwan was superficially friendly with the US for strategic reasons, but the two were in fact strange political bedfellows. During the past 10 years, Taiwan's rapid democratic development has caught the world's attention.

The US is proud of its history as a pioneer of democracy, which it sees as the highest stage of civilization and "the end of history." We can't ignore the fact that US military protection of Taiwan is built on basic human rights and the dissemination of democracy.

It is strange that unificationists in Taiwan choose not to see or place any importance on this. They only see Chinese nationalism and a united China, but they do not see the huge conflict between Chinese totalitarianism and Taiwanese and US liberal democratic politics.

They see US military protection of Taiwan as imperialism. When President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) recently talked about there being one country on each side of the Taiwan Strait, the US saw this as a statement of fact, saying that China should not over react. Leaders in the pan-blue camp, on the other hand, started screaming "national crisis!"

Recently, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in Beijing that the US does not support Taiwan independence, but "it's different from saying we oppose it." Taiwan's unificationists immediately scrambled to explain that only the "not supporting" portion of the statement was genuine and that the "not opposing" portion was insincere or a misunderstanding or distortion.

The fact is that the Chinese leadership has been so busy engaging in power struggles at the Beidaihe meetings that they have not responded very much to Chen's "one country on each side" statement.

Since assuming office, US President George W. Bush has viewed China as a "strategic competitor." Even though Bush has visited China twice since Sept. 11 last year, his closest advisers say Sino-US relations have not substantially improved. Interestingly, China is bending over backward to create a friendly atmosphere with the US, apparently viewing the US as an important player in the country's development.

To create a cordial atmosphere before Chinese President Jiang Zemin's (江澤民) visit to the US in October, China's central government authorities recently invited major media executives to a meeting and demanded that their reports on Sino-US relations "highlight proactive aspects" and be "careful about usage" when it comes to sensitive issues. Some academics and experts who attended the meeting criticized Beijing's current policy toward the US, which they viewed as "too soft."

However, Dai Bingguo (戴秉國), head of the Chinese Communist Party's international liaison department, said China needs to handle its relations with the US cautiously, given that China is facing too many domestic problems and the extent of Sino-US economic and trade relations.

A Chinese diplomat who attended the meeting revealed that Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan (唐家璇) made it clear during his US visit in February that China acknowledges the US' importance in Asia. The US' current Asia policies are beneficial to China and the US does not pose a threat to China, he said. Another diplomat stressed that it was a great honor for Jiang to be invited by Bush to his Texas home. Such remarks indicate the importance Beijing attaches to Jiang's visit.

Authoritarian China, which is viewed by the US as a threat, works hard to maintain an optimistic view about Sino-US relations. Meanwhile, in democratic Taiwan, which receives the sympathy and protection of the US, some people curse Taiwan-US relations and reject US military assistance for the defense of Taiwan.

The motives of Taiwan's pan-blue, pro-unification supporters are difficult to understand.

Chiou Chwei-liang is a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute of Southeast Asian Studies at Tamkang University.

Translated by Perry Svensson and Francis Huang
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