Print

Mail

wiki links

Ma and US cautiously courting China ties

TWO PUBLIC EVENTS, one in Taiwan and the other in China, have brought some much-needed clarity to the often murky and sometimes tense confrontation across the Taiwan Strait.

In Taipei, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) laid out explicitly what his policy toward China would be if he were elected in March. Calling it his "three noes" policy, Ma said he would pursue a policy of no negotiations for unification, no pursuit of de jure independence and no use of force by either side of the Taiwan Strait. He said that polls showed a majority of Taiwanese prefer the status quo to either unification or independence.

In Beijing, the visiting commander of US military forces in the Pacific and Asia, Admiral Timothy Keating, was explicit in asserting the right of US warships to sail through the Taiwan Strait. Beijing considers the strait to be an internal waterway under Chinese jurisdiction.

"We don't need China's permission to go through the Taiwan Straits [sic]," Keating said in response to a Chinese reporter at a meeting with Chinese, American and other foreign correspondents. "It's international waters. We will exercise our free right of passage whenever and wherever we choose as we have done repeatedly in the past and we'll do in the future."

Ma declared his "three noes" policy at a conference in Taipei a few days after the KMT scored a sweeping victory in Saturday's legislative elections. The KMT won 81 seats in the 113-seat legislature against 27 for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

While Ma is favored to win the March election, he and other KMT leaders cautioned that there are no guarantees. In democracies, voters have a way of going to the ballot box and voting as they please, confounding the political pundits.

In asserting that his government would not negotiate with China over unification, Ma served a notice that may unsettle Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and other Chinese leaders who have made clear they prefer Ma and the KMT to Chen and the DPP.

Moreover, Ma has taken pains in recent years to assure the electorate that he shares their identity even though he was born in Hong Kong of parents who came from China. In an interview two years ago, he said flatly: "I am Taiwanese."

He also reminded Chinese leaders that they had used force, firing missiles at Taiwan in trying to influence an election in 1996.

That, Ma said, "served only to alienate Taiwan people's hearts and minds against the mainland and alarm the international community over its rash behavior."

In Beijing, Keating was making his second visit to China as part of a continuing US effort to preclude Chinese leaders from miscalculating US military capabilities and intentions. Equally important, Keating and a senior Pentagon official, James Shinn, sought to discern China's intentions behind a steady expansion of its armed forces.

Beijing officials mainly reiterated known positions, saying Taiwan was a most sensitive issue, that the US should stop selling arms to Taiwan and that China posed no threat to the US.

Keating responded by repeating the "one China" policy of the US by renewing proposals for military exchanges and by asserting that the US seeks to avoid confrontations.

But when the Chinese reporter asked what was behind the USS Kitty Hawk's recent transit of the Taiwan Strait after being denied a port call in Hong Kong, Keating broke out of diplo-speak to lay out the longstanding US position that those are international waters.

He softened that by saying: "We don't want to be confrontational about this."

If the Chinese wanted to know why US ships were there, "we're going to tell them the truth," he said.

Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
This story has been viewed 2075 times.