During A high-profile conference in Taipei on Nov. 13 and Nov. 14 for track two, party-to-party contacts between Taiwan and China entitled “60 Years Across the Taiwan Strait,” Chinese academics were surprised by the challenge by pro-blue Taiwanese academics to Beijing’s “one China” principle after the pan-blues had promoted the idea in the past. Taiwan applauds them for delivering this surprise. However, this track two confrontation contained two more surprises that are even more deserving of our attention.
The first surprise was delivered by Li Jiyun (李際均), former director of the General Office of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Military Commission, who said Taipei’s request for Beijing to withdraw its ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan was a non-issue because mobile missiles can easily be redeployed. After mocking the request, which is a long-term policy of Ma and was a policy of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), Li said vaguely that the missiles are not as powerful as Taipei believes.
The second surprise came from Yang Jiemian (楊潔勉), president of Shanghai Institutes for International Studies and the younger brother of Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪), who said the possibility of a cross-strait war was almost zero.
Their views are very different from those of the Taiwanese public, and remarks made by both government and opposition leaders, who claim China’s missiles are devastating, and that a cross-strait war could break out anytime.
However, their apparent “slips of the tongue” were really insider information. Tens of thousands of missiles were fired when Nazi Germany attacked Britain and during the various Arab-Israeli conflicts. Despite the strong psychological effect, the missiles’ destructive capability is insignificant compared with attacks by strategic bombers. This is why every country invests much more on their air force than on ballistic missiles.
Thanks both to the high external dependence of China’s economy and the strong constraints created by the international political situation that has been the result of globalization, there has not been a war in the Taiwan Strait for almost 60 years. After Taiwan ended the Period of Communist Rebellion in 1991, China was no longer “an enemy state.” If Beijing also rejects the possibility of resolving the cross-strait conflict by force, the two sides could easily embrace peace and there would be no “state of hostility” that needs to be ended by a peace agreement.
So the Chinese academics’ remarks pointed to a stark truth: Ending cross-strait hostility, building mutual military trust and signing a cross-strait peace agreement are non-issues.
Since a war in the Strait is unlikely, the purpose of China’s deployment of ballistic missiles is designed to simulate a civil war status in order to pursue peace through the threat of war and pursue unification through peaceful means in the hope that this will give it sovereignty over Taiwan. The signing of a peace treaty is usually carried out if two parties want to remain on an equal status after a war, but if one party defeats the other party in a civil war, the winning party will take over the central government. If the losing party yields to the rule of the winning party and gains the right to participate in the government through unification, a peace agreement can be signed, rather than a treaty.
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