Chinese missile threat growing: Chen

The number of missiles Beijing has deployed against Taiwan is now more than 1,300, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) said yesterday during his New Year address.

Chen said that over the past seven years, the number of missiles deployed along China's southeast coast had increased fivefold, from 200 to 988. Today, that figure was 1,328, he said.

"Solidarity is Taiwan's only option," he said. "As long as we stay united, we can overcome the differences of national identification and maintain perpetual peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait."

Chen said Taiwan welcomed any proposal that could help maintain peace and stability across the Strait. Chen said that in his report to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing on Oct. 15, 2006, Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) had advocated the negotiation of a peace agreement to formally end the state of hostilities across the Taiwan Strait.

However, Chen said, the biggest hurdle for the improvement of cross-strait relations was Beijing's precondition of adhering to the "one China" principle.

"Normalization of relations between Taiwan and China cannot be advanced if preconditions are imposed," Chen said.

"Setting preconditions is equivalent to establishing foregone conclusions. It lacks sincerity and allows no room for consultation and negotiation," he said.

In what would be his last New Year address before he steps down at the end of his second term in May, Chen chanted "Taiwan, jiayou [加油, an expression of encouragement]" several times.

Chen refused the US request that he halt a referendum on Taiwan's UN membership parallel to the presidential election in March.

No one, including the president himself, he said, can "reject" the referendum because it had been initiated from the bottom up, adding that he was sorry to see the US and European countries oppose the referendum.

"Taiwan, as a peace-loving, sovereign state, has the right to ask the UN to fairly consider its membership application," Chen said. "To exclude Taiwan from the international body is to discriminate against the people of Taiwan and a covert act of political apartheid."

Chen called on the international community to repudiate Beijing's pressure and avoid interpreting the basic human rights of the 23 million people of Taiwan to enter the international body as a provocative act or an attempt to change the "status quo" in the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan is an independent sovereign state and only the people of Taiwan have the right to decide its future, Chen said.

Neither China nor any other country can do this for Taiwanese and the people have the absolute right to express their hope to participate in the UN, he said.

Chen blamed the nation's diplomatic dilemma on dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).

The president said Chiang had made a terrible mistake by withdrawing the nation's representative from the UN in 1972.

To join the UN and the WHO under the name "Taiwan" does not amount to changing the name of the country, nor does the country intend to compete with the People's Republic of China over China's representation at the UN, he said.

Chen said that overinvestment in China was the main cause of Taiwan's widening gap between rich and poor.

Citing statistics compiled by the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Investment Commission and organizations in other countries, Chen said data showed that the ratio of Taiwan's annual China-bound investment to its GDP had increased from 0.81 percent in 2000 to 2.15 percent in 2006.