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Academics mete out blame for soured relationship on both Bush and Chen

US President George W. Bush's latest comments about Taiwan and President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) agenda were the focus of attention at a conference on China hosted by National Chengchi University's Institute of International Relations yesterday.

One of the attendees of the conference, titled "The rise of China revisited: perception and reality," was Ross Munro, director of Asian Studies at the Center for Security Studies in Washington, co-author of The Coming Conflict with China, who said he was furious about the latest development in the US-Taiwan relationship.

"This is serious. I do not completely agree with what President [George W.] Bush did. I do not like the language he used, but I understand why he did this," Munro told the Taipei Times.

He said he doesn't think that people in Taiwan understood how serious the situation is. The Bush administration was the most pro-Taiwan administration in American history, he said, and Chen had soured that relationship.

Munro made reference to Taiwan's ungratefulness by describing a US official's anger toward Chen as "the anger of an old friend who feels their friendship has been abused."

Munro believed Chen has made a mistake.

In contrast to Munro's condemnation, June Teufel Dreyer of the University of Miami's political science department, and commissioner of the US China Security Review Commission, felt that the latest development couldn't be blamed on Chen.

"I think [Chinese premier] Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), as a guest of this country [the US], has no right to make demands on the US," Dreyer said.

She noted that China has been giving US headaches over its huge trade deficit and violations of its WTO agreements and has been unhelpful to the US in the war on terror or solving the North Korea nuclear proliferation problem.

Just as Munro was dismayed with Chen, Dreyer expressed her rage with Wen's trying to make an analogy of US president Abraham Lincoln fighting to keep the US together with China's wanting to absorb Taiwan.

"The South wanted to be part of the United States until the slavery issue came up, but obviously Taiwan has not been part of China. It was a colony of Japan for over 50 years. It was only a province for China for barely 10 years and that was more than 100 years ago," she said.

"I think this was a very poor analogy and I think Bush should have corrected him [Wen] instead of allowing it to stand," she said.

Dreyer supports Taiwan's right, as a sovereign state, to hold referendums and amend or rewrite its Constitution when it is clearly inapplicable.

"I am hoping that the Bush administration will revise its stance," she said.

While Dreyer does not blame Chen for the uproar in US-Taiwan relations, she said her position is not totally different from that of Munro.

"Because what a country has the right to do is not always what is wise to do, or prudent to do," she said.

Dreyer suggests that prior communication between the US and Taiwan on the issue of referendum was perhaps inadequate.

"Ultimately, the US is Taiwan's only reliable protector," she said, alluding to Taiwan's need to take US government's position into consideration.

Dreyer said she thinks Chen should go on with his plans for a referendum on election day, "otherwise he will look like a failure to his own supporters."

She suggested diluting the level of what is described as "provocative" by China, by having the wording of the referendum carefully thought out, or combining the referendum on China's missile with referendums on less provocative topics.

"So that Taiwan's people could not just vote for one issue but for five or six," she said.

"I think it is very important to the future of Taiwan's democracy that the people of Taiwan should be able to make their own decisions without having the PRC making decisions for them," she said, referring to the issue of referendums and rewriting the Constitution.

She warned of the danger of allowing the PRC to make decisions for Taiwan.

"China can not be allowed to take [for] themselves the right to decide what is independence `under the guise of democracy.' Otherwise, Taiwan will be slowly strangled by the PRC," she said.
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