Senior Japanese officials, in meetings yesterday, plan to assure their American counterparts that Japan shares a common concern about the future security of Taiwan, administration officials and a foreign diplomat said Friday.
While Japan is not expected to make specific offers of military or logistical aid in the event China attacks Taiwan, officials said, Japan is increasingly concerned about the growing political and military might of China.
With its new assurance, officials said, Japan is moving closer to the US point of view that the status quo between China and Taiwan should be maintained.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking to reporters on Friday, said the US and Japan shared the goal of maintaining peace between China and Taiwan.
"The United States and Japan enjoy very deep and broad relations in an alliance to try and help bring and maintain peace and stability" in the region, she said.
She and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were to meet with the Japanese foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, and the Defense Agency director-general, Yoshinori Ono, yesterday. The primary topic is expected to be efforts to coax North Korea to return to talks on ending its nuclear weapons program.
But an administration official said the US and Japan would also issue a joint statement confirming a "common strategic direction" on policies toward Taiwan, China and other regional issues. On Taiwan, the statement will "encourage the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan Straits dialogue," the administration official said. This would be the first time that Japan has joined the US in voicing public concern over China's growing military buildup in the area.
A senior foreign diplomat said that this has been Japan's policy for many years, even though it has not been stated in a public manner. Japan's National Defense Program Outline, a policy document adopted by the government last December, says that in light of the "uncertainty" that remains "in the cross-Taiwan Strait relations," and China's growing military prowess, the "close cooperative relationship between Japan and the United States" continues "to play an important role for the security of Japan."
The US and Japan maintain complex and conflicted relationships with the Chinese. Both have valuable economic relationships with China. Last year, China replaced the US as Japan's largest trading partner. China is an important trading partner for the US, too. On Friday, the State Department announced that the Export-Import Bank of the US had made a preliminary commitment to loan China US$5 billion to build four nuclear power plants in the Zhejiang and Yangjiang Provinces.
At the same time, however, the US has had angry exchanges with China in the last few days. On Wednesday, Porter Goss, the head of the CIA, issued a stern warning about China's growing military prowess.
"Beijing's military modernization and buildup could tilt the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, adding: "Improved Chinese capabilities threaten US forces in the region."
On Thursday, Rumsfeld said the US was concerned about the expansion of the Chinese navy.
In response, the Chinese Foreign Ministry, in a statement on Friday, angrily denounced those remarks, saying, "The United States has severely interfered with Chinese internal affairs and sent a false signal to the advocates of Taiwan independence."
China and Japan have been arguing about natural gas fields in the East China Sea that each country says lie in its territory. China has begun drilling for gas in the area, and on Friday Japan insisted that the drilling stop.
"We demand that China hand over data and stop exploration in the East China Sea until this problem is resolved," Shoichi Nakagawa, Japan's Economy and Trade minister, said during a news conference.
In Washington on Friday, Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said there were no plans to revise or alter the US-Japan Security Alliance, which was signed in 1966. He did say the two countries were involved in talks "about areas in the region, within the scope of that treaty."
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS