US rejects proposal for high-level visits

US President George W. Bush's administration on Tuesday threw cold water on the possibility that it could accept visits by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and other high-level Taiwanese officials to Washington, as 16 members of the House of Representatives introduced legislation urging the administration to allow such visits and condemning the long-time ban.

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said the administration would not allow any visits.

He made the announcement in answer to a question by Representative Steve Chabot, co-chairman of the Congressional Taiwan Caucus, during testimony at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on US policy toward China.

The exchange came at about the same time as Chabot and 15 other supporters of Taiwan in Congress introduced their bill. While Chabot told Negroponte that the bill was to be introduced "shortly," it was unclear whether Negroponte knew when he answered the question that the bill was being introduced that day.

High level visits have been banned since the US switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.

"I think we're long overdue in changing that policy," Chabot said.

"Taiwan has for many, many years now been a strong ally to the United States. They're a thriving democracy and it just seems like it's time for the United States to change its position to allow high-level officials from Taiwan to come here to our nation's capital," he said.

Negroponte rejected the idea.

"I think we would have difficulties with what you propose mainly because of our `one China' policy -- our view that there is one government of China and that the government which we recognize as the People's Republic of China," he said.

"So we would not want to take any steps that might give the impression that somehow we now think otherwise," he said.

The proposed legislation, which is non-biding, expresses the "sense of Congress" that restrictions on visits by high-level Taiwanese officials, "including the democratically-elected president of Taiwan," should be lifted, and that the US should allow direct Cabinet-level exchanges.

It cites an earlier law, enacted in 1994 and introduced by some of the same congressmen behind the current bill, that allows high-level visits to the US, including to Washington, "at any time to discuss a variety of important issues."

Similar bills have been introduced several times in the past several years, but while some have made it through the committee and the House of Representatives, they have all failed in the Senate.

Negroponte defended the administration's stance, saying that the US has other ways to interact with Taiwanese officials.

"Even though we would have issues with allowing the president or the vice president of Taiwan to come to Washington, this is not to say that we do not have arrangements for interacting with these individuals" through the American Institute in Taiwan and through visits by lower level officials, Negroponte said.

"So I don't think that we lack for a meaningful dialogue with the authorities of Taiwan" and conducting business with them, he said.

The bill draws heavily on the fact that Taiwan is a full-fledged democracy at a time when US policy is to encourage democracy around the world, while the rules barring high-level visits date from the 1970s.

"Lifting these restrictions will help bring a United States friend and ally out of its isolation, which will be beneficial to peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region," the bill says.