Wed, May 25, 2016 page3

• Taiwan, US might hold security talks

  • By William Lowther / Staff reporter in WASHINGTON
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  Taiwan might send a national security team to Washington next month for talks with the administration of US President Barack Obama, a meeting at the Wilson Center has been told.

  University of Richmond associate dean and professor of political science Vincent Wei-cheng Wang (王維正) said that national security teams from Taiwan and the US would meet next month.

  He said it would be “interesting to see” if the new administration of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) would conduct a “very candid conversation” with Obama’s administration.

  Washington sources confirmed that negotiations were underway to arrange such a meeting, but said that topics, times and the exact location had not yet been fixed.

  Addressing a discussion on “Tension in the Taiwan Strait,” Wang said the upcoming talks could be about what Taiwan needed and what additional support Taiwan could expect from the US “in light of China’s growing military and diplomatic pressure.”

  He indicated that it was possible the talks could lead to some friction of a kind that had not been seen between Washington and Taipei for the past eight years under the administration of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).

  Wang said there was a possibility that China would decide that with the Obama administration on its way out, this is a good time to test the US.

  “I don’t rule out that there could be some ratcheting up,” he said.

  There could be indications of just how the US regards its relationship with Taiwan when the Obama administration shows what kind of arms package — if any — it is prepared to approve, Wang said.

  He said that it would also be important to see whether the US would invite Taiwan to participate in the second round of negotiations for entrance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

  Wang said that the Tsai administration faced “a very short honeymoon.”

  He said that for the past eight years, the US and Taiwan had experienced a low-maintenance relationship with relatively low expectations. The US and Taiwan had not conducted a serious strategic dialogue during the Ma administration and the relationship seemed to be on auto pilot, he said.

  Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia and director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that China’s reaction to Tsai’s inauguration had not been “alarmist” and that Beijing’s behavior had been “predictable.”

  She said that a member of Taiwan’s government had told her that China had cut back group tourism by 50 percent and visits by individual tourists by 30 percent.

  Glaser said that relations between the Tsai administration and Beijing were “a work in progress.”

  She said that Tsai would visit Panama late next month and that the journey could involve a transit through the US, and that China would be watching closely how the transit was handled.

  Glaser said that China was being very careful about the use of Tsai’s name and that in a conversation that Glaser had conducted with a Chinese minister, the minister kept referring to Tsai as “the lady” rather than use her name.

  J. Stapleton Roy, a former US ambassador who founded the Kissinger Institute on China at the Wilson Center, said that Tsai’s inauguration had not triggered a crisis, but that if Taiwan-China relations were mishandled, a crisis might be “just around the corner.”

  He said China was clearly committed to a longer-term strategy in its push for unification.

  Roy said a crucial problem for Beijing was public attitudes in Taiwan. Despite extensive contact between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, there has been a decrease in support for unification in Taiwan, even though there was overwhelming support for maintenance of the “status quo,” Roy said.

  “People recognize that moving away from the ‘status quo,’ especially in an independence direction, would be destabilizing,” he said.

  There could be a point at which China becomes impatient about its inability to affect the attitude of people in Taiwan in favor of unification and that could be “very dangerous,” he said.
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