Wed, Mar 28, 2001 page3

• Academic urges more robust US policy toward China

  • By Lin Chieh-yu / STAFF REPORTER
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  An influential US expert on cross-strait ties recently appealed to the US administration to rethink former president Bill Clinton's China policy, urging it to stop parroting the "one China" principle and not allow Beijing to intimidate Wash-ington into making unnecessary concessions.

  "The new US administration should recognize that the one China policy is a dangerous semantic trap and avoid being drawn into pronouncements that could play into Beijing's definition of that one China, namely that one China has its capital in Beijing and that Taiwan is a province thereof," said June Dreyer, a professor of political science at the University of Miami.

  Dreyer also criticized Clinton for mentioning the "three no's" during his visit to China in 1998 and accepting Beijing's position on the Taiwan issue.

  "There should be no further official mention of the three no's and as little mention of the one China concept as possible," Dreyer said.

  The three no's are no support for two Chinas; no support for one China, one Taiwan and no support for Taiwan's entry into international organizations where statehood is required.

  Dreyer laid out her tough position during a speech at the Foreign Policy Research Institute on March 14, requesting that President George W. Bush and his advisers communicate with China's leaders in a totally different way from the Clinton administration.

  A report of Dreyer's speech was forwarded by the Bush government to Taiwan's National Security Council early this week.

  A senior adviser to the council said yesterday that Dreyer's remarks reflect the thoughts of the core members of the Bush administration toward policy in the Asia-Pacific region.

  In her speech entitled "How to deal with Beijing," Dreyer began by saying that US leaders should neither maintain a romantic expectation that China will change as its economy advances nor assume that a democracy will necessarily be easier to deal with than the current autocracy.

  "The facile assumption that Sino-US tensions will disappear when the mainland becomes capitalist is ludicrous," Dreyer said.

  "The current government is able to restrain nationalist passions [of those who have been educated to believe that Taiwan has `always' been part of the ancestral land] as it deems it advisable for diplomatic purposes. A popularly-elected democratic government might find it impossible to do so."

  Dreyer then suggested that the US government should be au fait with China's terminology and be prepared to quote them back to Beijing where relevant, especially in trade and sovereignty issues.

  "Remonstrations to Beijing about its human rights abuses are invariably refuted with arguments that the PRC is a sovereign state, and as such can do what it wishes," Dreyer said.

  Dreyer then stressed that there should be no repetition of year year when the administration told members of Congress that they were not to meet with President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) during his stopover in Los Angeles.

  Dreyer said that China uses veiled threats about its trade relations with the US to pressure Washington not to sell weapons to Taiwan and in response to US criticisms of its human rights record.

  "The US should remind Beijing that the terms of trade are reciprocal and the balance of trade is lop-sidedly in China's favor -- the US trade deficit with China in 2000 was US$83.8 billion, America's largest -- so Chinese businesses are apt to suffer even more," Dreyer said.
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