By Robyn Lim

Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, stated the obvious in an interview on 9th July with Deutsche Welle (Voice of Germany), calling for relations across the Taiwan Strait to be conducted on the basis of 'special state to state relations'. Taiwan is a flourishing democracy of 22 million people, not a renegade province of communist China. Most Taiwanese, increasingly asserting a sense of national identity, do not wish to 'return' to a poor, corrupt and authoritarian China which few have never known. Yet former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, in his Australian article of 27 July, supports a totalitarian and corrupt government in Beijing which insists on its right to bring Taiwan to heel by force if necessary.

Lee, who steps down in March 2000, is the first native Taiwanese president, and the first to be democratically elected. Lee has not used the forbidden word 'independence'; nor has he abandoned reunification as a distant goal. But Lee seeks to leave as his legacy a new definition of Taiwan's status, which meets current realities. Despite Beijing's bluster, or perhaps because of it, Lee's statement has received strong support in Taiwan.

Lee made a calculated move designed to prevent Taiwan from being squeezed by the PRC, and by those in the Clinton administration who seek to appease Beijing at Taiwan's expense. One of the many mistakes that Malcolm Fraser made was to say that Clinton "reasserted" US policy on China. On the contrary, Clinton changed American policy by accepting Beijing's "one China" formulation, which no previous US administration had done.

In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration reached strategic accommodation with China in the wider interests of forging a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union, which was then exploiting America's Vietnam-era strategic paralysis. The Carter administration switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, and abrogated its defence alliance with Taiwan. But it's not true that, pre-Clinton, the US ever accepted a "one China" formulation. The 1972 Shanghai Communique merely says that the US "acknowledges" that "Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan strait maintain that there is but one China, and that Taiwan is part of China". Nor has the US ever accepted that China has the right to use force against Taiwan. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) written by Congress to ensure that Carter could not completely abandon Taiwan, says that any use of force against Taiwan, including blockade and embargo, would be of "grave consequence" to the United States.

While the TRA remains of enduring importance, two important things have changed since the 1970s. The first is that Taiwan has become a democracy - the first in the long history of the Chinese people. As such, Taiwan is an affront to the totalitarian rulers of the PRC (as well as to the authoritarian leaders of the Chinese city state of Singapore). Taiwan is no longer the personal fiefdom of the Chiang family, and thus engages deep-seated US interests in the promotion of democracy. Yet Clinton, so keen to foist instant democracy on Indonesia without regard for the maritime security interests of the US or its allies, has been strangely silent about Taiwan's transition to democracy. So has Mr. Fraser.

The second thing that has changed since the 1970s is that China and the US are no longer de facto allies. The collapse of Soviet power having dissolved their alliance of convenience, they now represent opposite poles of strategic interest in the Western Pacific, with Taiwan as a major focus of tension between them. In 1995-6, China sought to intimidate Taiwan during its first presidential election, including by lobbing missiles that bracketed Taiwan's ports. A feeble US response to China's initial provocation emboldened Beijing. Belatedly, the US sent two aircraft carrier battle groups (one based in Japan) to the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait. China had not anticipated this reaction.

But Clinton, whose grasp of strategic issues is tenuous at the best of times, was self-deterred by this successful exercise in gunboat diplomacy. So Beijing in 1998 exploited his domestic embarrassments, insisting on an unprecedented nine day visit to China, with no stopovers in Japan or South Korea. While in Shanghai, Clinton obliged his hosts by stating his infamous "three no supports" on Taiwan: no support for independence for Taiwan; no two China's, or one Taiwan-one China; or for Taiwan's membership of any international organization which requires statehood for membership. That change in US policy caused particular disquiet in Japan, a fact which seems to have escaped Mr. Fraser.

  After the euphoria of Clinton's visit to China, Sino-US tensions rose rapidly in 1999. Causes included revelations of China's nuclear espionage in the United States, its stealing of US technology, China's support for pariah regimes in Iraq and Serbia, and the accidental US bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict. Earlier this year, China moved 100 or so short range missiles to its coast opposite Taiwan. Then the Clintonites sought to appease China by putting renewed pressures on Taiwan to negotiate with China essentially on Beijing's terms. Recent personnel changes, including on the National Security Council, have seen pro-Beijing elements move into senior positions. Ominously for Taiwan, they started to talk about an "interim agreement" by which Taiwan would agree not to declare independence in return for a PRC promise not to use force against Taiwan. This formula implied that cross-strait talks, which are supposed to be resumed soon, should have as their final goal the reunification of China.

But Taiwan insists that reunification can be achieved only after China itself has become democratic. Lee Teng Hui's 9th July interview was designed to sidestep the appeasers in Washington, and thus to ensure that Taiwan and the PRC negotiate on an equal footing. Thus Lee sought to restore the status quo ante Clinton, since President Reagan had assured Taiwan that the US would not pressure Taiwan to negotiate on terms set in Beijing. Lee Teng-hui's interview was also made with an eye to the PRC's 50th anniversary on 1st October. Taiwan had apparently got wind of some announcement to be made that boded ill for Taiwan. No doubt, domestic political issues also figured in Lee's calculations. The ruling Kuomintang (KMT) is running an unappealing candidate to succeed Lee and is being challenged both by James Soong, a KMT defector, and the Democratic Peoples' Party (DPP) which takes a harder line against Beijing. Currently these candidates are running neck and neck. But bellicosity by Beijing is likely to undermine Soong and play into the hands of the mainstream KMT.

What will the Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA) do? Probably not much, apart from continuing to rattle Taiwan's cage in the hope that an intimidated Washington will pressure Taiwan to kowtow to Beijing. The PLA has few attractive options. If it tries to invade across the Taiwan Strait, the PLA would invite in spades Hitler's problems with the English Channel. Other options, such as blockade, would be unlikely to work, particularly in any timely fashion. More drastic military options, such as missile attack, would be bound to provoke a US military response especially with Congress in its present mood. Any such action would also invite an economic embargo that China cannot afford. In seeking to pursue the benefits of a market economy, and thus avoid the pitfalls that brought down the Soviet Union, China is now hoist on its own petard. True, its recent bellicose noises against Taiwan identified some weaknesses on the island, as happened in 1995-6. The Taiwanese stock exchange went down 14 per cent over four days. But China's foreign-traded Shenzen-B shares went down even further. It's hard to see how China can punish

Taiwan without putting at risk the PRC's wider interests in a peaceful environment conducive to economic growth and military modernization. Unless, of course, the PLA acts irrationally, which is possible but not likely.

Malcolm Fraser says that the US should stop helping Taiwan to defend itself by selling it sophisticated weapons. This advice ignores the likely knock-on effects on Australian security, transmitted through Japan, if China were to take Taiwan by force. Japan, whose outer islands are within sight of Taiwan, has a vital stake in Taiwan's continued de facto independence. That's partly because Taiwan sits astride Japan's vital sea routes. If China were to take Taiwan, Beijing would acquire not only the island's advanced technology but China would then occupy a key link in the 'first island chain' that runs down the East Asian littoral. That would be a great boost to China's efforts to turn the East and South China Seas into Chinese lakes, and would do much to further intimidate the wobbly ASEANs.

If the US were to sit on its hands while China took Taiwan by force or threat, Japan would rapidly lose confidence in US strategic protection. Then Japan might well conclude that it must look after itself, including by developing long range maritime capability, and possibly nuclear weapons. That would probably lead to an arms race with China, destabilize the region, and undermine the security of all regional countries, including Australia. For Australians, Taiwan might seem a 'small country far away of which we know nothing', but the myth that distance ensures security should have died with the fall of Singapore in 1942.

  Soon after Lee Teng-hui's interview, the ASEANs, meeting in Singapore where the host could control the agenda, quickly ran up the white flag and waved their 'one China' policies. The ASEANs profess to see no interest in Taiwan's continued de facto independence, ignoring the dangerous implications for themselves if China were to take Taiwan by force or threat. The danger to the ASEANs is not to their territorial integrity but to their independence over the longer term. Most would find life uncomfortable in a region dominated by China which continues to use force and threat in pursuit of its interests. Despite the danger that China's steady march through the South China Sea represents to the ASEANs, they are too intimidated by Beijing to be able to combine in defence of their interests. With ASEAN well down the road to pre-emptive capitulation to Beijing, Australia is a special target of China's efforts to isolate Taiwan from all those who might otherwise be inclined to support it - the same strategy that Hitler successfully pursued against the Czechs in 1938. This is paying off. Mr Fraser, like Neville Chamberlain in 1938, blames the victim for 'causing trouble'.

As recommended by Machiavelli, flattery and intimidation are key weapons in the Chinese arsenal. China seeks to boost the all-too-easily flattered egos of Australian officials and academics by referring to Australia as an 'influential middle power' which would enjoy more respect if it were to become more 'independent' of the United States. Australian business interests, like those elsewhere, is vulnerable to the chimerical lure of China's vast market. So China lost no time in exploiting Mr Fraser's comments, endorsing his statement that the US should not count on Australia in any future conflict over Taiwan if Lee Teng-hui continues to behave in a "provocative" manner. China is anxious to prevent a repeat of the robust comments by then Defence Minister McLachlan in the wake of China's attempts to intimidate Taiwan in 1996. (Mr. McLachlan's warning that China's bellicose behaviour might incur consequences was made against the advice of limp-wristed foreign affairs and defence bureaucrats.) Few in Australia seem to appreciate that, like the US pre-Clinton, we have never accepted 'one China', but merely acknowledged China's position that Taiwan is a part of China. And it's odd that Malcolm Fraser, who had no trouble seeing clearly Moscow's efforts at alliance-busting in the South Pacific in the early 1980s, should now fail to see that he is aiding similar efforts by the PRC.

Recently we had the spectacle of Foreign Minister Downer parroting the Beijing line in admonishing PNG for its (temporary) recognition of Beijing. Of course, Taiwan did itself no favours by trying to buy the support of a government in PNG which was corrupt even by Port Moresby standards. That fiasco was also a product of Taiwan's raucous internal politics with various parties and factions seeking to get runs on the board in the run up to the March presidential elections. But that's democracy which Churchill noted was the worst system except all the others. What is depressing about the reaction to Lee Teng-hui's 9th July comments is that so many Western leaders have chosen to ignore Taiwan's laudable political and economic progress in order to curry favour with the unelected leaders of a repressive regime in Beijing.

Robyn Lim is professor of International Politics at Hiroshima Shudo University, Japan. From 1988 to 1994, she worked in the Office of National Assessments, Canberra

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