On Saturday, President Hu Jintao of the People's Republic of China (PRC) met briefly with Vice President-elect Vincent Siew of the Republic of China (ROC). But while the meeting on the southern Chinese island of Hainan at the Boao Forum for Asia was extremely short in length (barely twenty minutes), it was long on significance. The talks were the highest-level contact between the two governments since sixty years ago, when the end of the Chinese civil war forced Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party (KMT) to flee the mainland for Taiwan.
According to Beijing's official Xinhua news agency, Hu said the encounter had "inspired us to think deep about cross-straits economic exchanges and cooperation under the new circumstances." He was obviously referring to the imminent inauguration of Siew's KMT running mate, Ma Ying-jeou, who decisively trounced Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party in elections on Taiwan last month (see my analysis of the poll for TNI). Taipei's government-owned overseas broadcaster, Radio Taiwan International, quoted one of Siew's aides as saying that the meeting signaled "Taiwan's willingness to start making friends again" and observed that it was "the first test of the incoming government's pledges to forge closer economic and political ties with China." Speaking to the press in Washington on Friday, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte characterized the meeting as "a good way forward" even before it had even taken place, noting that "the best way to settle differences over the Taiwan Strait is by peaceful means and we think that dialogue between the People's Republic of China and the authorities, the leaders on Taiwan, is the best way forward."
The optimistic tone of the comments is certainly to be welcomed, not only in the region, but on this side of the Pacific as well. It is clearly in the interests of the United States to lower tensions between the parties on both sides of the strait. The PRC is America's largest trading partner (after Canada) as well as its only likely near-peer competitor in military affairs. Taiwan is not only a long-standing, if all-too-often neglected, partner, but also an indispensable supplier of components for America's computer and telecommunications needs, ranging from the Pentagon's sophisticated command-and- control systems to a suburban teenager's iPhone.
The presidential candidates have all talked a big game on Taiwan. Senator John McCain (R-NV), a long-time supporter of Taiwan, argued in a speech last year that "pointing nearly 900 missiles at Taiwan, passing laws [which] authorize force against the island, and continually practicing amphibious landings are not prudent ways to convince the world of China's peaceful rise." He kept it up with a statement last month after the island's presidential election, hailing the poll as a "fine example for the region." McCain was then followed by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), who said that she hoped "ways can be found to appropriately expand Taiwan's contributions to the international community." Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) has also argued that the administration should "reopen blocked channels of communication with Taiwan officials." With the arrival of a new president in Taiwan and the cross-strait military balance tipping toward China, it's time for Washington to become more directly engaged with both sides of the conflict. While carefully avoiding being cast in the role of "mediator," the United States must do its best to help maintain the balance between them. But will the next administration really commit to a new course in Taiwan Strait policy, a course that the Bush administration has apparently lacked the vision and perhaps the diplomatic finesse to undertake?
After the ice was broken Saturday, Siew met privately on Sunday with PRC Commerce Minister Chen Deming before the two led a seminar for business executives from both sides, where they exchanged views on possible market openings. Further talks in the coming weeks will likely hammer out solutions to some of the logistical complications which have driven up the costs of cross-strait economic integration, including the lack of regular direct airline flights and restrictions on trade and investment (en route to the Boao conference, Siew and his delegation had to switch planes in Hong Kong). However, if the idea is that as economic ties between Beijing and Taipei increase-over one million Taiwanese already live and work on the mainland and businesses based on the island have invested an estimated $100 billion in Chinese enterprises-the two adversaries will be even more constrained to settle their differences peacefully, then the United States needs to do more than simply applaud progress when it happens.
Two days before the Hu-Siew meeting, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates rang up his PRC counterpart, General Liang Guanglie, for the first time on the new "hotline" between the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense in Beijing which Presidents Bush and Hu had agreed to set up last fall. According to a Pentagon spokesman, while Gates congratulated Liang on his appointment last month as defense minister, the latter called upon the U.S. to end all arms sales and other military links with Taiwan. (Coincidentally, prior to his promotion Liang had been head of the PRC's Nanjing Military Region, a command that encompasses five provinces and three army groups which would spearhead any People's Liberation Army operations against Taiwan.) The fact is, however, that while Gates and Liang can talk, there are no such established channels for the defense chief-or any member of the U.S. cabinet-to regularly interact with their counterparts in Taipei. The same goes for the legislative branch: while Congress has exchanges with the PRC's rubber-stamp National People's Congress, there are no institutional connections with the ROC's boisterously democratic Legislative Yuan. Washington cannot even decide if it will give President-elect Ma a visa to privately visit the United States before his inauguration, despite his longstanding ties to America (he and his wife Christine Chow, both alumni of U.S. law schools, were married in New York; the couple's two daughters both currently live here and the elder of them, Lesley, is even a U.S. citizen).
Raymond Burghardt, the former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam who serves concurrently as director of seminars at the congressionally established East-West Center in Honolulu and Arlington, Virginia-based chairman of the board of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei, runs a heroic (and largely unheralded) diplomatic shuttle. But this roundabout channel is hardly the most efficient means of engagement-much less of playing a balancing role. While no doubt high-level communications can quickly be set up in the event of a crisis, do we really want to wait for one to emerge? In his speech last Friday, Negroponte argued, "Transparency and exchanges will most effectively build trust and reduce suspicion." That will only be the case if the exchanges include all parties involved.
Besides being less than conducive to America's official policy objective of ensuring the balance of peace and stability across the strait, the lack of routine contact makes little tactical or operational sense for U.S. strategic interests. The Taiwanese port of Kaohsiung is the sixth-busiest port in the world in terms of the number of shipping containers handled annually and the fourth business transshipment center. U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials should be regularly in contact with their counterparts in Taiwan's Executive Yuan. Given the common challenges that both the U.S. Pacific Command and the ROC Armed Forces will likely face in future years from the PRC's military buildup, the three-decade-old ban on active-duty U.S. general officers making routine visits to Taiwan to exchange information is simply wrongheaded-especially when American intelligence, in both the clandestine and analytical sides, has never managed to effectively penetrate mainland Chinese defense circles in the way China has routinely pierced America's veil, as a recent spate of espionage cases has shown.
Even with a fully functional triangular dialogue between the PRC, ROC and the United States, the Taiwan Strait will remain for the foreseeable future a potential flashpoint, one which TNI contributing editor Ted Galen Carpenter has repeatedly warned could well drag Washington into a shooting war with Beijing. As I noted previously, the latest estimates in a Pentagon report on Chinese military power indicate that the PRC's aggressive modernization effort is threatening to upset the peace because it undermines the ability of Taiwan's forces to resist any PLA attempt to reunite the island with the mainland against the wishes of its people. And the gap may actually be greater than previously thought: just last week Andrei Chang, editor-in-chief of the Kanwa Defense Review Monthly, analyzing the PRC's nuclear buildup, noted that "the nuclear deterrence against Taiwan and the United States is becoming integrated" and "the possibility cannot be excluded that a small number of neutron bombs have been deployed to deter Taiwan forces and the U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups." A militarily capable Taiwan is a more credible deterrent to cross-strait conflict than a weakened one. Hence there is dissonance between the official U.S. encouragement of peaceful dispute resolution and Washington's foot-dragging on Taiwanese requests for arms sales, especially F-16C/D fighters and missile-defense systems needed to counter an aerial balance of forces which has clearly shifted in the mainland's favor-and which the newly elected president has pledged to procure.
Perhaps the improving cross-strait political climate might induce Washington to go ahead with the arms sales and at least less-circuitous contacts after Ma takes office on May 20. But if the lack of attention, if not intentional downgrading, of ties with Taipei under the Bush administration-not even the U.S. trade representative has called on Taiwan, America's ninth-largest trading partner-is any indication, an American approach that carefully balances the competing interests, opportunities and challenges along the strait may have to wait until after a new president is sworn in on Capitol Hill next January 20.
J. Peter Pham is director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
