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By Juan T. Gatbonton Editorial
Consultant
Rapprochement between China and
its estranged province of Taiwan—promised by the election of the
Kuomintang’s Ma Ying-jeou to the presidency of the “Republic of
China”—removes a bone stuck in Asean’s throat.
Since the Korean War, Taiwan has
been the only flashpoint that could ignite a US-China-Japan
conflict. And among all the Asean states, the liability of high-tech
war across the Taiwan Straits has been scariest for us. The island
is so close that Batanes folk say you could almost hear the cocks on
the island crow.
China’s last
irredentist claim
Taiwan is China’s last major
irredentist claim. Nominally part of the Empire since the 10th
century, it had been lost to Japan in 1895. For the Americans,
Taiwan is just as crucial. Since the 1890s, Washington’s Pacific
strategy has been to ensure the group of islands enclosing the China
Sea remains in friendly hands.
The Asean states accept that
Taiwan is a Chinese province. Formally, they are concerned only with
how it is reunited with the mainland. But—if the truth be told—Asean’s
wishful hope is for the status quo on the island to continue for as
long as possible. Because resolution of the Taiwan issue in
China’s favor will enable it to dominate the South China
Sea—huge tracts of which it already claims—but which Asean
regards as its own maritime heartland.
The naval balance
of power
Rather than Taiwan itself,
control of the Taiwan Straits and the China Sea does seem the real
issue among China, the United States and Japan. As in the days of
the 19th-century naval strategist, Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the
primary object of American policy in East Asia still is to prevent
the rise of a regional superpower.
Mahan and his disciples in
Washington’s power elite regarded the projection of American power
into the Western Pacific—apart from signifying their country’s
emergence as a great power—as a strategy of “forward defense.”
That was why Theodore Roosevelt—then secretary of the Navy—had
ensured Dewey’s Asiatic fleet was within striking distance of
Manila Bay well before the Spanish-American War began.
America’s Atlantic coast was
protected by friendly Europeans. But the East Asian mainland and the
first group of islands enclosing the China Sea were occupied by
peoples alien to the Americans ethnically and culturally. So that it
is from there that an invasion of the American mainland would
threaten.
Mahan’s fears did come true. In
December 1941, the audacious Japanese devastated both America’s
Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and its forward airbase on Luzon
Island. And no sooner had the Japanese lunge toward the American
homeland been stopped—just short of Midway Island—than China
“stood up” under Communist rule.
Challenging the
status-quo power
Nowadays the US-China rivalry
resembles that between the hegemonic maritime power, Great Britain,
and the rising land power, Germany, beginning in the late 1800s.
Just as Britain tried to contain
Germany’s economic and military power, so did Germany try to break
Britain’s naval superiority. But, in our time, this natural
rivalry must be played out with the greatest subtlety—if only
because the potential costs of nuclear conflict are so high.
Pentagon strategists have been
shifting the weight of their overseas deployments from Europe to the
Pacific. Chinese strategists themselves apparently use as the
dominant contingency in their planning and weapons development a war
with Taiwan that involves the United States.
A land power since the 15th
century, China is developing its air-refueling and maritime
capabilities—the first steps in transforming its coastal defense
force into a fleet capable of projecting power over great distances.
Taiwan’s integration
well along
Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms,
Taiwan has come to depend for its prosperity on China’s workers
and markets. Taiwanese companies have invested more than $100
billion in the mainland; and more than a million Taiwanese live
there. But meanwhile Taiwan’s middle class has also been moving
away from its commitment to the proposition that the island and the
mainland are parts of one country.
Over this last 10 years, the
“Taiwanese” and “Chinese” positions on the sovereignty issue
have at times been so disparate that the risk of war had been real.
In 1996, two US carrier groups damped down aggressive Chinese
military exercises aimed at preventing the re-election of
“Taiwanese” President Lee Teng-hui.
What now for
the Straits?
US support for Taipei has at
times been so unequivocal that its Taiwanese tail had seemed to wag
the dog of Washington’s China policy. And Taiwan’s restoration
to Chinese control could reduce the China Sea to a Chinese
lake—and open the Pacific to Beijing’s blue-water ambitions.
But, for the moment, continuing
rapid growth seems Beijing’s highest priority—both to finance
China’s future greatness and to ease its political transition from
totalitarian to “soft” authoritarian rule. It has declared that
“China and the [United States] have no need to begin a war against
each other” over the island, and that even the idea of a loose
confederation between China and Taiwan “can be discussed.”
Short of the trappings of
statehood, Taiwan will still have a great deal of flexibility, which
President-elect Ma could exploit. But Beijing also said China’s
emergence, as a regional power, is “irresistible.”
Editor’s note: Notes and
Comment appears fortnightly.
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