IP: An Unavoidable War? -- Los Angeles Times, op-ed., February

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

An Unavoidable War?
by
Chalmers Johnson


        The death of Deng Xiaoping may have lit the fuse of a
Chinese-American military confrontation that neither side wants but that
both appear unable to prevent. As a result of domestic political
considerations, both China and America have locked themselves into
positions over Taiwan.
        Less than a year ago the U.S. was showing off its macho power in
the region by dispatching two carrier task forces to the waters around
Taiwan while China was trying to intimidate the Taiwanese with a month-long
rocket barrage into these same seas.
        All it would take right now for the situation to explode would be
for the Taiwanese to declare their independence. If that should happen,
China would have no alternative but to try to seize the island by force and
the Americans would have no alternative but to act on their self-proclaimed
mission as the guarantor of 'stability' in East Asia.
        The real issue is the Chinese civil war. In 1949, the Chinese
Communists under Mao Zedong defeated the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang
Kai-shek and drove Chiang's Nationalists into exile on Taiwan. Nonetheless,
both the Communists and Nationalists agreed that there was only one China
and that Taiwan was a part of it. They disagreed on who should rule that
one China. In their great strategic initiative to recognize these
historical developments in Asia, Nixon and Kissinger acknowledged this
situation.  A few years later Jimmy Carter recognized Beijing and broke
relations with Taipei. From China's point of view, Taiwan today is sort of
like a Chinese Texas-a place that would like to go its own way but knows
that if it did so it would involve an unavoidable challenge to the
sovereignty of the United States.
        Over the years the Taiwanese have become the second richest people
in Asia after the Japanese. Many want to break free from the mainland and
declare their independence.  Moreover, with the death of the original
Nationalist exiles and the assimilation of their children, a popular
democratization movement has swept Taiwan.
        Unfortunately, any mainland Chinese regime that acquiesced in the
independence of Taiwan would be overthrown.  With the collapse of European
and Russian communism, China has turned to Chinese nationalism for its
legitimacy. "Remember Taiwan" could be as powerful a rallying cry in
contemporary China as "Remember the Alamo" was in the U.S. at a comparable
stage of its development.
        With the reversion of Hong Kong and the first congress of the
Chinese Communist Party in five years all scheduled for later this year,
now complicated by the need to succeed Deng, China's leader Jiang Zemin has
no room for maneuver. Moreover, many Chinese believe that President
Clinton's diplomacy is aimed at a military alliance with Japan (Taiwan's
former colonial overlord) to contain them. The U.S. keeps 100,000 American
troops forward deployed in East Asia even though the threat of the former
USSR has collapsed.
        Meanwhile, American domestic politics have offered Taiwan an
opportunity to use its wealth to influence American public opinion. In
1995, the Taiwan Lobby spent $4.5 million to engineer virtually unanimous
votes in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to invite
Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, to visit the U.S. under the pretext of
attending an alumni meeting at Cornell University. The Chinese were
infuriated that the White House permitted this, and everything that has
happened since then-the Pentagon's dominant role in making American policy
in East Asia, the mounting evidence of influence peddling by rich
Asians-has only deepened Chinese suspicions.
        Thus the stage is set for a confrontation. The Chinese are willing
to give the Taiwanese a great deal of autonomy so long as they do not cause
China to lose face by declaring their independence. The United States has a
huge stake in supporting China's present course of economic development and
cooperation with the rest of Asia. But both China and the U.S. are so
constrained by their domestic political situations that if the Taiwanese
took this opportunity to declare their independence, China and the U.S.
would have no choice but to go to war. What is desperately needed is quiet
diplomacy between Chinese and American leaders. They must ensure that each
side understands how the Taiwanese could force their hands, and they must
find formulas that would both satisfy their domestic ideologues and
maintain the peace that is indispensable to the long-term prosperity of the
region.


CHALMERS JOHNSON is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. Web
site: <http://www.nmjc.org/jpri/>.




Chalmers Johnson
President, Japan Policy Research Institute
E-mail: cjohnson () ucsd edu
Fax: (619) 944-9022