If relations between the United States and China continue to deteriorate, the consequences for all of Northeast Asia, including Korea, could be significant. So the bitter controversies between Washington and Beijing over arms sales to Taiwan and over President Obama‘s meeting with the Dalai Lama are worrisome, especially the still-explosive arms sales issue.
For the past month, Chinese officials and editorials in the government-controlled media have angrily attacked the Obama Administration’s decision to sell $6.4 billion in weaponry to Taipei, including Black Hawk helicopters, sophisticated communications equipment, and 114 Patriot missiles. The depth of Chinese anger was demonstrated when a group of high-ranking military officers urged the government to use its economic clout to punish Washington by getting rid of some of the vast Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury securities.
Far from seeking to mollify Beijing, the White House has defended its actions as necessitated by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act and as “punishment” for what it sees as a defiant Chinese posture towards the United States, exemplified by its refusal to back the U.S. stance in the Copenhagen climate change negotiations and on the imposition of new U.N. sanctions on Iran.
Now, the Pentagon is pushing for the revival of a long-pending deal to sell 66 F-16 fighter jets to Taipei that was dropped by the Bush Administration. Congressional allies of the Pentagon have leaked a Defense Intelligence Agency report bemoaning the inadequacy of Taipei‘s existing airpower capabilities for defending itself against an attack from Beijing. While Taiwan has almost 400 combat aircraft, said the report, “far fewer of these are operationally capable,” because Taiwan’s 60 U.S.-made F-5 fighters are no longer operational, its existing fleet of 146 F-16s have outdated avionics and 126 fighter planes produced locally with U.S. help “lack the capability for sustained sorties.”
Will Beijing retaliate economically for the provocative U.S. stance on arms sales?
The Administration says no. It argues that China needs access to the U.S. market just as much as the U.S. needs China to buy its Treasuries; that the Beijing decision to sell $34 billion in U.S. securities in December came before the U.S. announcement of the arms package, and that Beijing unloaded the Treasury securities mainly to protect itself from any future weakening of the dollar.
But this argument ignores the fact that the official China Daily selected February 18 - the very day of Obama‘s meeting with the Dalai Lama - to condemn the $34 billion sale.
Clearly, the timing of the February 18 editorial was no accident. It was a chilling reminder that China’s willingness to keep propping up the reckless U.S. deficit spending will not go on forever if Washington remains insensitive to Chinese priorities.
Most U.S. officials, and most well-informed Americans, have no idea at all why China cares so much about the arms sales issue. Two explanations became clear to me during my many visits to Beijing and Taipei as Northeast Asia Bureau Chief of the Washington Post and later as a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. First, since Taiwan was taken away from China by Japan, getting it back is a compelling nationalist priority, a key step in China‘s emergence as a great power in control of all of its rightful territory. Second, U.S. arms sales delay the gradual process of unification between China and Taiwan that is moving with increasing rapidity as a result of economic factors.
Viewed from Beijing, the consolidation of “one China” is a patriotic mission of transcendent importance left over from history. Disunited and weak, China was unable to maintain its control over Taiwan in the face of European, Japanese, and American inroads. Spanish and Dutch adventurers established outposts on the island during the Ming period, and the Qing dynasty, which ruled Taiwan loosely for two centuries beginning in 1683, was forced to cede it to Japan in 1895 as the price for ending the Sino-Japanese war. No sooner had Japan been defeated in World War II than American support for the Chiang Kai-shek regime once again blocked national unity. Just as past humiliations in Taiwan symbolize the impotence of earlier Chinese regimes in this perspective, so reunification would demonstrate that a strong, unified China has now arrived on the world stage.
Soon after the normalization of Sino-American relations in January 1979, Beijing shifted to its present emphasis on peaceful reunification, gradually unveiling the “one country, two systems” proposal. The revised P.R.C. constitution, adopted in 1982, contained a new clause specifically designed for Taiwan and Hong Kong. Both would become Special Administrative Regions with a “high degree” of autonomy. They would be free to maintain their existing economic, political, and social systems and their own administrative and judicial machinery, “including the power of final adjudication.” They would issue their own currency, operate under their own budgets, and levy their own taxes. They would be exempt from any taxation by Beijing.
In one critical aspect Deng’s proposal accorded more favorable treatment to Taiwan than to Hong Kong. Taiwan would maintain its own armed forces; Hong Kong would not. Moreover, P.R.C. forces could be stationed in Hong Kong but not in Taiwan.
The United States insisted on retaining the right to sell arms to Taiwan when it “de-recognized” the Republic of China and opened relations with the People‘s Republic. But Congress went a step further, enacting the Taiwan Relations Act, which requires U.S. sales of weaponry to Taiwan “sufficient” for its defense. This led to festering tensions with Beijing until U.S. and Chinese leaders signed the August 1982 “Second Shanghai Communiqu?.” The United States declared that it “does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan” and pledged that its arms sales to Taipei “will not exceed, either in qualitative or quantitative terms” the level of those supplied since 1979. In deliberately ambiguous language, the communiqu? said that the United States “intends gradually to reduce its sales of arms to Taiwan, leading over a period of time to a final resolution.”
Successive U.S. administrations have ignored this commitment, poisoning a relationship with Beijing that will become increasingly important to the United States as its economic decline continues.
The views presented in this column are the writer‘s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.
