Jehangir S. Pocha, Chronicle Foreign Service
Saturday, March 5, 2005
Beijing -- China is expected to introduce controversial anti-secession legislation during the annual session of the National People's Congress beginning this weekend, formally serving notice that it opposes any move by Taiwan to declare independence and will respond with force if necessary.
Premier Wen Jiabao promised today, in a nationally televised speech in the cavernous Great Hall of the People, never to permit formal independence for Taiwan.
Wen said the proposed law reflects the "strong determination of the Chinese people to ... never allow secessionist forces working for Taiwan independence to separate Taiwan from China."
"Enshrining that threat in law is China's way of scaring the Taiwanese people into surrendering their hopes for independence," said Philip Yang, associate professor of political science at the National Taiwan University in Taipei.
China hopes the new law will stop Taiwan's drift toward independence, but it could also have the opposite effect.
"I think it could backfire," Yang said. "Already, people are organizing rallies in the streets here and speaking about passing our own anti- reunification law."
Such a reaction from Taiwan would almost certainly set off a fresh cycle of brinksmanship between the two estranged neighbors. Already, it has sparked harsh words from Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, whose recent pronouncements had been conciliatory.
"A dark cloud now overshadows the atmosphere of reconciliation," he said Tuesday in a videoconference with European lawmakers and academics.
The United States has said it is discouraging China from passing the anti- secession law, but its introduction at the congress is almost certain.
"The Taiwan issue has become very troublesome for China -- so this is our response," said Jin Linbo, director of Asian Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing. "This is not a military response but a legal one. All we are doing is codifying the one-China policy, which even the U.S. accepts, into law."
But part of that policy is China's oft-repeated warning that it will attack Taiwan if it tries unilaterally to change the status quo, under which the island enjoys de facto independence but remains legally a part of China.
Over the past 50 years, both have used diplomacy, economics and even the threat of military action to stymie each other. The problems peaked in 1996, when China fired missiles into the Formosa Strait and the United States sent a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier into the area to demonstrate its support for Taipei.
The latest round of tensions between the two erupted last March when Chen declared his intent to revise Taiwan's Constitution in 2006 -- a unilateral move Beijing said would be akin to a declaration of independence.
"Suddenly, Beijing felt itself to be losing control," said Alan Wachman, associate professor of international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "The anti-secession law was conceived then, as a response to the anxiety China was feeling about Chen . .. as a measure to show firmness and resolve."
The situation in Taiwan began to change soon after Beijing began planning the anti-secession law.
Chen was warned about getting too pushy with Beijing by the United States, which is legally bound by the Taiwan Relations Act to side with the island in the event of a war. The international furor that Chen's China-baiting created tarnished his party's image at home, and the more China-friendly opposition Kuomintang party made a clean sweep of Taiwan's parliamentary election in December. As a result, Chen's comments on cross-strait relations suddenly became conciliatory, and he even talked about Taiwan's eventual reunification with China.
But in Beijing, the die was cast.
"Things had gone so far (with the anti-secession bill) that it wasn't politically feasible to withdraw it," Wachman said. "Now Beijing risks stirring up a benign situation (and) painting itself further into that awkward corner of promising it will fight a war it really doesn't want to."
Despite the verbal, and occasionally very real, missiles China hurls Taiwan's way, analysts say Beijing desperately wants to avoid a conflict, particularly one that that could pit it against the United States.
Part of the reason is that while Beijing believes it can control a diplomatic spat, it knows no one can control a war.
"There's no assurance of what will happen once the sword is out of the scabbard," Wachman said. "The Communist Party can barely control China today. . .. Even if it were to win a war against Taiwan, how do you subordinate a nation of 23 million educated, cosmopolitan and wealthy people who'd be united in their hatred of China?"
Critics also worried that China could use the anti-secession law as a cloak of legality for new crackdowns against separatists in its western province of Xinjiang and in Tibet, he said.
China has already used the U.S.-led war on terror to justify human rights violations in Xinjiang, where ethnic Uighur Muslims are demanding their own homeland. "Now they could justify all the human rights abuses they are carrying out there by saying, 'Hey, this is the law, and these people are violating it,' " Wachman said.
The effect the anti-secession law will have on China's relations with Taiwan and the United States and on its internal politics depends largely on how it is written. Though the broad outlines of the initiative are known, no detailed draft of the bill has been circulated, and Wang says he clings to the faint hope that the National People's Congress will do the smart thing -- save face by passing the law, but making it toothless.
There are plenty of reasons for China to avoid an armed confrontation with Taiwan, principal among them its determination to continue the nation's march toward prosperity.
China's "first priority is to develop," Jin said. " Taiwan is a very important and emotional issue for us, but we are willing to wait for reunification."
"When Mao (Zedong) was in power, he and others could rule China without worrying about Hong Kong or Taiwan because they had legitimacy and popular backing," said Wang Jianwei, chairman of the political science department at the University of Wisconsin. "Today, the Chinese government has a legitimacy problem because of the global failure of communism and the serious flaws in its market reforms" that have created widespread inequities in China.
"Today, nationalism is the party's only real credential," said Wang. "We're lucky they didn't pass a law demanding the immediate unification (of Taiwan with China). That's what China's nationalists really wanted and with the U.S. occupied in Iraq, the party is trying to please them as much as it can by looking tough."
The obvious danger of such brinkmanship is that calculations could go awry, Yang said.
"There are radicals in Taiwan, too," he said. "Right now, everyone's hoping the U.S. will keep (both sides) in check, but what happens if it can't?"