LEAD: U.S.-China defense talks at 'high end' of expectations

Asian Political News, July 17, 2000

BEIJING, July 12 Kyodo

(EDS: UPDATING WITH DEVELOPMENTS)

Bilateral talks between the defense chiefs of China and the United States are proceeding at the "high end" of U.S. officials' expectations, the White House's top Asian affairs adviser said Wednesday.

The talks are "toward the high end of what we were expecting," Kenneth Lieberthal, special assistant to the president for Asian affairs and senior director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council, told Kyodo News.

U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen met with Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian at the new Beijing headquarters of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Wednesday morning.

The two exchanged views on Taiwan and Washington's proposal to construct a national missile defense (NMD) system to protect North America from a nuclear missile attack.

Despite Lieberthal's upbeat assessment, the two sides clashed on the two issues.

The "Sino-U.S. relationship is facing opportunities and problems as well, and the most important and sensitive of the problems is the Taiwan issue," the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Chi as telling Cohen.

The U.S. side reemphasized its commitment to the "one-China principle," but stressed its commitment and obligations to Taiwan's security under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which mandates that the U.S. provide Taiwan with arms to defend itself.

Cohen said the U.S. is committed to seeing a peaceful resolution to the cross-strait standoff, which has been simmering since defeated Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan in 1949 in the wake of the Communist victory on the mainland.

U.S.-based China experts predict Cohen will stress to the Chinese that proposals in the U.S. Congress seeking to include Taiwan under the theater missile defense (TMD) umbrella stem from Washington's anxiety over the missile buildup.

"The secretary will want to, however delicately, indicate to the Chinese that if they're worried about TMD and the U.S. presence in East Asia, the way to reduce American anxieties would be to cease making missile deployments in the Taiwan Strait," David Lampton, director of China Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, told Kyodo News.

China has expressed its strident opposition to proposed U.S. deployments of TMD and NMD. Chi, who is also a PLA general, used the platform of bilateral talks to raise the issue again on Wednesday.

Xinhua reported Chi told Cohen that "the NMD system will have a negative impact on the efforts for global strategic equilibrium and stability, international arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation."

This is Cohen's first trip to Beijing since January 1998. He was forced to put off a planned trip in 1999 "due to reasons known to all," Chi said, alluding to Beijing's outrage at the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May of that year during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) campaign against Yugoslavia.

On Wednesday afternoon, Cohen met with Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao and PLA Chief of Staff Gen. Fu Quanyou.

"U.S.-China relations count as the most important bilateral relationship in the world. That is an outgrowth of the influence the two countries have in the world," Fu said.

On Thursday, Cohen is slated to address the Chinese National Defense University and also to meet with President Jiang Zemin.

On Friday, he is scheduled to meet with Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) Chairman Wang Daohan in Shanghai. ARATS, an unofficial organization, negotiates with Taiwan's Straits Exchange Federation (SEF).