China is huffing and puffing - China's relations with Taiwan - Editorial

National Review, Oct 9, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

We must suppose that the generals crowd around the power center in Peking with enticing war scenarios, as they dream of a military adventure against Taiwan. The Red Chinese, as one used to call them, have not fought a war since they took on Vietnam, a venture that ended in stalemate. That was twenty-odd years ago, and twenty- odd years before that, the Chinese army marched against the United States and South Korea, winning an ambiguous victory. That's a long time between wars, and the hunger for military action is sharp in the hearts of the Old Guard. They are men who stood by Mao Tse-tung during a period when he did more than any other man to damage China. And now the military sees the abandonment of Maoist ideals and, still more humiliating, an exactly corresponding rise in economic productivity. For that reason, among others, they clamor for the annexation of Taiwan.

The pressure is exerted through the central figure in China, Deng Xiaoping, but biological decomposition is far along, and Deng must lean heavily on Li Peng and others. And the whole team would appear to speak with one voice on the matter of Taiwan. It isn't that they plan tomorrow to invade, but they desire that the diplomatic community should acknowledge, so to speak, that is their right; they are dealing, after all, with a rogue province.

The temperature heated almost to explosive levels when the President of Taiwan, Mr. Lee Teng-hui, went to Ithaca for a Cornell reunion. The eyes of the world were on the event because only one year earlier, President Lee had been denied the right to stop over in Hawaii to refuel his airplane. The outcry was so sharp on the Western side that President Clinton lifted the ban in order to permit the Cornell visit.

How to handle China is a difficult question, but one shouldn't begin by picking a fight with Japan. Mr. Clinton pressed China in the cause of human rights while accomplishing nothing to further human rights, punctuating his Asia policy with threats to forbid the sale of Japanese Lexises. Peking withdrew its ambassador from Washington and imprisoned Harry Wu. The ambassador is coming back and Harry Wu has been released, but the pressure to bring this about had little to do with inventive U.S. diplomacy. It had to do with the congress of women in Peking, which China did not want to lose. After that, they covet the Olympics for 2004.

But Taiwan does not sleep over it all. For one thing, Mr. Lee is going to run for a second term as president in March 1996. This will be the first election in which all Taiwanese participate. A free election in China is itself a unique event, but the Taiwanese venture especially galls Peking, on the quite logical grounds that Taiwan is acting like an independent country. Which indeed it is doing, which indeed it is. The historical haze that sits over the Taiwan Straits, as if Taiwan in an accidental moment of recent geological history had become detached from the mainland to float 170 miles out to sea, has become a miasma. Although there is fear among many Taiwanese of a mainland invasion, early indications are that Mr. Lee will be re-elected. He hasn't come out for the independence of Taiwan, but he has in recent months stressed that Taiwan is not receiving the kind of attention owing to an entity which has the most favorable balance of trade in the world and ranks tenth in economic power.

And then Taiwan is not a military pushover. It has weapons, including American F-5s. Almost as a matter of definition, an island of 21 million people would fall, in any prolonged engagement, to an army recruited from one billion people. But as one Taiwanese recently remarked in private conversation, if it looked as if military conquest were actually being scheduled, Taiwan could pull the diplomatic card from its sleeve: Declare itself an independent country, conduct a plebiscite that would confirm this status, and then ask for recognition. This would not diminish the mainland's proprietary rhetoric, but all the axes of diplomacy would necessarily rotate in the direction of recognizing an independent state.

Always there is the possibility of a new regime in Peking after the death of Deng. But the prospect of one that is latitudinarian on the Taiwan question is beyond today's horizon.