Taiwan: What China Really Wants.

Mr. Munro is co-author of The Coming Conflict with China and director of Asian studies at the Center for Security Studies in Washington. He worked for many years as a journalist in Asia.

The world in general, and the United States in particular, badly misunderstands China's Taiwan policy. We have an urgent need to see it for what it is.

Judged solely by official pronouncements from Beijing, that policy isn't a policy at all, but Chinese holy writ-an emotional, nationalistic position that is not open to compromise. "It remains the sacred mission and lofty goal of the entire Chinese people to achieve reunification of the motherland," declared President Jiang Zemin in 1995. This is his most important statement about Taiwan.

To listen to Jiang and many, many other Chinese officials, the Taiwan issue transcends logic and reason. China will pay any price-even sacrifice economic development-to achieve reunification or prevent the permanent division of the nation. China's stance on Taiwan, they say, doesn't reflect economic or military calculation. It is non-negotiable, or, as PRC deputy prime minister Qian Qichen recently put it, without "room for maneuver." The implicit but clear message for both Americans and Taiwanese? Don't bother resisting Beijing's efforts to conquer Taiwan, because it will never back down.

As for America's China hands, most have accepted Beijing's overheated rhetoric as an accurate reflection of Chinese policy-which shows how successful Beijing's propaganda campaign has been. In truth, China's Taiwan policy isn't anywhere near as emotional and sentimental, let alone irrational, as the Chinese themselves always try to suggest. Indeed, Beijing's dramatic statements on Taiwan, aimed primarily at the American audience, are designed in part to hide the fact that China's policy is actually quite rational and calculated. The reality is that Beijing's position on Taiwan is the product of a careful weighing of China's strategic interests.

In the eyes of PRC leaders, Taiwan is first and foremost a strategic target that must soon be subjugated if China is to realize its goal of becoming Asia's dominant and unchallenged power. But the Clinton administration, unfortunately, with its persistent obtuseness, has failed to recognize China's policy as a clear challenge to the vital strategic interests of the United States. By progressively distancing itself from Taipei, the administration has only encouraged Beijing to take an increasingly shrill and aggressive stance on the Taiwan issue.

'An Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier'

Even though this issue has been bathed in fervent sloganeering from the beginning, Beijing's Taiwan policy has always had a rational, strategic core. Until the 1970s, the Chinese leadership took seriously General MacArthur's famous description of Taiwan as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier" off the coast of China. With some justification: As long as Chiang Kai-shek was alive, or there was an American military presence on the island, Beijing could view Taiwan as at least a potential threat to China's security.

By the late 1970s, however, Beijing clearly no longer worried about Taiwan as a potential military threat. Nor did it view the isla nd as a military target. Despite the government's regular, pro forma statements that it reserved the right to use military force to reunify Taiwan and the mainland, it engaged in no preparations for large-scale military action. As Michael Swaine, an expert on the Chinese military, observes, "the Nanjing Military Region, which is the one facing Taiwan, was essentially demilitarized for most of the 1980s. The Chinese didn't place a lot of assets there. They didn't train much in that area either." The de facto Sino-American alliance against the Soviets was one reason. China's low-key stance on Taiwan during this period can also be attributed to the Reagan administration's quiet but firm insistence after 1982 that it wouldn't make any further concessions on the Taiwan issue.

Downplaying the military option, China's paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, marshaled widespread support in the 1980s for a patient, long-term policy of wooing Taiwan by offering special terms to the island's business community for trade and investment. His goal was to encourage economic interdependence and foster a pro-mainland faction in Taiwan-in effect a potential fifth column-with an eye toward eventual political integration. By 1990, that policy seemed to be working. Two-way trade between the island and the mainland had increased to $4 billion, up from $80 million in 1979. Taiwanese companies had invested in an estimated 2,000 enterprises in China, a figure that would continue to climb.

Taiwan faded not only as a military issue, but also as an emotionally charged, nationalist one. The old-fashioned and ideologically colored nationalism of the civil-war generation, for whom Taiwan's rulers had for decades been the enemy, was dying out, along with that generation.

While China's leaders insist that all Chinese fervently support reunification with Taiwan, there is abundant evidence that the Chinese public has long been apathetic about the issue. The results of an officially sanctioned 1998 poll indicate that Taiwan is a minor concern in the public consciousness. It found that 68 percent of urban dwellers identify Taiwan as the number-one issue hindering the improvement of U.S.-China relations. No surprise there, given that this assertion is regularly made by the Chinese leadership and repeated in the controlled media. What's noteworthy is the response to the follow-up question. Asked if they wanted Washington to end support for Taiwan, only 36 percent answered positively-which strongly suggests that most Chinese are quite comfortable with the status quo as it concerns Taiwan.

Yet the Taiwan issue is now close to the explosion point-and has been for several years. By 1994, China's military buildup had been refocused on Taiwan-in the medium term to develop the capability to invade the island, in the short term to modernize a few military elements so as to blockade Taiwan and attack it with missiles. Another aim was to raise substantially the potential cost to the United States of intervening in a military conflict to assist Taiwan. In 1995, Beijing ordered military exercises, explicitly aimed at intimidating Taiwan, that culminated in the 1996 firing of missiles into the island's air and sea lanes-in effect, a brief blockade. Now, of course, China is once again threatening to take military action against Taiwan.

For most American China-watchers, there is a single, simple explanation for Beijing's going in one decade from treating Taiwan as a secondary, long-term issue to suggesting bellicosely that it is on the verge of going to war over the island. That explanation is the rapid and dramatic democratization of Taiwan's politics under the leadership of Lee Teng-hui. Democratization quickly brought to a dignified end the political domination of Taiwan by an aging, mainland-born minority whose members strongly supported the goal of reunification, distant or not. Instead, Taiwan's newly democratic politics created a political consensus that now includes more than 90 percent of the population. That's the approximate portion of Taiwanese voters who oppose the island's reunification with the mainland anytime in the foreseeable future. Within that consensus are supporters of eventual reunification (in the distant future, when China is both democratic and much more developed economically) and dreamers who favor a truly independent republic. At its core, the consensus strongly supports the indefinite continuation of Taiwan's autonomous status.

Clearly, Taiwan's new, democratically driven assertiveness has been a cause of increased tensions with China. But it is a fundamental error to conclude that this explains sufficiently why China and Taiwan have twice gone to the brink of major military hostilities in just a few years. Put another way, we are witnessing much more than a simple process of Taiwan acting and China reacting.

The Shift

In fact, the Taiwan issue would not be incendiary today if there hadn't been a momentous shift in Chinese Grand Strategy in the first half of the 1990s. Just as Taiwan was reaching a democratic consensus in favor of continued autonomy, the post-Deng generation of younger and more ambitious political and military leaders in China was adopting a new grand strategy. The goal of that strategy: to dominate Asia as every Chinese dynasty at the height of its power had done throughout history. Now as in the past, "dominate" for the Chinese usually didn't mean invade: China's size, wealth, and power were usually enough to intimidate its neighbors into subservience.

Suddenly, the Beijing regime saw Taiwan's autonomy-its de facto independence, so to speak-in a new and adversarial light: as a barrier preventing China from achieving its strategic ambitions. The new generation of political and military leaders had concluded by 1994 that, in order to achieve the goal of dominating Asia, it must first seize control of Taiwan.

The seeds of the new strategy can be found in 1989-1991, when the Soviet empire collapsed. Practically overnight, China found itself effectively unopposed on the land mass of continental East Asia. The Soviet armed forces no longer constituted a significant conventional threat on China's northern borders. These forces began withdrawing from Mongolia and from the newly independent Central Asian republics, all of which quickly became eager to reach modi vivendi with China. What was left of the Soviet military on China's border with Russia itself was a shadow of its former self. The Soviet collapse also forced Vietnam and India to abandon their adversarial stances toward China-stances they had been able to afford only with Soviet support.

The breakup of the Soviet Union and its bloc amounted to a lucky strategic windfall for China. Although it had played only a marginal role in that breakup, China became its chief beneficiary. Even without a military buildup, China's relative power in Asia and the world would have soared. With the buildup that began in 1989, and continues to this day, the shift in power has become even more pronounced.

During the same period, China's economy came roaring back to life. Its all-out boom had almost every CEO in the Western world salivating. This, too, had huge implications for China's relative power in the world, as those CEOs were all urging their governments to curry favor with a regime that had the power to include or exclude their corporations from China.

These were the heady economic and military circumstances in which the Beijing leadership consciously adopted the goal of becoming the dominant and undisputed power in all of East Asia.

The evidence that the Chinese leadership embraced this goal is overwhelming. Publicly, the Beijing regime, whose foreign-policy slogan is "We shall never seek hegemony," adamantly denies its true ambition. Yet the regime makes clear that it seeks to dominate Asia by reiterating a set of specific strategic goals that amount to the same thing. Those goals are: to control Taiwan and the South China Sea; to ensure the permanent strategic subservience of Japan; and to end America's military presence in Asia and its military links with Japan and other Asian democracies on China's periphery. If China were to achieve these announced goals, its hegemony over Asia would be both unquestioned and unchallenged.

If this reality isn't fully appreciated by non-Asian strategic thinkers, it is certainly appreciated in the region. Only when China controls Taiwan, or, more precisely, the island's air and sea space, can Beijing realistically pursue its more ambitious goals. Once China has Taiwan in its grasp, it will sit astride Japan's southern sea lanes, a lifeline connecting Japan to its petroleum supply as well as to several key markets. China would also effectively control all other nations' access from the east to the South China Sea, the crucial link between the Pacific and Indian oceans. The security of the Philippines would be immediately and acutely threatened, and other Southeast Asian nations would find themselves

More Vulnerable to Chinese Coercion

After late 1993 and early 1994, when the Chinese leadership adopted its new strategic goals, the shift in Beijing's policy towards Taiwan was dramatic. By mid 1994, the People's Liberation Army had become vocal about the need to plan for military operations against Taiwan no later than 1996. A Central Military Commission document dated 10 July 1994 took a particularly aggressive stance on the need for preparing to take military action.

Shortly thereafter, in September 1994, the PLA Navy conducted its first large-scale exercise in the East China Sea in many years. This exercise was later judged by analysts at the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence "the first of a series of rehearsals of a contingency scenario for the invasion of Taiwan." It was also a planned precursor to the much larger, and much more publicized, exercises that began in the summer of 1995 and ended in the Taiwan Strait crisis of March 1996. The timing of the September 1994 exercise suggests that the PLA was developing new war plans for Taiwan no later than early 1994.

In December 1994, the Chinese military establishment held what amounted to a closed-door "Invade Taiwan!" pep rally. Sponsored by the Ministry of National Defense and the PLA's General Staff Headquarters, the gathering was characterized by officials as a "report session on strategic policy on Taiwan." The main themes of the four-day meeting were that it would be necessary to use military force to achieve reunification and that "it will be better to resolve the issue of Taiwan earlier than doing it later. This will help develop the entire country and stabilize Asia and the whole world." It was also stated that "the most appropriate time" to attack Taiwan was between 2000 and 2005.

The timing of these events is significant. They all preceded-by many months-the announcement of Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui's visit to Cornell University in New York, the event that most U.S. Sinologists identify as the turning point in China's Taiwan policy. Obviously, the Chinese leadership, particularly Chinese military leaders, seized on this event as an excuse to bare their real intentions towards Taiwan.

These developments put the supporters of Deng Xiaoping's gradualist strategy towards Taiwan on the defensive. Not coincidentally, Deng had slipped into physical and political decline. Although the regime never completely junked Deng's moderate, economically oriented approach to the Taiwan issue, Beijing has relegated it since 1994 to a distinctly secondary place in its Taiwan strategy.

The strategic shift was manifested not only in military doctrine and military exercises; there was also a significant shift in emphasis in several articles about Taiwan appearing in official Chinese journals. These articles all emphasized what a great strategic asset Taiwan would be if it were under Beijing's control.

The intellectual foundation for this new view of Taiwan had been laid in the 1980s by Liu Huaqing, when he was commander-in-chief of the PRC navy. Admiral Liu, who later became a Politburo member and vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission, then asserted that "the Chinese navy should exert effective control of the seas within the first island chain." By Liu's account, the first island chain comprises the Aleutians, the Kuriles, Japan (including the Ryukyus), Taiwan, the Philippines, and most of Indonesia.

A 1995 article in The Navy articulated China's strategic ambitions vis-a-vis Taiwan: "If [China] wants to prosper, it has to advance into the Pacific in which lies China's future. Taiwan, facing the Pacific in the east, is the only unobstructed exit for China to move into the ocean. If this gateway is opened for China, then it becomes much easier for China to maneuver in the West Pacific."

A 1996 article in another important PRC journal envisioned the "recovery" of Taiwan as giving China "a valuable military base." It saw, correctly, that breaching the chain of island democracies on China's eastern periphery would give China a huge strategic advantage:

Taiwan is 900 nautical miles south of the outlet of the Yalu River, 800 nautical miles north of the Nansha Islands [in the South China Sea]. Its superior natural geographic position gives Taiwan Island a great [military] campaign and strategic value. A modern, Taiwan-based naval force could carry out a fully-mobilized attack throughout Chinese territorial waters within two days. Taiwan itself is a valuable military base to the mainland coastal region and to the entire Southeast Asian region as well . . .

Taiwan is also the crucial point in the first chain of islands. . . . Taiwan is located at the point where these two important strategic areas [Northeast and Southeast Asia] meet-a pivotal point. In addition, heading east of Taiwan, crossing 1,200 nautical miles, one can advance on the second chain of islands. Simply from a military perspective, by strongly occupying Taiwan, one can show force in three areas. One could move at will across the length and breadth of the wide western Pacific Ocean, engaging in widespread mobile combat. This truly would be the wondrous effect of the "central location" in naval warfare. . . . Taiwan is the most convenient place from which China can venture forth into distant seas.

But perhaps the clearest evidence of Beijing's new strategic ambitions appeared in a March 1996 article published by Taiwan Affairs, still another PRC journal. The title alone-"Taiwan's Geostrategic Value Makes Reunification Essential"-says it all. After a couple of introductory sentences reiterating the usual argument that Taiwan has always been part of China, Lu Junyuan makes it plain that China's real interest in the island is as a strategically valuable piece of real estate. He summarizes his description of Taiwan's geographic location with the observation: "We can thus see that Taiwan occupies a unique and advantageous spot on the geostrategic map."

The American Response All of this raises a momentous question: What are the implications for U.S. policy towards Taiwan?

First, we can see from the evidence just reviewed that the Clinton administration's current Taiwan policy is recklessly naive. It is based on the assumption that, if pressured enough, Taiwan will make concessions sufficient to satisfy Beijing, short of its being swallowed up by the mainland. In recent years, U.S. officials and emissaries have been pressing Taipei to negotiate with Beijing. The administration escalated its pressure in March 1999, when it began to push the Taiwanese to reach "interim agreements" with China. The administration's dangerously flawed reasoning is that China desires merely symbolic or legalistic concessions, suitable for assuaging nationalistic passions. Then, lo and behold, life in Taiwan could go on largely as before, and stability would reign in the Taiwan Strait.

But Beijing has made it clear that it will not be thus satisfied. It will never be placated by any interim agreement that doesn't give it military control over the island. It would use any interim agreement as a new wedge with which to put pressure on Taiwan to capitulate.

Yet the Clinton administration's naivete goes even further. The president and his top officials refuse to recognize that there is a fundamental strategic conflict of interest between China and the United States. China wants to dominate Asia, while the United States is still committed, as it has been for more than a century, to maintaining a balance of power in Asia and preventing any single power from dominating all of the region.

So how do administration officials explain the constant friction and intermittent crises that characterize U.S.-China relations? Their leading culprit is Taiwan. They often privately say that if only this major "irritant" were somehow to go away, U.S.-China relations would dramatically and permanently improve. So when Admiral Dennis Blair, the U.S. Pacific commander, recently referred to Taiwan as the "turd in the punchbowl" of U.S.-China relations, he was only repeating a sentiment widespread in the administration.

But such sentiments amount to collective self-delusion. In truth, any interim agreement between China and Taiwan would set the stage for renewed conflict between the two, and the United States would soon find itself in the middle again. Likewise, a real "end" to the Taiwan issue-that is, a Chinese conquest of the island-would set the stage for a dangerous showdown in Asia between the United States and China.

So, we may ask, Lenin-style, what is to be done?

First, learn from China. The Chinese are right in attaching enormous strategic importance to Taiwan. The United States has no military forces based in Taiwan, nor does it need them, as long as the island's own robust forces, equipped largely by the United States, continue to control its territory. The American military should remain the back-up force-ready to intervene in Taiwan's behalf if Taiwan is unable to counter a Chinese military offensive.

Second, reduce "strategic ambiguity." For many years, this policy towards prospective Chinese military action against Taiwan served us well. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 was the foundation of strategic ambiguity, committing the U.S. to supply Taiwan with adequate defensive weapons and declaring that the U.S. would view any Chinese military action against Taiwan with "grave concern." At the same time, the Act stopped short of extending an unconditional security guarantee to Taiwan, an omission that served as a warning to independence forces in Taiwan that the United States was not giving them carte blanche to declare independence and needlessly provoke China. That was the heart of "strategic ambiguity": Neither China nor Taiwan could be certain that the United States would intervene if China launched a military offensive.

Sadly, the Clinton administration itself has undermined strategic ambiguity by taking an increasingly unfriendly posture towards Taiwan at exactly the same time that China has escalated its threats and built up its military capabilities. The administration's stance has only encouraged Beijing to take a more aggressive stance towards Taiwan.

Washington should make it clear that further threats and military actions by China will result in the progressive reduction of America's strategic ambiguity. In short, more Chinese threats against Taiwan would only lead Washington to strengthen its commitment to the island. Beijing should be made to understand that the United States will intervene militarily in Taiwan's behalf should China attack. The only exception might be in the event of a formal and explicit declaration of independence by Taiwan and the establishment of a Republic of Taiwan-steps that have already been ruled out by all the major parties on the island as too provocative.

A firmer U.S. position on Taiwan would reverberate among all of America's friends in the region. Our military presence there has become dangerously tenuous during the past few years-despite our inarguable military superiority. Our allies have become increasingly distrustful of our commitment to staying in Asia and maintaining a balance of power. A shoring up of our commitment to Taiwan would send them a new and reassuring message.

High Stakes

We have looked at Taiwan as a purely military or strategic issue. We have left to the very end the main argument raised in favor of U.S. support for Taiwan: The United States has a moral commitment to Taiwan that overshadows any strategic interest. Taiwan is a democracy, indeed a democracy as full-fledged as the United States. It is an old friend of ours. Its people overwhelmingly oppose putting their fate in the hands of Beijing, and they are ready to fight to prevent that from happening. If the United States failed to come to Taiwan's aid, it would forever diminish itself.

And this brings us full circle-to the strategic imperative. For if the United States were to abandon an old and democratic friend to Chinese aggression, U.S. credibility in Asia would collapse. Countries ranging from Japan to the Philippines to Singapore would be forced to conclude that they cannot count on America in the future. These and other nations would have no choice but to stampede to Beijing, to reach an accommodation. And the United States would have no choice but to beat a hasty retreat from Asia, leaving it to a hostile and hegemonic China. And that, surely, would be a disaster.