US-Taiwan-China relationship back in balance

[October 08, 2008]  TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwan's once-strained relations with the United States are back on track after the Bush administration approved a long-delayed $6.5 billion package of weapons to help the island defend itself against China.

Though China reacted angrily, the deal is also a sign that the sometimes shaky three-way relationship between China, Taiwan and the U.S. is moving back into balance.

China had profited from a rupture in U.S.-Taiwan military relations, but with the announcement of the deal, that rupture has now been repaired.

"The final decision of the U.S. executive branch reflected a prudent and rational decision," said Alexander Huang, a China policy expert at Tamkang University in Taipei. "It should be understood by Beijing and welcomed by Taipei."

The decision, announced late last week, is good news for Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, who wants to maintain close ties with Washington while lessening tensions with the communist mainland, from which Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949.

Ma took power in May, after Taiwan's electorate decided it had had enough of the China-averse policies of former President Chen Shui-bian and his pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.

Those policies threatened to upset the balance that has kept the peace over the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait since Washington shifted its recognition in 1979 from Taipei to Beijing as the legitimate government of China.

Chen incensed Beijing, which still views Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to attack if the island ever moves to make the break permanent.

He also angered Washington, Taiwan's most important foreign partner. While the U.S. is legally committed to help defend Taiwan, it also wants good relations with China, which purchases huge amounts of American debt and is an important partner in efforts to shut down North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Amid unusually harsh criticism of Chen's pro-independence brinksmanship last year, the U.S. imposed an informal freeze on Taiwan arms deals -- a move that delighted Beijing.

Washington never formally acknowledged the freeze and Douglas Pall, the former senior U.S. representative in Taiwan, told a Chinese newspaper, the Global Times, in a recent interview that the U.S. was merely holding off to avoid riling China during the Olympic Games.

Ma came into the presidency with an agenda of seeking better relations with China through increased trade and a formal renunciation of the independence option. Now, with last week's announcement, he can quiet criticisms from the Democratic Progressive Party and its pro-independence allies that he has not done enough to provide protection for Taiwan.

Included in the American arms package are Patriot III missiles, Apache helicopters, parts for F-16 jet fighters and submarine-launched Harpoon missiles.

Conspicuously missing, however, is a feasibility study for U.S.-made diesel submarines, which Taiwan wants, but which some in the United States have criticized for their presumably offensive nature.

This appears to have been a deliberate decision by Washington to try to mitigate Chinese anger over the planned arms sale.

Still China has strongly denounced the deal, signaling its displeasure by abruptly canceling a series of high level military and diplomatic contacts with the United States.

The U.S. move "has contaminated the sound atmosphere for our military relations and gravely jeopardized China's national security," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in Beijing Tuesday.

But such pronouncements are almost a pro forma reaction, made whenever the U.S. sells weapons to Taiwan.

Taiwan expert Bruce Jacobs of Australia's Monash University said that if China is upset over the arms deal, it only has itself to blame, because of its deployment of more than 1,000 missiles aimed at Taiwan and its recent purchases of sophisticated weapons from Russia and other foreign suppliers.

"Taiwan needs these U.S. arms because China is threatening it," he said.

Huang says he supports Ma's policy of trying to reduce tensions with Beijing, insisting that it represents a marked improvement over Chen's independence brinksmanship.

However, he acknowledges that recent pitfalls in the program -- lower than expected Chinese tourist arrivals in Taiwan for example -- could reduce support.

Most Taiwanese are still in favor of Ma's program, though recent concerns over tainted Chinese milk-product shipments to the island have raised new questions about how far the relationship should go.

Ma publicly chided Beijing for failing to prevent the products from being treated with the industrial chemical melamine, after popular outrage forced government officials to remove more than 100 Chinese-made milk products from store shelves around Taiwan.

[Associated Press; By PETER ENAV]

Associated Press writer Henry Sanderson in Beijing contributed to this report.

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