Saturday, April 14, 2001

By Lisa Burgess, Washington bureau

WASHINGTON — If Washington approves a controversial package of arms sales to Taiwan later this month, China is likely to retaliate by flexing its growing military muscle.

China "won’t start a war over [the arms sales], but it’s almost impossible that [the government] wouldn’t use military force in some degree to show that they are [angry]," a Pentagon intelligence analyst said Thursday. "It’s just the way they are. Subtlety isn’t their thing."

Possibilities for a military response from China range from troop movements toward China’s coast to live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Straits, similar to those Beijing held right before the first Taiwan presidential election in March 1996, the analyst said. "We don’t know, but we’re bracing for the worst."

Beijing has a long history of using its armed forces to respond to internal and external developments not to its liking — and no single issue angers the Chinese government as much as U.S. support for Taiwan.

An island republic of 21.5 million people, Taiwan lies roughly 140 miles off China’s coast. Taiwan has historically been part of China, although for part of the first half of last century, the island was a Japanese colony. Taiwan returned to Chinese control in 1945 after Japan lost World War II. When Mao Zedong’s communists beat their nationalist foes four years later, the nationalists fled to Taiwan and, with U.S. support, set up a government-in-exile.

To this day, Beijing insists that Taiwan is a renegade province that must one day return to the motherland. Before trading with China, nations must first renounce official ties to Taiwan.

In 1978, the U.S. government agreed to not recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, so long as China doesn’t use military force to impose its will on the island republic.

But in 1979, the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which obligates Washington to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons.

U.S. administrations have responded to Taiwan’s subsequent requests for arms with varying degrees of warmth. The largest single U.S. weapons sale to Taiwan was in 1992, when President George Bush approved the sale of 150 F-16 aircraft to Taiwan.

During President Bill Clinton’s tenure, Washington agreed to sell Taiwan a long-range early warning radar system, advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles and Maverick air-to-surface missiles. But Taiwan received just one of its requested items, Maverick missiles, and even those were sold on the condition that they remain on U.S. soil unless Washington decides to release them in an emergency.

Now Taiwan is asking the United States for an arms deal that four state-of-the-art, $1.2 billion Arleigh-Burke class destroyers, which center around the technically advanced Aegis combat system that can track more than 100 targets at once, on land, air and sea. Taiwan also wants air-to-air missiles, air-to-sea missiles, and a long-range radar system dubbed Pave Paws.

Bush is scheduled to decide what weapons can be sold by April 25.

Beijing has warned repeatedly that any arms sales to Taiwan will irreparably damage U.S.-China ties.

Zhou Mingwei, vice minister of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said March 1 that Taiwan is "the main problem for U.S.-China relations," and said it was important for the two governments to "handle this matter right."

"From past experience, the most painful and destructive experience for the U.S.-China relationship is arms sales to Taiwan which we don’t want to see," Zhou said.

But the recent stand-off between the United States and China over the April 1 collision between a U.S. Navy spy aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet, and Beijing’s subsequent 11-day refusal to release the U.S. crew, have so angered Congress that the pending arms sale is almost guaranteed.

Rep. Tom Lantos from California, a top Democrat on the House International Relations Committee who supports fully granting Taiwan’s weapons wish list, said Thursday that the mood on the Hill towards China was definitively hawkish.

"The people who were on the fence with respect to arms sales to Taiwan are showing movement in our direction," Lantos told The Associated Press. "Congressional sentiment has shifted, and American public opinion has shifted."

The Chinese government is notoriously touchy about any U.S. move that could indicate U.S. support for an independent Taiwan, no matter how insignificant. For example, in the summer of 1995, when the Clinton administration issued a visa allowing Taiwan’s President Lee Teng-hui to visit his alma mater, Cornell University, China responded by firing six scudlike missiles into target areas roughly 80 miles off the coast of Taiwan.

The situation got even more tense in 1996, the first year that Taiwan was to hold presidential and national legislative elections. Beijing proclaimed it would use force if necessary to prevent Taiwan from formally declaring independence, as some presidential candidates were advocating.

In the days before the March 23 elections, China started firing unarmed missiles and holding live-fire exercises in the international waters near Taiwan in an attempt to intimidate Taiwanese voters.

The United States responded by sending a battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz to join the aircraft carrier Independence and its battle group just outside the international waters of the Taiwan Strait, which separates China from the self-governing island.

Now China appears to be preparing its military for another showdown over Taiwan. Earlier this year, China formally announced the launch of the largest military modernization program in modern history, and Beijing’s efforts include a significant buildup of missiles on the Taiwan Strait.

In late March, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. Dennis Blair, told a Senate panel that "the missile buildup on the Chinese side is the part that’s most threatening" to stability in the region.

Taiwan is not the only possible target of China’s steady build-up of short-range ballistic missiles opposite Taiwan, which now number around 250 to 300, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.

"China’s military build-up is also aimed at deterring U.S. intervention in support of Taiwan," CIA director George Tenet told a Senate committee Feb. 29.

Tenet called Taiwan "the toughest issue" facing China-U.S. relations.

Click here for a timeline of key events in U.S.-China-Taiwan relations

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