A Chinese man reads a book near a poster of Chinese President Jiang Zemin making a speech below the communist hammer-and-sickle emblem at a book store in Beijing Monday, Sept. 2, 2002. China's Communist Party will be bigger than ever when it meets for a watershed congress in November, with 66 million members now on the rolls, official media reported Monday.(AP Photo/Greg Baker) 

By Dr. J. Bryan "Jerry" Collester
Scanews Political Analyst

If only to spite Bill Clinton, when George W. Bush came to the presidency, he was tough as nails on China. Straight away he offered Taiwan the largest arms package of surface ships, submarines and reconnaissance planes, since his father's eye-catching sale of F-16 fighter jets a decade earlier. Relations with China only got worse, of course. Then when 24 U.S. crew members of an EP3 reconnaissance plane were "detained" for 11 days by Chinese authorities after the hobbled plane made an emergency landing on Hainan Island, following a clash with a Chinese jet over international waters, relations reached a nadir.
Then came September 11 and the war on terrorism. Relations changed perceptibly, if not dramatically. Count the ways: 

1. In the far western Zinjiang province, the U.S. gave China a cautious green light to do battle with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which was guiding the Muslim and Uighur ethnic unrest. By August of 2002, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage would carry the administration's decision to put the group on the "enemies" list and justify China's heavy-handed repression of these fundamentalists. Thus Chinese repression has become an issue of terrorism, rather than civil rights, as Amnesty International characterizes it. 

2. Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao visited Washington in May, which was a somewhat subdued affair, but it offered China's next leader of the Chinese Communist Party a golden opportunity to meet with the full panoply of American political leaders including Pres. Bush, V. P. Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Members of Congress, even New York City's much celebrated mayor, Rudy Juliani 

3. Bush visited Beijing on February 21/22, 2002 and spoke without censors to Qinghua University students. In strong terms he encouraged them to follow the mandates of democracy, free expression and human rights for the individual, which many commentators considered a cheeky move on the president's part. And of major achievement on the 30-hour stopover, President Bush lauded President Jiang's "constructive leadership" in urging North Korean leader Kim Jong-il last fall to accept South Korea's offer to hold discussions and enlisted Jiang's further help in conveying to North Korea his sincere desire to resume contacts between Washington and Pyongyang. 

4. Douglas Paal was appointed director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) in April 2002 over the strong objections of the Blue Team on Capitol Hill and in the administration. The "Blue Team" is a quite influential congeries of strong Taiwan supporters lodged in the White House, Capitol Hill and numerous think tanks around Washington. The Blue Team lost, and Paal was confirmed and went to Taipei in July to represent the United States. 

5. China announced (Aug 02) rules to control the export of missile-related technologies, a step long demanded by the Washington, noted the New York Times. 

6. Finally Pres. Jiang Zemin has been invited for a gala October 25 meeting with Pres. Bush at the Crawford ranch. This may be Jiang's last major international foray as president before the November 8 meeting of the Party conclave at the seaside playground of party bigwigs at Beihaide, when the 3rd generation of communist leaders makes way for the 4th of Hu Jintao. 

One can draw three conclusions from this transition in Bush policy. The first is that making concert with the PRC to subdue terrorism, rather than basing a policy on pique at Bill Clinton, makes good sense. It brings added benefits like getting China to cease selling missile-related technologies.

Second, one could draw the conclusion that, like the Clinton administration, Bush has finally decided that Taiwan is not as important as he thought, and that protecting the small democracy of 23 million people came at too high a price. I do not think that is a correct conclusion!

Third, one could draw almost the opposite conclusion, that Bush's moves, while advancing important U.S. foreign policy objectives, also are meant, in fact, to shore up support for Taiwan and President Chen Shui-bian. That reasoning goes this way.

For 2 solid years during Chen's presidency, he has worked assiduously to court Mainland China in both word and deed. China, for its part, has attempted, and apparently almost succeeded, in freezing out the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Taiwan's president. Instead China has played to Taiwan's Kuomintang party (KMT) and its splinter offshoots making relations for Chen in the Legislative Yuan very difficult, despite the DPP's having become the largest parliamentary party in last December's elections, eclipsing the long-ruling KMT. 

President Chen, some say, has grown increasing desperate at his inability to deal with the Mainland, and it has had significant and adverse political relations at home. This, some say, led to his outburst in August at a meeting of the Taiwanese Chambers of Commerce in Asia in which he said "Taiwan should consider walking its own road" if the island cannot get any reciprocity from China. Subsequently, speaking to a meeting of the DPP's Central Executive Committee, Chen went further to say: "Taiwan is a sovereign country, and its name is the Republic of China." While the language is not new, in the context of suggesting a referendum on independence, the PRC, as well as KMT and other politicians in Taiwan reacted strongly and negatively. Chen apparently knew he had gone a stretch too far indicating his remarks might have been taken "out of context, oversimplified and might create misunderstanding." They certainly did!

For the Bush administration, however, this outburst confirmed the need to modify its stance from one of "containment" to one of engagement towards the PRC. Just as the U.S. was successful in getting compliance on selling missile related technologies, so there may be ways the U.S. can assist Taiwan by intervening with China. Clearly the adversarial approach has not worked with China. Perhaps engagement will benefit both the U.S. and Taiwan, and for the Bush administration such a policy may also help heal some of the breaches between the "hardliners" and moderates which has rent the Bush administration so mercilessly. Its certainly worth a try. Actually, it looks like a win-win situation.