 Redlining U.S./China relations?
UNITED NATIONS — A year ago, U.S./ China relations were in a political tailspin. The Chinese communists had forced down and seized a US Navy Reconnaissance aircraft and its crew which were flying in international airspace. President George W. Bush had just announced renewed military arms sales and defense commitments to Taiwan. The long simmering issue of human rights was percolating in the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Now a year later, the People's Republic of China is a full member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the 2008 Summer Olympics are slated to be held in Beijing, and the cause of human rights in China seems to have sputtered out like a wet firecracker. A year after the notorious April Fool's Day Incident near Hainan island, Sino/American relations are not only back on track, but hold a unique political chemistry. President Bush visited China twice in less than a year--first going to a Shanghai Economic Summit in the fall and recently visting Beijing, ironically on the 30th anniversary of the historic Nixon trip. Yet, at the same time, American political ties with the Republic of China on Taiwan are markedly improved from the drifting amibiguity of the Clinton era. America's closer ties with Taiwan and Japan for that matter, reflect the Bush Administration's political values and its recalibrated Far Eastern geopolitical strategy. Ironically September 11th was the catalyst which brought the People's Republic out of the political wilderness and into a renewed working relationship with Washington. In another sense China's diplomatic mandarins have skillfully used the spectre of September 11th as a way to shamelessly justify the crackdown on her own Islamic population. Beijing's claim that Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terror network is rooted among local Muslims in western China's isolated Xinjiang Province appears more fancy than fact. While the Beijing regime is crudely manipulating the war on terror as a way to suppress presumed Bin Laden gang "fundamentalists" in Xinjiang province, the measures taken actually have fueled radicalism and fostered an Islamic identity. Religious crackdowns and cultural pressures have created a sense of solidarity among Islamic peoples who plainly have more in common with fellow Moslems in places like Kirgizstan and Tajikistan, now independent former Soviet satraps, than with the comrades in Beijing. Interestingly, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, said some months ago that the campaign against terrorism " had given licence to the Chinese government to intensify a crackdown against its Muslim minority." Amnesty International in a recent report cites that tens of thousands of Uighur ethnics have been rounded up in the past decade; naturally the crackdown intensified after September 11th. The PRC has played the anti-terrorism card rather well; in other words Beijing's public harshness can be ascribed to "anti-fundamentalism" and thus earn a free pass in the court of public opinion. While crackdowns on the Buddhist Tibetans bring international rebuke, mostly from otherwise secular Californians who magically relate to the mountainous land of the clouds, there are few supporters for the forgotten Muslims in Xinjiang or "East Turkestan," as it was once known. The Economist of London argues, "In April last year, China launched a nationwide "strike hard" campaign against serious crime, which in Xinjiang also targeted the 'three evils' of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism...China's protrayal of Uighur separatism as part of a global terror problem is being seized upon by officials in some parts of Xinjiang to harass the Muslim population." So in a sense September 11th puts the People's Republic in a position to join with the global coalition to bring both political legitimacy and the unapologetic opportunity to deal with its visions of separatism from Xinjiang in the West to Taiwan in the East. While it has not brought the PRC any real strategic leverage over Taiwan, which the PRC claims as an "errant province," it allows Beijing to bully Washington every time the U.S. tilts closer to democratic Taiwan. Recently Taipei's Defense Minister Tang Yiau-ming visited Florida for a conference and was subjected to Beijing's usual rhetorical barrage. The implicit threat being that the U.S. is "interfering in the internal affairs of China," etc., etc. Xu Shiquan, President of the PRC's "Institute of Taiwan Studies" warned Hong Kong's Far Eastern Economic Review that if the US crosses the Chinese government's "red lines" with regard to Taiwan, "there will be serious consequences." He warned that the "Bush Administration knows where China's red lines are..diplomatically we've said what we need to say, we have made our position clear." In other words, don't get too formally cozy with Taipei. While it's reckless to cross the proverbial "red lines", the real problem remains that it's actually Beijing who has needlessly provoked the Taiwan issue and the US as well, by deliberately not forsaking the use of force to bring Taiwan "back to the Chinese motherland." The biggest "red line" which Beijing itself has never renounced crossing remains the very genuine and potent threat to use brute military force against a free and democratic Taiwan.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
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