Don't bet against China going to war over Taiwan

Tom Plate The Straits Times Asia News Network Singapore

It's unimaginable that China would ever go to war against Taiwan, right?

Until recently, that's what I thought.

Why would the government of China alter its strategic course, veer away from its sane game plan of prioritizing economic development for 1.3 billion people and launch some kind of military attack on Taiwan, a major investor on the mainland and the democratic darling of the West?

The international implications for Beijing would be staggering. It would shock an onlooking world every bit as much as last century's horrific Cultural Revolution, not to mention the Tiananmen crackdown.

China again would become, for some years at least, a pariah on the international stage. Die-hard anti-communist Republicans in the U.S. would say "I told you so"; anti-free trade Democrats now blaming China for aggravating U.S. joblessness would say "there the Bad Guys go again". Even the worshipful French would have to duck for political cover. Thus China, assuming the success of invasion, would gain Taiwan -- but lose the world.

And so I used to laugh when learned scholars such as University of California at Los Angeles' Richard Baum would refuse to rule out the possibility of such military action. How could they be so oblivious to the primacy of economics over politics in our globalised world?

But now I have come to accept the Baum possibility: That significant forces inside China marching to a drumbeat different from that of rational economists may wind up calling the shots over Taiwan, where the pro-independence President Chen Shui-bian has apparently been re-elected (subject to the recount).

Utterly fantastic? Well, let's have a chat with the likable and thoughtful Ma Lik, one of Hong Kong's 36 representatives in the National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing who took over as chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong in the wake of recent local elections that were disastrous for his pro-Beijing party.

Some would call Ma a communist, except that you have to wonder if there are any communists anymore, economically speaking, in Beijing. In reality, Ma swims comfortably in the pragmatic school of China's new leader Hu Jintao, whose policy approach takes more leaves from The Wall Street Journal playbook than from The Little Red Book.

This quiet-spoken gentleman knows Beijing well, probably spends more time there than almost anyone from Hong Kong, attends plenary NPC meetings and tells me matter-of-factly that China's preparations for war, or at least for an air and sea embargo, against Chen's Taiwan are far more developed than you may think.

"I don't agree with you that (military action) is unlikely," said Ma. "Given Chen Shui-bian, it is now actually more likely."

Chen, who represents the Democratic People's Party in Taiwan that toys with the notion of formal independence and often taunts the mainland about it, was not exactly Beijing's favorite in the tumultuous March 20 election.

In Beijing's eyes, Taiwan is no different from Hong Kong, a legal part of greater China. But many in Taiwan do not wish to emulate Hong Kong's legally subservient status, in theory or in practice; indeed, roughly half of them voted for Chen, who increased his popular vote by 25 percent from the last election.

Ma says Beijing's position is that it is not theoretically opposed to electoral democracy in Taiwan and Hong Kong, so long as the outcomes do not challenge Beijing's bottom-line sovereignty. The philosophy of the late Deng Xiaoping of "one country, two systems" was intended in part to finesse the problem of the political-cultural chasm between Hong Kong (market-driven, entrepreneurial) and the mainland (then totally state-driven and collectivist), not detract from Beijing's political sovereignty. This means that Hong Kong is not the ultimate boss of its own political body; China is.

For Beijing, therefore, the outcome of the disputed Taiwan election has obvious implications for the Hong Kong that Ma loves. What if his people want to elect a Hong Kong-style Chen Shui-bian, defiant of Beijing? That's why Ma can readily conjure up an invasion scenario to remove Chen and keep Taiwan from declaring independence, and stop the rise of a Chen clone in Hong Kong.

Call it preemptive or preventive war (some other power used that justification recently). "This is what the People's Liberation Army (the Chinese military) wants to do about Taiwan," he tells me candidly.

China fears that Chen is the lead domino in the dissolution of mother China. Thus, the PLA wants to "Saddamise" it. Under these circumstances, and with such historic stakes, it's easy to imagine why China would exercise the military option against Taiwan.