Implications of China-Taiwan crisis

Implications of China-Taiwan crisis

Although China's current tension with Taiwan is a domestic affair, it will have an impact on the region, writes Dewi Fortuna Anwar.

JAKARTA (JP): The heightening tension between China and Taiwan clearly demonstrates one of the reasons why we do not talk about the peace dividend in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Besides the China-Taiwan conflict there are still a host of other unresolved bilateral and territorial issues which continue to hamper the development of regional peace and stability in the wider Asia Pacific region.

In any discussion about Southeast Asian security China always looms large. China's sheer size alone is sufficient to put its much smaller neighbors to the south on guard. But added to China's overwhelming size is the fact that in the past five decades relations between Southeast Asia and China have been mostly problematic.

During the Cold War most of the non-communist countries in Southeast Asia saw communist China as a major threat to their security. A number of these countries even went so far as to join military alliances with the United States and other Western powers in an effort to contain communism in general, and Chinese communism in particular.

Although Indonesia under president Sukarno developed very close ties with China, Jakarta froze its diplomatic relations with Beijing after the New Order government came to power. It accused China of being involved in the abortive communist coup of 1965. Indonesia, however, never took part in an anti-China alliance. Even Vietnam's earlier close relations with China soured after Hanoi sided with Moscow in the Sino-Soviet conflict, culminating in a border war between the two countries in 1979.

In view of these formerly difficult relations between most of Southeast Asia and China, a special effort is clearly needed by both sides to remove the suspicions and to build trust. The ending of the Cold War has provided challenges as well as creating opportunities in moving in this direction. While in other parts of the world defense spending has suffered major cuts, the reverse has been observed in the Asia Pacific region.

Although the reasons are varied, there is no denying the fact that most countries in the Asia Pacific region have increased their military spending and are engaged in the modernization of their defense systems.

For the bigger countries the demise of the bi-polar security structure has clearly provided an opportunity to play a much bigger role in regional affairs than ever before. For these countries, therefore, the refurbishing of their defense systems is clearly not only intended for deterrence purposes but also as power projection. In such a situation smaller countries have also been pushed towards spending more money on arms to enhance their defense capability.

Fortunately, most of the countries in the Asia Pacific region agree on the importance of multilateral security dialogs. The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) was established in 1994 precisely to ensure that the new regional challenges do not turn into threats.

All of the ASEAN countries regard having cordial relations with China as essential for regional stability. China's willingness to take part in multilateral security dialogs have created a pool of goodwill among the ASEAN countries toward Beijing. The ARF is an important, and so far the only Asia Pacific-wide, forum for confidence building and preventive diplomacy. China's participation in the Indonesian-sponsored Workshops on the South China Sea has also been welcomed as an indication of Beijing's desire to resolve territorial disputes peacefully.

It is, therefore, with mounting alarm that one witnesses the escalating conflict across the Taiwan strait. Old suspicions and fears of China's regional ambitions and predilections for using force to settle conflicts unavoidably come again to the surface. China's occupation of Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands, an atoll claimed by the Philippines, in February 1995 had already shaken some of the regional confidence in China. After that incident China succeeded in winning ASEAN's favor again by showing a conciliatory approach at the ARF meeting in Brunei in July 1995. China's very real current threat to Taiwan is a purely internal matter which should not affect other countries in the region. But other countries in the region cannot but be affected by China's behavior and its possible implications for future regional peace and stability.

One of the most worrying aspects of the present Taiwan crisis is the absolute contempt shown by Beijing towards international opinion. Another cause for concern is the fact that complex interdependence and all manner of economic and technological linkages which now exist between Taiwan and the mainland are not sufficient to "tame" China. Can one, therefore, really expect China to behave with restraint and circumspection in dealing with other countries if it feels that its vital interests are at stake?

We clearly hope that the present crisis across the Taiwan Strait will pass without causing further harm. But it will take more time and effort for China to win back the trust of the ASEAN countries. While ASEAN continues to regard engaging China as an important security strategy, it can be expected that the ASEAN countries will now pay even more attention to their conventional defense capability. Furthermore, the demonstration of China's military prowess and its willingness to fight may push the members of ASEAN towards closer intra-ASEAN military cooperation. It is not inconceivable that the presence of a clear external threat would persuade the ASEAN countries to move away from bilateral military relations into a more cohesive multilateral structure.

The writer is a senior researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.