Will Southeast Asia take sides?

Michael Richardson The Straits Times Asia News Network Singapore

China has lately been ratcheting up the pressure on Taiwan while telling Singapore and other Asia-Pacific countries in unambiguous terms that it expects them to stick to its interpretation of the one-China policy.

Beijing's assertiveness is a reminder that China's rise brings challenges as well as benefits. In the past few years, it has been mainly the benefits that have been felt throughout the western Pacific.

China's supercharged economic expansion has stimulated trade, investment and tourist flows that have boosted growth and created jobs -- from Japan and South Korea to Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. China, it seemed, had been tied into a web of regional cooperation and order. When President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao took over the leadership of the Communist Party and government in 2002 and last year, they espoused a foreign policy with China's "peaceful rise" as its centrepiece.

The economic and diplomatic benefits for the region from the new China were dazzling. They far outshone the darker side of China's emergence as a power with increasing political and military clout, as well as economic strength. But the heightened tensions over Taiwan are starting to bring regional views of China back into more realistic perspective.

Beijing's muscle-flexing is a reminder that China is an irredentist power set on recovering territory it says was unjustly taken when it was weak and subjugated by colonizers, among them Western nations and Japan. These often repeated territorial claims by Beijing conflict with the rival claims of many of China's neighbors, from Japan to Southeast Asia. The Chinese claims encompass not just Taiwan but islands and vast areas of surrounding waters and seabed in the East and South China Seas. They also stretch to Himalayan territory claimed by India.

Beijing insists that China can be united and whole only with Taiwan included. Beijing's claims to sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea (disputed with Japan) and the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea (disputed with Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei) are equally uncompromising.

While President Hu and Premier Wen have taken over the party and state leadership, former president Jiang Zemin has remained the military boss. It appeared that Hu and Wen wanted to give top priority to resolving China's economic and social problems, not military modernization. To do so, they needed a friendly regional environment and a stable relationship with Taiwan.

Beijing insists that Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian and others on the island who seek independence are to blame for the current crisis. However, some foreign analysts say that a power struggle between the Hu and Jiang factions in Beijing is giving renewed prominence to reunification, soon rather than later and by force if necessary.

The United States' decision to press ahead with a big arms sale for Taiwan to counter what the Bush administration says is a growing Chinese military threat to the island is adding fuel to the fires of patriotic fervor on the mainland. Of course, this storm may pass or subside, as others have over Taiwan in recent years, when the protagonists accept that the costs of trying to change the uneasy status quo far outweigh any likely gains.

But China's threats to use force to corral Taiwan must be taken seriously. The Chinese military is growing stronger and may be able within the next few years to launch a successful amphibious invasion of Taiwan or force it to capitulate with a missile attack or naval blockade.

Contrary to the "peaceful rise" mantra, China has repeatedly used force to defend or advance its interests in the past 60 years. Its troops took over Tibet in 1950. A few years later, they fought on the side of the North Koreans against the U.S. in the Korean War. In 1962, they fought with India to take control of a mountainous border zone in the Himalayas.

China seized the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974 and invaded and occupied parts of northern Vietnam for several months in early 1979 as a reprisal after Hanoi sent its forces into Cambodia to topple the Khmer Rouge regime, which had ties to Beijing. The Chinese and Vietnamese navies fought briefly in the Spratlys in the South China Sea in 1988 in a battle in which China secured control of six cays.

However, with the exception of Korea, these were all localized conflicts that could be managed. They were never likely to lead to a wider war. Taiwan is different. The U.S. is obliged by an act of Congress to defend the island from Chinese attack, unless the Taiwanese authorities were to provoke Beijing by declaring independence. Even then, America might intervene on Taiwan's side.

The crisis Southeast Asia fears most would be one between China and the U.S. over Taiwan. The last thing that Southeast Asian countries want is for regional stability to be disrupted and economic growth undermined by a conflict in which they would be under intense pressure to choose sides between these two big powers.

The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. This is a personal comment.