Asia Times
Jul 30, 2010
By Jens Kastner
TAIPEI – Recently in Taipei, as yet another delegation from mainland China cut the ribbon to an investment fair and Taiwan’s hotel
industry anticipated ever-rising numbers of mainland tourists, the island’s President Ma Ying-jeou had his eyes fixed on monitors.
Shown on them weren’t the rosy graphs of the Taiwan bourse, nor was the president surrounded by economists and party officials. In the midst of Taiwan’s military top brass, Ma was inspecting a spine-chilling cyber-simulation of missile attacks on Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
With increasing economic cooperation and people-to-people exchange in the past two decades, there are growing calls for both sides across the Taiwan Strait to formally sign an agreement to end the state of war that has existed between them since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) troops were swept out of the mainland by Mao Zedong’s army and fled to Taiwan. The first step would be for their militaries to build mutual trust.
But all recent signs show that closer economic ties and improvements in the Taiwan government’s relations with Beijing are of little help in reducing military hostility across the strait. One month after their signing of the economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA), China’s and Taiwan’s militaries seem still light-years away from the establishing mutual trust.
Beijing on one hand tries to woo retired Taiwanese military personnel, while on the other keeps increasing its firepower aimed at Taiwan, which in turn continues asking the US to provide advanced weaponry. While Taiwan, just as any other country or region in the world, appreciates doing business with China, it wants to keep China’s military at bay. To ensure this objective, Washington’s arms are needed, and for the sake of guaranteeing American goodwill the Taiwanese government is willing to pay billions of dollars.
“Now that we have improved our relations with China, it’s time to strengthen ties with the US through the purchase of excessively priced arms,” said Professor George Tsai, political scientist at Taiwan’s Sun Yet-sen Graduate Institute, in an interview with Asia Times Online. “This is important because to feel safer, we still need the US as a power balancer between China and us,” said Tsai. more …
