Vague language and inopportune timing show that China’s PR savvy has its limits, writes Amit Chanda
By Amit Chanda
The passage of any law by China’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress is always a mere formality. But the controversial legislation to outlaw Taiwanese secession has proved anything but routine. It raised the stakes for the island’s pro-independence camp and increased the risk of a cross-Strait military conflict.
The anti-secession law’s vague language and attempt at softened wording – perhaps geared toward mollifying foreign critics – paradoxically increases rather than decreases the likelihood that China and the United States could be unwittingly and unwillingly drawn into an avoidable military conflict. By failing to clearly delineate presumed or potential “red lines” for Taiwan, the law leaves open the possibility of substantial miscalculation or misinterpretation.
Despite several weeks of intense US pressure to soften – or even retract – the proposed law, China’s leaders did little more than attempt to reinforce their position that “non-peaceful” (i.e., military) measures would serve strictly as a last resort – which had already been assumed anyway. The Bush administration’s reaction was uncharacteristically blunt, with its call for “Beijing to reconsider the passage of the law’” – a rather directly worded intrusion into what China considers to be an internal matter.
Taiwan’s December 2004 legislative elections had delivered an unexpected defeat for Chen and his ruling Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, and the pro-independence camp’s failure to secure a legislative majority was seen as a positive development for relations with the mainland. Indeed, the start of 2005 saw some movement on improved ties, with the introduction of a hugely successful lunar new year charter-flights program. This gave rise to serious discussion about instituting permanent direct air links to aid bilateral trade flow. Now, in the aftermath of the anti-secession law, the future of the charter-flights scheme looks bleak.
Opinion polls in Taiwan reflect public dismay over the Chinese legislation, and this negative sentiment will raise the pressure on President Chen, who recently antagonized some of his more ardent pro-independence supporters by reaching out to the pro-unification opposition People First Party. A survey by Taiwan’s China Times found that 56% of those polled resented the anti-secession law, with 47% saying that Taiwan should retaliate by either holding a public referendum on the issue or introducing counter-legislation of its own.
There are now serious concerns that the so-called dark greens – the harder-line faction in Taiwan’s pro-independence pan-green political camp – will seize this issue as a stick with which to beat President Chen. As DPP legislator Hsiao Bi-khim recently said, the anti-secession law “will make it very hard for us to be moderates”.
One of the more frustrating elements of the anti-secession law is the fact that it is an entirely unnecessary provocation. The absence of laws mandating force to block separatist activity has never stopped Chinese authorities from brutally persecuting individuals and groups who have called for an independent Tibet or Xinjiang. There is thus little reason to believe that a more explicitly assertive stance is necessary for dealing with the “splittist” government in Taipei. Missile tests, PLA military exercises and threatening rhetoric have been sufficient deterrents until now.
Mainland officials justify the law in terms of clarifying their policy and establishing a legal premise for invading the island. In practice, however, the construction of legal foundations could weaken the Chinese government’s operational flexibility when responding to a Taiwanese move toward independence. The law of unintended consequences dictates that this effort to deny ambiguity to Taiwanese activists could backfire, and instead leave mainland leaders without room to maneuver if Taiwan does attempt to revise the status quo.
This means that the Hu Jintao administration could well have its hands tied, and find itself unable to pursue some kind of compromise solution to a situation that is already fraught with nuance and complexity, and which shows no sign of getting easier to manage with the passage of time. While outright military conflict is still considered unlikely, the combination of China’s vague “red lines” and non-specific threats will certainly raise the likelihood of miscalculation and misinterpretation on both sides.
More broadly, the fact that the anti-secession law was introduced at all comes as a major disappointment to those who had been impressed by the apparent sophistication and skillfulness of recent Chinese diplomacy. Coming in the same week as China’s poorly handled removal of Tung Chee-hwa as Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, the anti-secession law episode illustrates that the mainland’s PR savvy has its limits and that Taiwan will remain an emotional and divisive thorn in the side of Sino-US relations.
Amit Chanda is Asia research analyst for the Country Intelligence Group at Global Insight. He writes extensively on political/security issues involving China, Japan, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula.
