[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 24 (Tuesday, February 27, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Page S1376]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             PEACEMAKERS ARE UP AGAINST AN UNDETERRED CHINA

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, our policy toward China is, in the 
words of our colleague from California, Senator Feinstein, one of 
zigzagging.
  I want to have a good relationship with China, but I do not want it 
at expense of a free Taiwan that has a free press and a multiparty 
system.
  Recently, I read an excellent column by Georgie Anne Geyer, who has 
had a great deal of experience in the field of international relations.
  Her comments on the China situation should be of interest to all of 
my colleagues, as well as their staffs, and I ask that they be printed 
in the Record at the end of my remarks.
  The column follows:

             Peacemakers Are up Against an Undeterred China

       Washington.--Now, let's see if I understand this:
       Last summer, the more-or-less communist government in 
     Beijing (population China: 1.2 billion) set its People's 
     Liberation Army loose to make Taiwan (population: 21 million) 
     sit up and take notice. First, Beijing stirred things up a 
     bit by conducting ballistic missile tests off the Taiwanese 
     coast--not exactly a neighborly act.
       Then, the Chinese leaders provided Ambassador Charles 
     Freeman, a specialist on China who was visiting Beijing this 
     winter, with the astonishing news that they were seriously 
     considering launching missile strikes on Taiwan this spring 
     every day for a month. Freeman, who was for many years in our 
     Beijing Embassy, took their warnings most seriously, and in a 
     recent speech at The Heritage Foundation, went so far as to 
     say:
       ``These exercises are not an empty show of force. They are 
     a campaign of military intimidation that could, and may well 
     as the coming year unfolds, extend into the actual outbreak 
     of combat in the Taiwan Strait and even strikes against 
     Taiwan targets.''
       So what do our doughty leaders here do? Well, these warlike 
     growls from Beijing did not seem very nice at all (wasn't 
     China supposed to become capitalist now, anyway?). At first, 
     our responses were just the kind the frontal-assault Chinese 
     like to evoke in barbarians: ambiguous. The new American 
     ambassador to Beijing, former Sen. James Sasser of Tennessee, 
     went so far as to suggest, when asked at a press conference 
     in Beijing what the United States would do if the Chinese did 
     attack Taiwan, that, aster all, we had long recognized that 
     Taiwan was a part of China . . .
       And how the Chinese smiled behind their missiles.
       Then, for once in the past three years of China-bungling, 
     the administration actually did the right thing. On Dec. 19, 
     it quietly sent the USS Nimitz to the Taiwan Straits, the 
     politically treacherous waterway between Taiwan and China. 
     This was important: It marked the first time American ships 
     had patrolled the straits since the Nixon/Kissinger ``peace'' 
     with China in 1976.
       It is hard to ignore the Nimitz, if only because the 
     nuclear-powered U.S. carrier comes with five escort ships 
     equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles. But the master chess-
     playing Chinese also understood perfectly: This was exactly 
     the way they had always played the ``Great Game'' in Asia.
       Ah, but then the White House got cold feet over having done 
     such an awful thing. ``No, no, not us,'' they said--in 
     effect. ``We didn't send that big bad Nimitz. (Would we do 
     such a thing? Nobody here but us peacemakers.)'' No, the 
     decision to sail in waters that, for political reasons, we 
     had not entered for 17 years had been made by the ship's 
     commander alone--and that was because of bad weather in 
     alternate waters.
       Now, unfortunately or fortunately, Hong Kong has an active 
     weather bureau, and those officious fellows there immediately 
     took on what was clearly none of their business and said the 
     weather had been just fine in those days. And so the Chinese, 
     who don't know much about us either, wrote the whole thing 
     off as just ``more American lying.''
       In the end, the threat was dispensed with, the Chinese 
     remained undeterred, and American policy toward China was and 
     is as imprecise and lacking in consensus as ever (Secretary 
     of State Warren Christopher did not even mention the word 
     ``China'' in a recent major foreign-policy address at 
     Harvard).
       Let us try to make some sense of all this:
       China and, indeed, all of Asia are at a turning point whose 
     outcome will assuredly shape the form of Asia, and our 
     interests in it, for the next 20 years. In China, as Deng 
     Xiao Ping comes to the end of his life. President Jiang Zemin 
     is becoming more and more hard-line (he has even been wearing 
     the once-hated Mao suits). Increasingly he has been placating 
     the hard-line People's Liberation Army.
       Gerrit Gong, director of Asian Studies for the Center for 
     Strategic and International Studies here, recently met with 
     the military command in Beijing, and told me that he sees the 
     military pressures on the government as becoming intense. 
     ``The older military feel that the revolution is not over,'' 
     he said, ``and that their comrades' blood must still be 
     vindicated. They want to send a message to Taiwan and Japan 
     that they're still strong.''
       The Taiwan elections in March, plus Beijing's fear of 
     American recognition of a potentially ``independent'' Taiwan, 
     are what drives the Chinese. With their studied 
     obstreperousness, blended with the constantly reinforced 
     belief that they can bluff this administration, they are 
     playing two games: (1) to threaten and contain the United 
     States, and (2) to diminish the international standing or 
     independent dreams of little, but rich Taiwan.
       Emboldened by no real American policy--and now assured by 
     the White House that the Nimitz was just ``off course''--
     Beijing this last week took the first steps toward setting an 
     actual timetable for the ``reunification'' of Taiwan with the 
     mainland--after Hong Kong in 1997 and Macao in 1999. This is 
     serious business.
       Our former ambassador to Beijing, James Lilley, who 
     understands these games, shakes his head at the seeming 
     ``mystery'' that so many here see in how to deal with them. 
     ``The Nimitz was exactly the right signal to China,'' he told 
     me. ``The sea is our battleground. Actually we are in the 
     catbird's seat--but we are letting ourselves be jerked 
     around.''

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