TAIPEI, Nov 24 — The United States has moved quickly to reassure Taiwan, less than a week after President Barack Obama’s visit to China, by sending a senior diplomat to Taipei to allay fears that the island’s interests have been compromised.
Raymond Burghardt, chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto US embassy here, flew into Taipei on Sunday, just five days after Obama met Chinese President Hu Jintao last Tuesday.
“President Obama did not in any way change our long-standing position on Taiwan,” Burghardt told reporters after meeting Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng yesterday morning.
He will meet President Ma Ying-jeou today before leaving tomorrow.
The official line from the Taiwan government is that there is nothing to worry about, and Ma said last week that relations between the US, China and Taiwan were the best in 60 years.
But the fact that Burghardt has to give such an assurance underlines the unease in Taiwan over a perceived American tilt towards China.
Dr Vincent Wang, chairman of the political science department at the University of Richmond, noted that some passages in the joint statement issued after Obama’s meeting with Hu “may give some people the impression that the US has moved towards or even tacitly endorsed the Chinese positions”.
Concerns arose, for example, over the use of the term “peaceful development of cross-strait ties” in the statement.
Dr Wang said: “To the US, ‘peaceful development of relations across the Taiwan Strait’ is a generic description of its expectation that relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait should be conducted, and perhaps improved, through peaceful means.
“It’s not the same as China’s ‘peaceful development’, which is the primary stage, or more conciliatory formulation, of its stated policy of ‘peaceful unification’.”
Some also point to the omission of the Taiwan Relations Act, a 1979 US law that was passed after the US switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, in the statement.
The Act authorises the sale of defensive weapons to Taiwan and has been a source of contention between Beijing and Washington.
However, most analysts believe it was omitted to give face to China. Obama subsequently mentioned the Act at a press conference in the presence of Hu.
In view of this, Burghardt told reporters yesterday that Obama had broached the topic of Taiwan and arms sales in private talks with Hu.
Still, many across the political spectrum in Taiwan believe that Washington is nudging Taipei towards political dialogue with Beijing, as they examine the phrase that the US “is ready to see the enhanced dialogue and communication across the Strait in terms of economy, politics and other spheres”.
Taiwan scholars note that forcing Taiwan to negotiate with China is a violation of the Six Assurances, which the late US President Ronald Reagan gave to Taiwan in 1982.
Dr Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the Hawaii-based East-West Centre, told The Straits Times that the US policy on Taiwan might not have changed officially, but that he would not be surprised if “the Obama administration is relatively less inclined than some previous US governments to put Taiwan’s concerns ahead of the US-China relationship”. — The Straits Times
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