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Pastimes : All Clowns Must Be Destroyed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IceShark who wrote (19377)	3/21/2000 12:37:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42523

Has this been posted yet? China hints at nuclear showdown over Taiwan Tuesday, March 21, 2000 By MICHAEL DORGAN Knight Ridder Newspapers BEIJING -- While top Chinese and Taiwanese leaders lowered their voices Monday, a Chinese military newspaper laid out in chilling new detail how China could conquer Taiwan by force. Beijing's tactics, the publication said, might include a neutron bomb attack on Taiwan and a nuclear showdown with the United States. "The United States will not sacrifice 200 million Americans for 20 million Taiwanese," predicted one of the articles in a 16-page special issue of Haowangjiao Weekly, which is sponsored by the People's Liberation Army. "They will finally acknowledge the difficulty and withdraw." Haowangjiao, an arm of the State Commission of Science Technology and National Defense, an agency of the People's Liberation Army, did not set a deadline for reunification. But it reported that China "will announce a timetable for reunification at the proper time this year." Although China's military tends to be the most bellicose of Beijing's official voices, no Chinese government publication appears without high-level approval and coordination. The escalating threat could be noting more than a trial balloon from a hard-line faction, some U.S. experts speculated, but it would have to be an influential one. It is unclear whether China's loudest saber-rattling to date is an attempt to soften up Taiwan's newly elected President Chen Shui-bian for negotiations over the island's future, a test of the Clinton administration's mettle, a melodramatic attempt to underscore China's seriousness about retaking Taiwan, or a bit of all three. The threats also could be rhetorical nonsense, several U.S. analysts said, reckoning that the United States would quickly win any military conflict with China. Although the Chinese military is large, it is technologically backward, short of modern planes and ships, and no match for the United States in conventional or nuclear warfare. "They really can't do very much," said Charles Hill, diplomat-in-residence at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and a senior State Department official and Asia expert in the Reagan administration. An escalating series of military threats would nonetheless test Taiwanese, and perhaps U.S., resolve in ways advantageous to China, whose leaders insist Taiwan is a renegade province that must be reunified with the Chinese mainland. To cool the situation, Stanley Roth, the State Department's top official for Asia, is in Beijing, along with Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The administration Monday tapped retired Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., former chairman of the House International Relations Committee, to fly to Taipei to encourage restraint there. In Taipei, Chen's aides begged Beijing not to cause panic by threatening Taiwan, but instead to let the newly elected government "stabilize the status quo." "We want China to exercise moderation, flexibility, and goodwill during this very volatile period of transition," Hsiao Bi-khim, the head of the department of international affairs of Chen's Democratic Progressive Party, told reporters. While both Chen and Chinese President Jiang Zemin have expressed a willingness to talk, both also have set conditions unacceptable to the other. Jiang demands that Taiwan concede its subordination to Beijing before talks start; Chen insists that Taiwan and China must meet as equals.