Kanwa: WHY US-TAIWAN MILITARY COOPERATION ACHIEVED MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH

<Kanwa News April 10th 2002> The US decision to sell submarines to Taiwan and allow Taiwan's Defense Minister to visit the US signify a major breakthrough in the US-Taiwan military cooperation since the 1992 sales of F16 fighters to the latter.

The background of the series of incidents is as follows: First of all, since 1992, the Chinese military forces have obtained much greater financial resources and the "modernization" program in the military made substantial progress. In order to offset China's advantage in the quantity and technology of the weapon systems, the US standard of arms sales to Taiwan naturally has to be lifted to a new level. Unavoidably, the two sides will have more cooperation in military exercises and the exchanges of personnel. Secondly, the incidents also reflect the increasing concern of the US over Beijing's armament enlargement.

The Director of CIA emphasized at the Congress hearing that Beijing's budget on defense would double in the coming 5 years, which means Washington has already listed China rather than Russia as the number one target to contain. Kanwa's latest report reveals that taking China's 1995 military budget as the basis and supposing the increase rate is 15% every year, the total military budget during the '9th Five-Year Plan' will be US$58.94 billion, which will increase to US$118.549 billion in the '10th Five-Year Plan" and US$238.442 billion in the '11th Five-Year Plan" respectively. Military strategists in Washington generally believe that China does not have enough bargaining counters in its US policy. Militarily, it does not yet have the strength to challenge the US in any region around the world; politically, its export of missile technologies will severely damage its bilateral relations with other countries and therefore this card of "proliferating the cruise missiles" has limited effect. Economically, it heavily relies on the US in many areas. China just joined WTO not long ago and there is only "theoretical possibility" at the current stage to impose sanctions against the US via WTO framework. Looking at the experience in the last 15 years, China's pretests have been kept at calling back its ambassador, launching military exercises or suspending the military exchange programs between the two countries. These actions never posed real-sense threat to the interests of the US. Moreover, after the September 11 incident, the Russia-US ties have become ever closer. Putin is practicing a more practical diplomatic policy, and in effect restrictions on Russia's military technology export to China have also become tighter.

Meanwhile, the Russia-Europe and Russia-US relations have obtained huge improvement after the incident. As a consequence, the mutual understanding achieved between China and Russia on the issue of ABM has no real effect. The Russia-US-China triangular relation today is no longer so clear as that during the Yaltsen time. Under the circumstances mentioned above, plus the current critical time when China tries to enlarge its armament in order to overtake Taiwan, reinforcing its all-round military cooperation with Taiwan is an important measure of the US in order to contain China. <Kanwa Washington>