Saturday, August 21

MIRO CERNETIG

Monday, August 16, 1999

IN JINMEN ISLAND, TAIWAN -- Standing guard inside his beachfront pillbox, a rake-thin Taiwanese soldier peers across two kilometres of pale green sea, the only thing separating him from an enemy army six times larger than his own.

"Oh yes, I think the Chinese will attack," he says nervously, waiting for the invasion in full camouflage combat gear, hands gripping a machine gun.

"It could come any day now. Things are getting worse."

In this lush island fortress on Jinmen Island -- a low hill honeycombed with machine-gun nests and underground bunkers -- it's easy to understand the young man's jangled nerves. If there is a war, this will be the front line. And in the past few weeks, the jingoism traded between Taiwan and China has reached an alarming peak.

In the sky above Jinmen, Taiwanese and Chinese fighter jets joust with each other either side of the invisible line that divides the airspace between the Chinese mainland and the archipelago of islands inhabited by 22 million Taiwanese.

China's Communist regime, which views Taiwan as a renegade province that must return to the Motherland's control, has launched an intense campaign of psychological warfare. Every day, state-controlled newspapers carry front-page photos of assault teams from the People's Liberation Army practising amphibious landings and rocket attacks. The papers even suggest that fishing boats, just a kilometre away from Taiwan's machine-gun nests, could be used in a massive invasion.

China's army generals, angered by Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui's announcement that Taiwan will now talk to Beijing only on a special "state-to-state" basis, are also warning that they have a secret team of "dragons" -- a crack commando squad trained for secret raids after being parachuted into enemy territory.

"How long will 400,000 Taiwanese [soldiers] last?" asked a headline in the Chinese press. "Only four or five days."

The Taiwanese, equipped with the best military material money can buy, have retaliated with their own propaganda blitz.

Western reporters are invited for tours of defences on Jinmen Island, where an old sign declares "Give us back our land," even though Taiwan's government has long since abandoned the dream of retaking control of the mainland.

Visitors are shown military docks carved deep into the granite cliffs of Jinmen Island, high-tech machine-gun nests, and long stretches of beach where broken beer bottles are cemented into the rocks, all the better to lacerate Chinese invaders who might try to crawl onto the steep landfalls.

A highlight of the military tour was a peek at Taiwan's own commando team, the army frogmen, an elite crew deemed able to penetrate behind Chinese lines should a war break out.

To show off their prowess, dozens of the young men ran up and down a sandy beach in skimpy red swimsuits as steel-grey warships passed behind them in the Taiwan Strait. The frogmen showed off with a half-hour of calisthenics and muscle stretches, perhaps not always leaving the impression the military commanders intended.

"Ooooh, this is better than Baywatch," commented a British reporter who sat on a podium with high-ranking Taiwanese officials as the soldiers performed before her.

Despite all the publicity, however, there seems little chance of a major military conflict being instigated by either side.

This is not to say there will be no further shows of military strength on China's part. In 1996, Beijing carried out war games and fired rockets off the Taiwanese coast to keep Taiwan's independence movement in line. Three years later, Beijing is leaking threats that the Chinese army may try to seize an outlying Taiwanese island such as Jinmen -- something it has tried before.

In 1958, Chairman Mao Tsetung shelled Jinmen and nearby Matsu Island for 44 days, lobbing more than 474,000 shells over the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwanese responded by shelling the mainland. Eventually, one of the Cold War's oddest agreements was reached: The Chinese agreed to shell the islands on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday; Taiwan reciprocated on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Sunday was everyone's day off.

But now China's leaders know that even though their 2.5-million-member army is six times larger than Taiwan's, an invasion of the island's heavily armed beaches would result in a bloodbath for both sides. Taiwan has spent 50 years digging in for a Chinese attack, and its air force has some of the most modern jet fighters and missile technology available.

A repetition of shelling, which would likely cost lives, carries serious consequences in the contemporary political climate. While the United States, like Canada, supports Beijing's attempts to reunify Taiwan and the mainland, it has left little doubt that if Beijing resorts to an invasion instead of diplomacy, Washington would come to Taiwan's aid in some manner. Two U.S. nuclear-aircraft-carrier battle groups are now patrolling the vicinity of the South China Sea. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, Washington is required to defend Taiwan against a major invasion.

"China will know if they attempt to undertake any kind of operation -- whether it's Taiwan or anything -- that they are going to have the U.S. Navy to deal with," warned Rear Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of the USS Kitty Hawk battle group that, along with the USS Constellation, is in the area. "We are there in numbers, we're trained, we're ready and we're very powerful."

Officially, China's leaders say that no outside force or warnings will influence their policy on Taiwan. The reality, however, is that Beijing's leadership would stand to lose a great deal if it were to use force to solve its disagreements with Taiwan.

Powerful pro-Taiwan forces in the U.S. Congress would likely force heavy economic sanctions on Beijing. That would cut into China's record $57-billion (U.S.) trade surplus with the United States, something that would erode the Communist regime's attempts to prop up an already troubled economy.

As well, an aggressive action against Taiwan would be yet another setback for chilly U.S.-Sino relations. The relationship, damaged in recent months by the bombing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and by congressional charges that Chinese spies stole U.S. nuclear secrets, has begun to defrost in recent weeks.

The warming trend has given support to Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, who has been fighting accusations that he is too eager to deal with the United States and with the West. Mr. Zhu is battling with conservatives in the Chinese government to push China's entry into the World Trade Organization by year's end. Chinese President Jiang Zemin, who is behind his Premier's plan, unlikely to risk a regional war with Taiwan -- a global crisis that would surely derail China's entry into the WTO -- no matter how sure Taiwanese lookouts are that an invasion is on the horizon.