U.S. to Explain Taiwan Arms Deal to China : Weapons: Envoy will visit Beijing next week. Administration says F-16 sales will promote ‘regional stabilization.’

The Bush Administration is sending a top State Department official to Beijing early next week to explain to the Chinese leadership the President’s decision to reverse 10 years of American policy by permitting the sale of U.S. F-16 warplanes to Taiwan, Administration sources said Wednesday.

The official, Assistant Secretary of State William Clark Jr., will argue that the Administration is not violating a 1982 arms communique worked out between the United States and China. As part of that agreement, the United States promised that it would gradually reduce arms sales to Taiwan and eventually phase them out.

“We told the Chinese (in 1982) there would come a time when spare parts would have to be found” for Taiwan, one senior U.S. official explained. “That’s not written in the communique, but it’s been our interpretation all along.”

He said the United States needs to supply modern F-16s because it can’t find any replacements for the outmoded, 1950s-era F-104s that Taiwan’s air force is now flying.

Bush said Wednesday that he has decided to sell Taiwan 150 of the fighter aircraft. The President timed his public announcement to coincide with a campaign trip to Ft. Worth, the site of the General Dynamics factory that makes the warplanes. The Texas company had said in July that it was planning to lay off 5,800 workers, and Bush disclosed soon afterward that he was reconsidering the decade-old ban on the sale of F-16s to Taiwan.

Administration officials said Wednesday that the change in longstanding U.S. policy was prompted by China’s recent acquisition of sophisticated new Russian Sukhoi 27 fighters. A senior U.S. official said that one of the Administration’s primary goals is to ease fears in Asia about China’s growing military power and to demonstrate that there will be no American withdrawal from the region.

“We think this will have the effect of regional stabilization,” this official said. “We hope it doesn’t mean a new arms race.”

For its part, China said today that Washington would be held accountable for any “serious consequences” from what it called the violation of the decade-old policy, Reuters news agency reported.

“The Chinese government has already launched the strongest protest to the U.S. government and will also stress that the U.S. government should be held accountable for any serious consequences arising therefrom,” Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen told reporters in Jakarta.

China may respond by buying still more Russian planes or other weapons. For the last week, Chinese Defense Minister Qin Jiwei has been in Russia discussing the possible purchase of additional weapons. According to Itar-Tass, the Russian news agency, acting Russian Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar told Qin that arms sales to China could help keep Russia’s stagnating military industry afloat.

“This is just another sign of the arms race in the region (Asia),” said Harry Harding, a scholar at the Brookings Institution. “The tragedy of arms races is that each step is seen as a reaction to another one.”