ASIA : China-Taiwan Tensions Cool Down After a Feverish Spring

“The first few steps of the mating dance have begun.”

That was the analysis of a Western observer here this week after Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui sang a beckoning tune to the Chinese mainland in his inauguration address.

Lee carefully avoided all the shrill notes the Chinese Communists hate. He described reunification of Taiwan with China as a desirable goal.

Independence for Taiwan, Lee said, is “unnecessary and impossible.”

Finally, he offered to make a “journey of peace to the mainland.”

The Beijing regime grumbled a bit about Lee’s sincerity. But for several weeks now, the official mainland press has halted the Lee Teng-hui demonization that marked the period of military tensions leading up to Lee’s March 23 victory as Taiwan’s first popularly elected president.

Two months after the threat of war in the Taiwan Strait prompted the United States to dispatch two aircraft carrier groups to the area, relations between Taiwan and the mainland are on the mend. U.S.-China relations, meanwhile, are as bad as they have been in years, with mini-crises on several fronts. In the latest flap, the Chinese government has accused U.S. firms participating in a paper recycling program of illegally shipping dangerous, disease-infested garbage to China.

Taiwanese business people again fill flights into Beijing and Shanghai. A team of Taiwanese educators flew to the Chinese capital this week hoping to sell correspondence courses in the People’s Republic. Their mainland hosts met them with a fleet of Mercedes.

Most experts on both sides of the strait hope that sometime this year--certainly before the July 1, 1997, return of Hong Kong to China--some type of direct shipping link will be established between the island and the mainland.

The tone in Taipei and, to a lesser degree, Beijing is one of reconciliation and peace.

The day after Lee’s address, Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan, held a conference titled “The Prospects for Cross-Strait Relations After President Lee’s Inauguration Speech.”

One of the participants, National Chengchi University political science professor Chao Chien-min, said Lee’s offer to travel to Beijing on a peace mission represented “a greater consensus in Taiwan, which we did not have in the past.”

The mood of reconciliation is not so marked in Beijing. But speaking to reporters in Zimbabwe, where he was traveling with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Foreign Minister Qian Qichen said Lee is welcome to visit Beijing “in an appropriate capacity.”

“We will now listen to what the Taiwan authorities say and observe their actions,” Qian said.

Meanwhile, the odd man out in the love triangle is the United States, which gets little credit here for coming to Taiwan’s aid and is confronted in Beijing with some of the most virulent anti-Americanism of recent years.

In Taipei, Steve Bih-rong Liu, chief editorial writer for the influential China Times, said most Taiwanese are grateful to the U.S. for its show of military support but believe that the Clinton administration may have gone too far by sending a second carrier group into the area, causing the Chinese to overreact with escalating military exercises.

In Beijing, the official press criticizes the United States almost every day on contentious issues that range from arms proliferation to intellectual property disputes over pirated CDs to, most recently, gun smuggling to U.S. urban gangs.

One particularly impassioned controversy stems from a program in which China has been importing large amounts of wastepaper, mostly from the United States, for its growing paper industry. Beijing says that some American firms have sent containers stuffed with foul garbage, including syringes and used diapers.

“We are on the front line, a steel Great Wall guarding the motherland, and will resolutely remove foreign rubbish from the country,” the Shanghai customs office said in a statement typical of the anti-garbage campaign.