Taiwan Gets GOP Favored Nation Status

The Republicans’ report on President Clinton’s “China connection” has been completed. It is a remarkably incomplete and distorted document, one that makes the most of any possible links to China while failing to pursue similar questions about Taiwan.

For more than a year now, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee has been examining the fund-raising for Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. The investigation began after The Times and other papers reported that some of the money raised by Clinton’s campaign had come from overseas.

The necessary background is this: Both China and Taiwan have sought to influence Clinton, much as they have tried to win over previous occupants of the White House. Clinton’s campaign team was cultivating both Taiwan and China as it approached the 1996 campaign. Both China and Taiwan also possess active intelligence services.

*

Yet you would never know any of these underlying realities from the Senate report, which finds signs of China everywhere and Taiwan nowhere.

The Senate committee, of course, is controlled by Republicans. In this probe, they faced a dilemma. They had a strong political interest in investigating a Democratic president. Yet at the same time, they didn’t want to investigate possible ties to Taiwan, because Taiwan has historically been a strong supporter of Republican members of Congress.

The result was a one-sided report. The Republican majority behaved like a parent who discovers two siblings in a fight and decides to punish the one he doesn’t like, while sparing the one he favors.

This column has frequently been critical of the Chinese regime. And China’s activities in the 1996 campaign deserve to have been investigated. Still, the Senate report strains so hard to pin everything on China, it leaves the feeling that in this particular case, Beijing may be getting a bum rap, or at least an exaggerated one.

China’s goal was “to influence our political process,” the report says. Yet nowhere do the Republicans attempt to say in what way China’s activities, overt or covert, went beyond those carried out by other governments, such as Taiwan or the Saudis, Israelis, Greeks, Turks, Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Japanese or South Koreans.

*

In the report’s summary, the key finding is relegated to a subordinate clause: “While the committee still cannot determine conclusively whether the People’s Republic of China funded, directed or encouraged the illegal contributions in question . . . “ it says, then asserting vaguely that “strong circumstantial evidence” shows that China was “involved.”

The best part of the Republicans’ study shows that several figures connected to the Clinton fund-raising effort--John Huang, Maria Hsia, Ted Sioeng, Mochtar and James Riady and Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie--had ties to China.

And yet it is here that the Republicans display their blindness, too. For while delving into the China connections of the Clinton fund-raisers, the investigators ignored other evidence leading to Taiwan:

* Huang was raised in Taiwan. Trie was born there. Both men traveled to Taiwan, where they sought to raise money for Clinton. James C. Wood, the Clinton appointee who headed the Washington office responsible for dealing with Taiwan, resigned amid charges that he was soliciting Taiwan businessmen for contributions.

* The now-famous Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, where Trie raised phony contributions for Clinton’s legal defense and where Vice President Al Gore helped raise money, is the California branch of a Taiwan-based sect. Its links are to Taiwan, not China.

* Liu Taiying--a close associate of Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui and the money man in charge of an estimated $3 billion in assets for the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s ruling party--flew to the United States in the fall of 1995 for a meeting with Clinton that Trie helped to arrange.

Taiwan shows up in the report merely as an aside, when the Republicans try once, briefly, to give some context. The report notes that China was upset about Clinton’s 1995 decision to grant Lee a visa for an unprecedented trip to the United States.

Yet that very fact raises questions the report doesn’t explore. How did Lee get his visa? In part because of strong backing for it both in the administration and, especially, in Congress. Did fund-raising from Taiwan sources have anything to do with that support? For that matter, was Taiwan using its intelligence service to win friends in America?

The Republicans’ extraordinary effort to minimize Taiwan’s role was encapsulated by the report’s curious invocation of the phrase “Greater China.” The report says the investigation found that many trails of money from Clinton’s fund-raising can be traced back to “Greater China.”

The concept of Greater China has been used in recent years to describe the Chinese cultural entities of China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Often, the phrase has been employed by those who are sympathetic to the Beijing regime.

In the Senate report, however, the concept of Greater China takes on a new, more sinister meaning. It is used to deflect blame away from Taiwan and back to China. Connections that lead to Taiwan can be made to sound as though they originated inside China itself.

In short, the Republican majority came up with a selective, self-serving version of what happened during Clinton’s 1996 campaign. The country deserved a full and accurate account. This report doesn’t give one.

Mann’s column appears here every Wednesday.