Beijing Backpedals in Its War of Words With Taiwan

Question: When does the word disaster have a calming effect?

Answer: When China’s official news service makes an unaccustomed flub.

In a dispatch late Thursday afternoon, the New China News Agency reported that a top Chinese envoy to Taiwan had warned the island, which Beijing regards as sovereign territory, to stick to the “one China” policy or face military action.

“If [Taiwan] does not recognize the ‘one China’ principle, if it does not recognize that Taiwan is a part of China, then the result will not be peace but war,” the news agency quoted mainland official Tang Shubei as telling a symposium in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

The report immediately caused a stir among journalists here, who scrambled to get out the story that China had publicly used the term war for the first time in telling Taiwan not to ditch the notion that the two sides make up “one China.”

Over the next few hours, the story hit the airwaves the world over. By 9 a.m. in Washington, National Public Radio had broadcast the report.

But within an hour after that, the Chinese news agency issued a hasty retraction, perhaps clued in to the small furor that quickly developed around the story at a time when tension with Taiwan is already fraught and Beijing’s relations with the U.S. are shaky concerning the Taiwan issue.

Instead of the word war, Tang should have been quoted as saying that failing to uphold the “one China” principle would result in “not peace but disaster,” the news wire corrected.

“It was a slip of the pen by the reporter,” an editor at the news agency told Reuters.

The quick effort at damage control reflects the sensitivity surrounding what China calls “the Taiwan question.”

Since the island elected former independence advocate Chen Shui-bian as president last month--defying Beijing’s threats--all eyes have been trained on China’s reaction and all ears tuned for the slightest change in Beijing’s official stance.

Already, a Chinese “white paper” had upped the ante in February by warning Taipei that “indefinitely” postponing reunification could provoke an attack by the mainland.

The initial report of Tang’s statement Thursday was interpreted by some as making refusal to accept the “one China” principle also a cause for war.

But the correction pulled the Beijing regime back from the brink--and narrowly averted a rapidly escalating PR, well, disaster.