La Vita è Bella Life is Beautiful. La Vita es Bonita. 美麗人生　

242愛的鼓勵 7訂閱站台

每一任美國總統對中國的態度總是先強硬然後慢慢軟化，但是今天的中國早已不是當年的吳下阿蒙。美國的歐巴馬總統上任時，國內有二次房貸引發的國際金融危機，對外有兩場戰爭（阿富汗與伊拉克），北韓與伊朗核武問題，及在中歐設置防禦飛彈基地引發與俄羅斯的敵對。所以Obama並沒有像（恐怕也沒辦法）以前的美國總統那樣，對中國一開始就採取強硬的態度。

然而友善與溫和的態度似乎造成中國的錯誤解讀。在哥本哈根，溫家寶兩次放歐巴馬鴿子，迫使歐巴馬必須在路上堵住溫溫家寶，好與他會談（會談的要求或許中國一直沒同意）；這應該讓美國警覺到友好的態度似乎被詮釋為示弱。

所以與前幾任美國總統（兩位布希總統）在任內的最後幾個月宣布對台的軍售，民主黨的歐巴馬反而在上任剛滿一年就宣布對台軍售。而且在同一天國務卿（希拉蕊）克林頓也公開指責中國在伊朗的核子問題上曖昧的立場，並指出歐巴馬總統即將會晤達賴。

就如同我見過的許多在中國工作的台灣人，他們都告訴我非得對中國的員工或幹部採取強硬的立場，不然他們（指中國員工或幹部）不僅不把你當一回事，還會爬到你頭上。當然美中問題不能這麼看，畢竟中國身為一個主權國家，當然有權力決定他自己的方向與立場，不須隨美國起舞。更何況中國現在不僅是一個強權國家，也是美國最大債權國。但是把友善當成示弱倒是中國上上下下頗為一致的社會人格。而美國似乎也了解到這點，所以對台軍售應該只是今年第一件美中的衝突！



News Analysis        
U.S. Arms for Taiwan Send Beijing a Message        

By HELENE COOPER        
Published: January 31, 2010        

WASHINGTON — For the past year, China has adopted an increasingly muscular position toward the United States, berating American officials for the global economic crisis, stage-managing President Obama’s visit to China in November, refusing to back a tougher climate change agreement in Copenhagen and standing fast against American demands for tough new Security Council sanctions against Iran.       

Now, the Obama administration has started to push back. In announcing an arms sales package to Taiwan worth $6 billion on Friday, the United States leveled a direct strike at the heart of the most sensitive diplomatic issue between the two countries since America affirmed the “one China” policy in 1972.        

The arms package was doubly infuriating to Beijing coming so soon after the Bush administration announced a similar arms package for Taiwan in 2008, and right as tensions were easing somewhat in Beijing and Taipei’s own relations. China’s immediate, and outraged, reaction — cancellation of some military exchanges and announcement of punitive sanctions against American companies — demonstrates, China experts said, that Beijing is feeling a little burned, particularly because the Taiwan arms announcement came on the same day that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly berated China for not taking a stronger position on holding Iran accountable for its nuclear program.        
While administration officials sounded a uniform public note, cautioning Beijing not to allow this latest tiff to damage overall relations, some administration officials suggested privately that the timing of the arms sales and the tougher language on Iran was calculated to send a message to Beijing to avoid assumptions that President Obama would be deferential to China over American security concerns and existing agreements.       


“This was a case of making sure that there was no misunderstanding that we will act in our own national security interests,” one senior administration official said. A second Obama administration official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said pointedly: “Unlike the previous administration, we did not wait until the end of our administration to go ahead with the arms sales to Taiwan. We did it early.”        


Jung Yeon-je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
American soldiers with arms at a South Korean base. The United States is selling Patriot missiles and other arms to Taiwan.

But larger questions remain about where the Obama administration is heading on China policy, and whether the new toughness signals a fundamentally new direction and will yield results that last year’s softer approach did not.        

Beyond the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, management of the American relationship with China is one of Mr. Obama’s biggest foreign policy challenges. Flush with cash, China’s economy is growing mightily, and China has become one of the biggest foreign lenders to the United States. China also is an increasingly critical American trading partner and a global rival in influence and economic power.        

“The president’s view is that obviously we have to have a mature enough relationship with China that we can be candid and firm where we disagree and cooperate forcefully when we agree,” a senior administration official said. He insisted that the timing of the arms package and Mrs. Clinton’s tough words were “not designed to send a gratuitous message to China, but to demonstrate the firmness of our position.”       


China has a history of getting off to a tough start with American administrations. President Bill Clinton alienated Beijing with tough talk on human rights, even signing an executive order that made renewal of trade privileges for China dependent on progress on human rights. But Mr. Clinton reversed himself in 1994, saying that the United States and China would move forward faster on issues of mutual concern if Beijing was not isolated.       


Similarly, President George W. Bush’s first dealings with the Chinese were also fractious, including an effort to recover American airmen whose spy plane was forced down off the Chinese coast.       


“The Obama administration came in exactly the opposite,” said Steven Clemons, director of foreign policy programs at the New America Foundation. “They needed China on economic issues, climate change, Iran, North Korea. So they came in wanting to do this lovely dance with China, but that didn’t work.”        

Instead, China pushed back hard, including at the Copenhagen climate change summit meeting in December, when Beijing balked at American and European demands that China agree to an international monitoring system for emissions targets. Twice, the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, sent an underling to represent him at meetings with Mr. Obama, in what diplomats said was an intentional snub. Mr. Obama later had to track down Mr. Wen, surprising him and appearing at the doorway of a conference room where Mr. Wen was meeting with the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India.       


The United States and China eventually reached a compromise on the monitoring agreement, but the whole incident left a bad taste in the mouths of many Obama administration officials, who believed China had deliberately set out to belittle Mr. Obama, and who were determined to push back and reassert American authority.        

“The Chinese,” said James J. Shinn, who was assistant secretary of defense for Asia during the Bush administration, “now seem to have a palpable sense of confidence that they’re more in the driver’s seat than two years ago, across a whole range of issues.”       


For Mr. Obama, the arms sale to Taiwan, which China considers a breakaway province, may be only the first of many instances this year in which he will run afoul of Beijing.      


Some foreign policy experts said that the administration now seemed intent on poking at the sovereignty issues that have long been China’s Achilles’ heel.  Mrs. Clinton noted on Friday that Mr. Obama would soon be meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama — a meeting that White House officials put off last summer to avoid alienating Beijing in advance of Mr. Obama’s China trip. China regards the Dalai Lama as an advocate of Tibetan independence.        

“China is feeling very confident these days, but the one thing that the Chinese freak out about consistently are sovereignty issues,” said Mr. Clemons of the New America Foundation. “So anything related to Taiwan or Tibet will get them going.”        

Added to that, the administration has been championing Internet freedom recently, another source of public tension with Beijing. China’s government is embroiled in a fight with Google over that company’s complaints about Internet censorship and hacking attacks it says originated in China.       


But the tougher American positions do not change the fact that Mr. Obama needs Chinese cooperation on a host of issues. Beyond his efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the president is also working with Beijing on similar ambitions in North Korea.       


And Mr. Obama announced in his State of the Union address last week that he planned to double American exports in the next five years, an ambitious goal that cannot be met unless he somehow persuades China to let its currency appreciate, making Chinese products more expensive in the United States and American products more affordable in China.        

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/world/asia/01china.html


U.S. Approval of Taiwan Arms Sales Angers China      

By HELENE COOPER        
Published: January 29, 2010         

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has approved an arms sales package to Taiwan worth more than $6 billion, a move that has enraged China and may complicate President Obama’s effort to enlist Beijing’s cooperation on Iran.       


The administration deferred a decision on selling F-16 fighter planes to Taiwan, administration officials said, but they pointedly added that they were not shutting the door to future F-16 sales.       


The last time the United States sold F-16s to Taiwan was in 1992 under President George H. W. Bush. In response, China threatened to withdraw from international arms control talks and retaliated, many China experts contend, by selling medium-range missiles to Pakistan.        

“We continue to study it,” a senior administration official said of the possible F-16 sales. “We will look at it from the perspective of what its impact would be on Taiwan’s air defense capability.”        

The arms package announced Friday is primarily defensive, and includes 114 Patriot missiles worth $2.82 billion, 60 Black Hawk helicopters worth $3.1 billion and communications equipment for Taiwan’s F-16 fleet. The package also includes Harpoon missiles and mine-hunting ships, the Defense Cooperation Security Agency said in a statement.        

The Chinese reaction was swift, and negative. China’s vice foreign minister, He Yafei, issued a diplomatic message to the State Department expressing his “indignation” over the pending sale, said Wang Baoding, the spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington.        

“We believe this move endangers China’s national security and harms China’s peaceful reunification efforts,” Mr. Wang said in an interview. “It will harm China-U.S. relations and bring about a serious and active impact on bilateral communication and cooperation.”        

China experts said that Beijing was likely to cut off military-to-military cooperation with the United States in retaliation, and that President Hu Jintao might boycott Mr. Obama’s planned nuclear security summit meeting in April.        

The relationship between the two countries may deteriorate more if Mr. Obama meets, as he is expected to, with the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Mr. Obama put off meeting with the Dalai Lama last year to avoid angering Beijing before his visit to China in November, a decision that received strong criticism from human rights activists.        

Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, said Friday that the announcement should not “come as a surprise to our Chinese friends,” adding that the Obama administration was “bent on a new relationship with China that goes beyond arms sales to Taiwan.” Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, General Jones sought to play down the escalating tensions between the United States and China.       

Those tensions have been on full display since Mr. Obama traveled to Beijing in November. While Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu promised to conduct regular exchanges and to work together on a number of issues, they did not reach an agreement on how to move forward on Western efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Obama administration officials now say that they view China, not Russia, as the main stumbling block on efforts to get a Security Council resolution that would impose additional sanctions on Iran.        

A month after Mr. Obama went to Beijing, China blocked his efforts to reach a meaningful climate change agreement in Copenhagen. China announced this month that it had tested the country’s first land-based missile defense system, a test that Chinese and Western analysts said was timed to convey Beijing’s annoyance over the expected American arms sales to Taiwan. Throughout January, Chinese state news media have produced a torrent of articles condemning the expected sale.        

China views Taiwan as a breakaway province, separated since the civil war of the 1940s, and sees arms sales as interference in an internal matter. The American relationship with Taiwan is one of the most delicate diplomatic issues between Beijing and Washington.        

The deal announced Friday is the second big arms sale to Taiwan in two years. When the Pentagon announced in October 2008, under the Bush administration, that it was selling Taiwan $6.6 billion worth of weapons, China froze military ties with the United States and did not resume the contacts until after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Beijing last February.        

On Wednesday, the Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, urged China not to take that tack again. Responding to a question from a reporter before the sale was announced, Mr. Morrell said that “this relationship is too important to go through the fits and starts that we have over the years, where every little bump in the road results in a breaking of communication and a suspension of dialogue.”    


Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are both expected to travel to Beijing this year for high-level talks. Administration officials said Friday that they hoped China did not retract those two invitations.       


A version of this article appeared in print on January 30, 2010, on page A5 of the New York edition.        

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/world/asia/30arms.html        

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