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Washington, Jan. 13 (CNA) Unless changes are made in the United States' China policy, sometime in the next decade an American president will witness either an internal upheaval in mainland China or an attempt by Beijing to take Taiwan, and the former will very likely lead to the latter, according to an article published in the latest issue of "Hoover Digest" quarterly magazine.

Charles Hill, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution which publishes the magazine, wrote that President Bill Clinton's handling of the US-PRC relationship has bolstered the growing assumption that East Asia has become the world's most dangerous region.

"Oddly enough for big-power politics, it is not acts or ideas or statements that raise the risks involved, but an attitude that the US has allowed to take root in the Chinese hierarchy -- that no matter what moves China may take against our interests, Washington will find a way to sidestep it, play it down, or explain it away," said Hill.

When Communist China fired missiles to bracket and, in effect, blockade Taiwan in March 1996, Clinton took credit for "the bold response" of sending aircraft carriers to the area. Not lost on the Communist Chinese, however, was the fact that they closed the Taiwan Straits during the operation without being challenged by the US Navy, noted the author.

And the revelation in 1999 that Communist China had penetrated the most secret US weapons laboratories and stolen intelligence on every warhead in the US arsenal was predictably downplayed by the Clinton administration, said Hill.

He is convinced that mainland China's internal situation similarly is affected by an American attitude that adds up to avoidance. Throughout the 1990s, American policy has been shaped by the conviction that mainland China's economic development will be the locomotive that inevitably pulls human rights and democracy into the Communist Chinese polity.

The problem with this theory is two-fold, Hill pointed out. First, it justifies American inaction on the ground that current setbacks to freedom are insignificant. Second, it encourages the determination of the Chinese leaders to gain wealth and power from the technology and economic dynamism of the West without relinquishing their traditional forms of political control over the people.

"As the Asian economic crisis of 1997-1998 should have demonstrated, economic advances under conditions that lack of the transparency and accountability of democracy cannot be sustained," stressed Hill.

He concluded that the "Clinton administration's handling of the US-China relationship has allowed dangerous tendencies to gather strength. Unless changes are made in US policy, sometime in the next decade an American president will witness either an internal upheaval in China, demonstrating that the Chinese revolution that began a century and a half ago is not yet over, or an attempt by Beijing to take Taiwan." (By Nelson Chung)