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POLITICAL DIFFERENCES WITH U.S. TO BE SORTED OUT: OFFICIAL

2003-12-29 22:43:08

    Taipei, Dec. 29 (CNA) The differences between Taipei and Washington over Taiwan's forthcoming referendum will be sorted out, the country's representative to Washington, Chen Chien-jen, said here Monday.

    Briefing the Foreign Relations Committee of the Legislative Yuan over the country's ties with the United States, the de-facto ambassador to Washington said Taiwan's insistence on holding a national referendum and U.S. President George W. Bush's concerns over Taiwan's attempts to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait via a referendum have plunged bilateral ties into an "unprecedented" situation.

    With some 80 days to go before the March 20 presidential election, when the proposed referendum is expected to be held, Chen said however that the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, of which he is head, will do its utmost to sort out the differences.

    Chen, who is in Taipei to report on his work in Washington, said that while Taipei sees a referendum as necessary to consolidate the country's democracy, Washington sees it as a potential threat to the stability it works hard to maintain across the Taiwan Strait.

    Based on the long-term friendship between the two sides, Chen said he hopes the disagreement will be sorted out before March 20.

    He promised to spare no efforts to convince Washington that Taipei has no intention of changing the status quo via a referendum and that the root cause of the tension across the strait lies in Beijing's persistent military threat against Taiwan and the 496 missiles it has targeting the island.

    According to his analysis, the ties between Beijing and Washington are improving and mainland China has changed from what Bush called a "strategic competitor" in his early presidency to a "diplomatic partner" as he described the country in his welcome speech to visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in December.

    This is obviously because the United States needs Beijing's cooperation in the reconstruction of Iraq, disarming North Korea's nuclear power and addressing the trade imbalance between the two countries that gives Beijing a huge trade surplus.

    The closer ties between Beijing and Washington pose difficulties in Taiwan's association with the United States, Chen said.

    When Bush publicly aired his disapproval of Taiwan's referendum on Dec. 10, Chen said, the U.S. president was not appeasing the mainland China, rather he wanted to get the message across to Taiwan that Taiwan's referendum will be a big problem in bilateral ties and will constitute a threat to U.S. ground rules that neither side of the Taiwan Strait should change the status quo unilaterally.

    He said he will speak plainly when he reports to President Chen Shui-bian about the difficulties brought about by the referendum in ties with Washington and the potential dangers if they are not resolved properly.

(By Maubo Chang)

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