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Cross-strait military imbalance continues to grow: U.S. commission

ROC Central News Agency

2010/11/18 13:29:40

By Zep Hu and Deborah Kuo

Washington, Nov. 17 (CNA) The security situation in the Taiwan Strait remains a concern despite the development of closer cross-strait relations over the past year, a U.S. Congressional commission said Wednesday.

The overall relationship between Taiwan and China has seen an "unbalanced improvement" over the past year, said Carolyn Bartholomew, vice chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), in her opening remarks on the commission's 2010 annual report.

Despite that China and Taiwan have signed a historic free trade agreement that will further integrate their two economies and they have continued to institutionalize their diplomatic relations, Bartholomew said, China still continues its military buildup from across Taiwan and has refused to renounce the use of force to reclaim the island.

Noting that China was estimated to have deployed between 1,050 and 1,150 short-range ballistic missiles opposite the island, Bartholomew said that the matter was further complicated by Taiwan's decreasing capability to adequately defend itself from a Chinese air and missile assault.

Meanwhile, Dan Blumenthal, a former Pentagon China official who is now a USCC member, told reporters that the annual report did not include a recommendation to provide F-16 C/D fighters to Taiwan because commission members were not able to reach a consensus on the issue.

A unanimous agreement would be required for such a recommendation to be included in the report, which is being submitted to Congress.

Everyone on the commission agreed that Taiwan's air defence was inadequate and that something had to be done to solve the problem, he said. However, not everybody thought that the proposed sale of the advanced fighter jets was the solution, he said.

"In the interest of getting a unanimous vote and an agreement on the fact that there is a problem, we decided to forego a unanimous solution to the problem, except that there has to be a lot more done to ameliorate the cross-strait imbalance," Blumenthal said.

This is the commission's eighth major report since it was established in 2000 with the aim of monitoring whether and how China fulfills the promises it made when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.