WASHINGTON TIMES
July 8, 2007

Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian ("Beijing's ‘One China': The Cross-strait Jacket" Oped, July 3) states that  "After 10 years of experience with ‘one country, two systems' in Hong Kong, the public's expectation of electing their executive chief and all legislators has not been met."

Clearly, the Hong Kong experience teaches the people of Taiwan the lesson that freedom and democracy are words that do not appear in Beijing's vocabulary. And that Beijing's "One China" is a mere fallacy, a Chinese pie in the sky, to which the 23 million peace-loving people of Taiwan do not aspire to adhere at all.

Disturbingly, the United States maintains its own version of the "One China Policy." The 1972 U.S.-China Shanghai Communiqué, the cradle of this One China Policy, states that "The U.S. acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China."  

True, at the time, both the Communist government in Beijing and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government in Taipei claimed sovereignty over each other's territory.

But in the early nineties, the Taiwan side unilaterally gave up its claims on the mainland, thus effectively rendering the "U.S. One China Policy" null and void.

Now that Taiwan is a de facto independent country and a bastion of democracy and human rights, the time has come for the international community (including the United States) to accept the reality in the Taiwan Strait and either abolish the One China Policy completely or have this outdated Cold War relic replaced by a policy more clearly reflecting today's reality: a "U.S. One China, One Taiwan policy."

Sincerely,


CT Lee, President
Formosan Association for Public Affairs
Washington