Piquing China just days before meetings with its leaders, US President George W. Bush yesterday held up Taiwan as a model of freedom "at all levels" that the communist giant should emulate.
Bush's speech opening a four-country tour of Asia amounted to a road map of the coming discussions he was to have on a potential bird-flu outbreak, global trade, North Korea's nuclear ambitions and other issues at a gathering of Pacific Rim economies in South Korea.
Bush arrived in Busan, South Korea, last night for the APEC summit and a one-on-one meeting with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. The US president met with his closest Asian ally, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, in Kyoto, Japan, earlier yesterday and was traveling to China and Mongolia over the weekend.
PHOTO: AFP
In remarks sure to irritate his Chinese hosts, Bush prodded the communist nation to grant basic freedoms to its 1.3 billion people and further open its economy.
"We encourage China to continue down the road of reform and openness," Bush told an audience that stayed silent until its polite applause at the end. "By meeting the legitimate demands of its citizens for freedom and openness, China's leaders can help their country grow into a modern, prosperous and confident nation."
His challenge to Beijing immediately followed lavish praise of Taiwan.
"By embracing freedom at all levels, Taiwan has delivered prosperity to its people and created a free and democratic Chinese society," Bush said. Pointing to Taiwan -- as well as South Korea -- Bush said political freedoms are the inevitable product of the kind of economic liberalization China has begun pursuing.
"Men and women who are allowed to control their own wealth will eventually insist on controlling their own lives and their own future. As China reforms its economy, its leaders are finding that once the door to freedom is opened even a crack, it cannot be closed," he said.
Comparing Taiwan and China, even indirectly, raises a major thorn in US-China relations. While US policy recognizes only one China -- including Taiwan -- and opposes Taiwanese independence, Washington is also Taiwan's largest arms benefactor and is bound by the Taiwan Relations Act to help Taiwan defend itself if attacked.
Bush's speech was an attempt to follow through on his inaugural promise to predicate US relations with all nations on their treatment of their citizens -- a pledge that meets its most difficult test with strategic allies such as China, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Still, the call for change in China was not as tough as some on Capitol Hill and among his conservative supporters might want, as it was accompanied by praise on several fronts.
Bush recognized that economic reforms have resulted in a better-housed, better-fed populace, and he lauded China's leadership in the effort to rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons programs.
But while the US president said China should allow people to worship without state control -- a point he hoped to underscore by visiting an officially recognized church while in Beijing -- Bush did not mention China's human rights record.
"The Chinese are not going to like being scolded," said Adam Segal, who studies China at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "But if they are of the mind to, they can read it with a positive spin."
Beijing's response was muted.
"Our common points outnumber our differences," Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing (
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