New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani met Tuesday morning with the president of Taiwan, referred afterward to the nation of 22 million people as a "remarkable country," then scoffed at Chinese reporters who heatedly asked if the mayor planned to recognize Taiwan as its own nation.
"Well, I don't get to recognize countries," an exasperated Giuliani said at a City Hall news conference after his meeting with the Taiwanese leader, Chen Shui-bian (
He said: "And the State Department said it was OK to visit with him. So, you can now go out and make a big deal out of it in some distorted way if you want. That's your job."
Giuliani's press secretary, Sunny Mindel, said that the mayor's reference to Taiwan as a country was "a manner of speaking" and not a political statement at odds with the US policy of recognizing only one Chinese government.
A State Department official shrugged off the mayor's remarks.
"Rudy Giuliani doesn't represent US policy," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Although the US does not recognize Taiwan as a country, critics of China, among them many Republicans, often refer to it as one.
Giuliani's comments, and Chen's visit to New York City, come at a delicate time in relations between Washington and Beijing.
Last month President George W. Bush seemed to upgrade relations with Taiwan when he said that the US would do "whatever it takes" to defend it, but he also said later that Taiwan should not declare independence or provoke an attack by China.
His administration later gave Chen, over angry Chinese opposition, permission to stop briefly in the US on his way to and from Latin America.
But the official position of the US government is that the visit is unofficial, even though more than two dozen members of Congress took an Air Force jet from Andrews Air Force base outside Washington on Monday evening to have dinner with Chen at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan.
"He certainly seemed to be enjoying the fact that he had freedom of movement and that he was being treated like a world leader," said Representative Peter King. "Unlike the last time, when he was treated like he was under house arrest."
King was referring to Chen's last pass through the US, in August, when the Clinton administration sequestered him in his hotel room in Los Angeles and discouraged members of Congress from visiting him.
Still, Chen moved about the city on Tuesday as if he was a world leader under an order of silence. He held no news conferences and made no public statements. Even Giuliani was whisked into an 8am meeting with Chen without speaking to reporters who stood in a rain-drenched clump on the sidewalk.
Chen was then driven to the New York Stock Exchange, where his limousine sped by reporters waiting outside the main entrance and turned a corner to let the president in the side door. Chen was given a tour of the old and new trading floors by Richard Grasso, the exchange's chairman, who did not return a call seeking comment.
At his news conference, Giuliani, who noted that he was friendly with Chen from Chen's days as mayor of Taipei, said much of the meeting was devoted to discussions of expanding economic relationships between Taiwan and New York. Then he made the reference that caused the furor.
"Taiwan is a remarkable country when you consider the size of the country, the population, and what it's able to produce and the economy it's been able to build and grow," Giuliani said. He added that Taiwan was "a great and strong ally of the United States, and an outpost of democracy."
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