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Here is an article which i have found on asia time, it is about taiwan solution and i find it quiet interessting:

GENEVA - If President George W Bush's recent statement on Taiwan is to be taken at face value, the island represents such a major strategic security concern to the United States that Washington is ready to go to war to preserve the status quo.

Granted, Bush no doubt did not fully realize the full implications of his words and the administration subsequently back-tracked from his statement, but the very fact that he spoke as he did is a good measure of the obsessive fixation with China which has been, over the past century, one of the hallmarks of US policy. Thus, 10 years after the end of the Cold War, Washington remains entangled in what is nothing more than the continuing saga of the 80-year-old Chinese civil war.

In 1949, following its defeat on the mainland at the hands of the communists, the US-supported government of the Republic of China withdrew to Taiwan. In 1951, in the wake of the Korean War, the US sent the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to preempt any possible communist landing, thus ensuring the survival of the Kuomintang (KMT) regime on the island-province.

What emerged were two competing Chinese governments; on the mainland, the government of the People's Republic of China controlled by the Communist Party, and on Taiwan the government of the Republic of China controlled by the KMT. Both governments claimed to be the sole legitimate representative of China and thus, by definition, adhered to a "One China" policy.

For some 20 years, the US succeeded on imposing on the non-communist world the fiction that Taiwan - rather than Beijing - represented China. In the realm of Washington's political mythology, "Red China", as opposed to "Free China", which endured on Taiwan, became the personification of evil; a regime so repulsive that it had to be isolated at all costs and with which even contemplating a dialogue was an act of moral depravation.

It was only in 1970, after the election of Richard Nixon to the US presidency, and the nomination of Henry Kissinger as Advisor for National Security that Washington, as part of its efforts to find a negotiated solution to the Vietnam War, decided to regard and address China as one of the main actors in the world balance of power rather than as the incarnation of the devil.

Before approaching Beijing, Kissinger asked a number of American academics what was, in their mind, the prerequisite for the resumption of a dialogue between the US and China. The consensual reply was that Taiwan was Beijing's main priority and that China would never enter into a dialogue with the US if that issue were not addressed. Kissinger, the consummate politician, thought otherwise and so did the leaders in Beijing. Indeed, while they viewed the issue of Taiwan as substantive, its dimension paled in comparison to the threat represented by the Soviet Union. Thus, for the leaders in Beijing, the priorities were self-evident; the major threat should be dealt with first and Taiwan could wait.

It was on this premise that the whole edifice of the new US/China relation was constructed. Its foundation was the commonly perceived Soviet threat. In the meantime, Taiwan would be put on the back burner to be dealt with in a hypothetical future on the understanding that the status quo would be preserved.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought to an end this marriage of convenience. What had been a strategic partnership cemented by a common enemy became a conventional relation between on one hand the longest uninterrupted civilization in history and, on the other, the last surviving superpower.

That in these changed circumstances the Taiwan issue would reemerge is hardly surprising. That it would do so with a vengeance is mostly due to one man; Taiwan's former president Lee Teng-hui. During his presidency in the mid-1990s, Lee began to challenge the status quo by initiating a drift towards independence. Lee belonged to that generation of Taiwanese raised when the island was a Japanese colony. A alumni of Kyoto Imperial University, Lee made no secret of the fact that in his youth he felt more Japanese than Chinese. There is reason to suspect that Lee's move was encouraged by some elements of the Japanese establishment who never reconciled themselves with the loss of Taiwan.

By moving towards independence, Lee was undermining the claim of the Kuomintang that its "Republic of China" on Taiwan was the only legitimate representative of the Chinese state. This clearly was of no concern to Lee. Paradoxically, it was to China. Beijing could put up, albeit uncomfortably, with a "One China, Two Governments" situation. This had been a recurring situation in Chinese history when one dynasty would overthrow another, which would then retreat to a distant corner of the empire while still claiming the whole nation.

Conversely, the notion of a breakaway Taiwan, proclaiming independence under the umbrella of a foreign power and thus amounting to a partition of the national territory as a result of an outside intervention, was more than Beijing could stomach. Thus, the bottom line was that independence for Taiwan meant war with China, a point which was forcefully put to Taiwan's pro-independence new President Chen Shui-bian when he was elected in March 2000 to succeed Lee Teng-hui.

While there has been a good amount of saber rattling on all sides, and Washington has recently acquiesced to a new spate of arms procurement by Taiwan, the military dimension of the problem is actually irrelevant to the issue. Not only does China not have the amphibious means to invade Taiwan, but also it is not in the process of building such a capacity. Thus it will not have the physical means to invade Taiwan possibly for decades. What Beijing does have, now and even more so in the future, are enough conventional means combined with diplomatic and economic pressure to thoroughly destroy the island's economic viability. That such a development would lead to a major regional crisis is an understatement.

Confronted with the real possibility of being drawn into a wider China/Taiwan confrontation, Washington's policy has been one of negative passivity. While on one hand the US has reaffirmed its "Three No" policy - no to independence, no to a one China/one Taiwan and no to two Chinas - the overall thrust of its policy towards the island has provided Taiwan's political establishment with a strong disincentive to negotiate a realistic settlement with Beijing. However, with time no longer on the side of peace and with the US increasingly risking getting drawn into a conflict in which none of its security imperatives are at stake, keeping the problem on hold in the hope that it will just fade away is no longer an option.

There are two reasons why a negotiated settlement is now within the realm of the possible.

First, in a somewhat paradoxical way, with the passing of time, Taiwan and the mainland have actually been moving closer. Over the past 50 years, the mainland went from being a Marxist totalitarian regime to a market-oriented, one-party system, a reasonable facsimile to what Taiwan was in the early 1960s. Taiwan went from a one-party system to a multiparty democracy, a development certainly facilitated both by the island's interaction with the outside world and by the manageable size of its population. With both Chinese parties now committed to a market economy, the ideological divide between the between the two sides has for all practical purposes been bridged. Were it not so, Taiwan today would not be one of the main investors on the mainland.

Second, the creation of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has clearly demonstrated that Beijing has accepted the principal that there is room in China for more than one system. Thus conceptually there is no reason why the "one China, two systems" cannot become "one China, three systems". This would also be consonant with China's recent past, namely the "Three Peoples Principals" of Dr Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese Republic, whom both the communists and the Kuomintang claim as one of theirs.

The "Three Principals" entail nationalism, that is to say the unity of the motherland; democracy, meaning the wish of the people of Taiwan to retain their own system; and livelihood, meaning economic development, and remain the uncontested foundations of modern China. The substantive issue will of course be how to translate these principals into a viable agreement. The prerequisite will be a genuine wish to negotiate by the contenders of the ongoing Chinese civil war. While this wish has yet to be expressed (Lee Teng-hui was a master at raising preconditions he knew Beijing could not accept) the level of rhetoric has clearly abated and both Beijing and Chen Shui-bian have shown commendable restraint

The outcome of a creative negotiations process should be a formula that, under a One China umbrella, would permit Taiwan to retain all its institutions, be they political, legal or financial, as well as its armed forces relabeled "self defense units", its foreign trade offices and even its flag in parallel with the national flag.

Both Taiwan and the mainland would profit immensely from such a solution. Taiwan could contribute substantially both to the modernization of the mainland's economy and also to the evolution of its institutions.

Conversely, unrestricted access to the mainland would provide Taiwan with a major source of labor as well as with a market of major potentials. The end result would not only remove from the map a potential source for a major conflict in Asia but could well prove a win-win solution for all concerned

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