Taiwan "president" Chen Shui-bian reportedly said in an interview Friday that a planned referendum in March would not involve independence but call on the mainland to withdraw ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan and renounce the use of force against the island.

Chen contended that the referendum would help make people on the island and countries around the world more aware of what he described as an imminent and growing military threat from the mainland.

Feigning innocence, Chen's new initiative to focus the vote on the mainland's military posturing after Washington has bluntly discouraged him from holding a "defensive referendum" on independence is further provocation.

The island's pro-independence forces have pressed for a referendum for ages as a way to bypass constitutional barriers to try and "legitimize" independence.

Following months of discussion, the island's legislature passed a bill late last month mostly written by the island's opposition groups, most noticeably the Nationalist and People First parties. The bill severely limited the ability of the island's "president" to call a referendum except if the island's "sovereignty" is "facing an external threat." Chen says the mainland's missiles pose such a threat.

Once again, Chen showed us how swiftly he could move to make use of the clause, which the opposition parties had only supported in the legislature as a last resort in the election process.

Nobody in the world hopes more than the Chinese people do that the Taiwan question can be solved in a peaceful way.

The mainland will not renounce the use of force, if necessary, to reunite the mainland and Taiwan. This is not directed against the people in Taiwan but the foreign forces interfering in China's reunification and the separatists forces on the island attempting to foment "Taiwan independence."

The current cross-Straits situation is not the mainland pursuing reunification by force, but the island's diehard separatists stepping up their independence agenda, by relying on sophisticated weaponry from the United States, more boldly and overtly than ever before.

It is the Taiwan pro-independence forces who have pushed Beijing into a corner where it has to prepare to honour his words.

And it is the provocative stunts of the island's separatists that have created cross-Straits tension that will endanger the 23 million people on the island.

(China Daily December 9, 2003)