Taiwan's dangerous game.(THE LAST WORD)

On March 22, voters on Taiwan elected Nationalist Party candidate Ma Ying-jeou, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former Taipei mayor, as president of the Republic of China. Ma, who defeated Democratic Progressive Party candidate Frank Hsieh by a 58-percent to 42-percent margin, will be Taiwan's first president to have campaigned for closer economic relations with communist mainland China.

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The news of Ma's election triggered a surge in Taiwan's stock market, prompted by expectations that Ma's economic policies will spur the nation's stagnant economy. The president-elect said in a March 23 interview that he hoped his new policy of opening Taiwan to tourism from mainland China would have a positive effect on the economy within 100 days of being implemented.

If the voters of Taiwan seem shortsighted for emphasizing economic prosperity at the expense of national security and even future sovereignty, maybe they are merely playing the hand dealt to them by the world's superpowers (the United States included) as best they can. President Bill Clinton admitted bluntly in his 1998 Shanghai Library remarks on "Shaping China for the 21st Century": "We don't support independence for Taiwan, or two Chinas or one Taiwan, one China. And we don't believe that Taiwan should be a member in any organization for which statehood is a requirement."

Clinton's remarks reflected a long history of U.S. acquiescence and even favoritism toward the communists on mainland China. In fact, U.S. policies encouraging trade deals with China, including even deals subsidized by the U.S. government, have helped to make China a major player in the international marketplace.

Yet, in terms of the balance of trade with China, Taiwan is actually faring much better than we are. A report posted at the communist Chinese government's website at the end of 2006 indicated that the value of goods exported that year from Taiwan to the mainland totaled $79.2 billion, while Taiwan imported $18.9 billion of goods from the mainland. The report observed: "The mainland has become the biggest export market and the biggest source of trade surplus for Taiwan, according to the [mainland Chinese] ministry [of Commerce]."

On the other hand, the United States suffered a $232 billion deficit with China that same year. U.S. trade with China has been a losing proposition since the days when President Nixon first called for the "normalizing of relations" and establishing trade with ...