Only a week before Taiwan's new president, elected on a pro-independence ticket, is to be inaugurated, Beijing has leaked a strategy which makes any action of Taiwan's part effectively moot. PNS editor Franz Schurmour projects.ry and sociology at UC-Berkeley and former chair of the Center for Chinese Studies, is author of numerous books on foreign politics.

It looks like the Taiwan crisis has been defused -- permanently.

Suddenly, Beijing has moved the spotlight away from Taiwan president-elect Chen Shui-bian simply by telling him, "Say whatever you want but we're not going to do anything for at least three years."

Chen is a founder of Taiwan's pro-independence Democratic People's Party (DPP). He has since moved to a position of "neither independence nor reunification." But he named a vice-president, Annette Lu, who loudly proclaims the old DPP stance: "We Taiwanese must recognize that we are a sovereign state."

Beijing's response has been, in effect, "Do that and we'll forcibly re-integrate Taiwan into our own sovereign Chinese state." That means war, a war that conceivably could draw in America. So worldwide eyes were focusing on Chen's May 20 inaugural address.

But on May 14, Beijing leaked to the global Sing Tao Daily the gist of its reunification strategy, to be announced during the plenary session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) in 2003. At that time it will be clear whether reunification is to be gained through peace or war.

China's President Jiang Zemin met with top leaders to discuss reunification on the eve of the May 1 holiday. Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, rising star Hu Jintao, Generals Zhang Wannian and Chi Haotian, and Qian Qichen, former foreign minister now Taiwan reunification head. The leaders then met with the entire Central Committee, the State Council and the Central Military Affairs Committee.

The implicit message from these meetings is that China's new proposal comes with 100 percent consensus. That's not a message Chen Shui-bian can transmit -- not only has the opposition Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) splintered but the DPP itself is factionalized, as evident in the divergent views of Chen and Lu.

Beijing's proposal considers three scenarios.

1. Taiwan continues to avoid taking a position on "One China" but secretly moves towards independence and seeks military allies. That means war, the proposal says bluntly.

2. Taiwan keeps finding excuses to avoid making a decision -- for example, that Taiwan is democratic while China is not. In this case the 2003 NPC will decide whether reunification comes through peace or war.

3. Taiwan accepts reunification. In that case, the year 2011 will be set for the formal proclamation of reunification. This will be the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty and the proclamation of the Chinese Republic in 1911.

Although Beijing's offer was timed to come just before Chen Shui-bian's inaugural address, it goes far beyond wanting to outshine the new president. It comes at a time when China's wealth, power and prestige have hit a new high.

At the same time Taiwan's two biggest foreign friends, America and Japan, are slipping away. America publicly humiliated Taiwan by refusing to sell it advanced warships. And Japan is in a slump it seems incapable of getting out of. Meanwhile Taiwan's big business community is straining at the leashes to fully get into the China boom.

All Chen Shui-bian has to do in his inaugural address is say nothing about reunification or independence. He has already said he wants to open all trade routes between the mainland and Taiwan.

So by the spring of 2003 China and Taiwan will already have been unified. A sign of the trend may already be evident. Mainland China is called "the Chinese People's Republic," while Taiwan is called "the Republic of China." Both names already agree on "one China."

When pro-independence advocates called for a Republic of Taiwan the reaction in Taiwan and in Overseas Chinese communities was massively negative. So it looks like the Taiwan crisis has been already been defused -- forever.