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This paper offers an institutional account of how President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan has sent important messages across the Taiwan Strait. Under Taiwan's constitutional system, the parliament can neither hold the president accountable for what he says nor sack the premier appointed by the president, while a president who lacks legislative support also finds it hard to put his policy goals into practice. These problems give President Chen the excuse to set up extra-constitutional channels to deliver pro-independence messages, some of which go against his official pledges. Here, a collection of Chen's important remarks directed across the Taiwan Strait are analyzed, and a consistent pattern is revealed of when and where he is likely to say what. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a conceptualization of cross-Strait relations during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, it traces the path by which the Bush administration came to play a balancing role in cross-Strait relations. As will be seen, there is more than a little irony about the current state of cross-Strait relations. First, the Bush administration's policy toward the conflict between China and Taiwan has been measured and primarily reactive, in contrast to its aggressive initiatives elsewhere, suggesting a policy of "muddling through." Second, President George W. Bush has evidently become upset with President Chen Shui-bian on several occasions for acting like, well, President Bush: appealing to his base constituency and being "bold" in foreign affairs. Finally and more analytically, a policy of muddling through (which can be discerned in Beijing and Taipei as well as in Washington) does not imply very good policymaking, especially in such a vital area as the relations between Taiwan and China. Yet, at least so far, muddling through seems to have worked tolerably well in the sense that crises in cross-Strait relations have been defused and that they now appear fairly stable, despite the fundamental disagreement between Beijing and Taipei over Taiwan's sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In “Diversionary Dragons, or ‘Talking Tough in Taipei’” (Journal of East Asian Studies 9, 3: 369-398), Yitan Li, Patrick James, and A. Cooper Drury presented a newly created data set to show that Chen Shui-bian used independence rhetoric and confrontation with the mainland as a diversionary tactic in the face of domestic political difficulties. In the present exchange, Jonathan Sullivan challenges the authors’ understanding of how the Democratic Progressive Party used the Taiwan independence issue-and the authors’ interpretation of independence- and raises questions about the coding of press coverage as a means of identifying underlying preferences. The authors respond, concluding that the future use of such diversionary tactics is by no means foreclosed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]