The recent annual Australia-US ministerial talks in Washington (involving Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Robert Hill and Downer) saw a long debate about Taiwan, with the US arguing that Beijing was being driven to a more muscular stance over Taiwan because of competition between President Hu Jintao and his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. The Australians see China's harder line but disagree with the US analysis about the reasons.

Meanwhile, shadow foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, after his visit to Beijing this month, believes the current tension over Taiwan is the most serious since 1996 when the US deployed its navy to the Taiwan Strait. In June, when he was in Washington, Rudd raised his concerns with National Security Council staff.

A fortnight ago on the Sunday program Rudd said: "I've got to say the 'W' word is starting to be muttered around the corridors of power in Beijing and this worries me greatly. When I met Chinese government officials the only thing they wanted to talk about was Taiwan."

Since his return to Australia, Rudd has made his concerns high profile. Interviewed by the ABC's Geraldine Doogue last Sunday, Rudd said: "They [China] believe that Chen is a person who is deeply personally, politically and psychologically committed to an independent Republic of Taiwan. That's their analytical conclusion."

He described a meeting with a Chinese leader who said that "with Chen Shui-bian, we have studied him, we have studied his words, we've observed his actions and we've done so for the last four years, we've now concluded that this individual is committed to taking Taiwan in the direction of independence and formal separation from China. And for those reasons we've now decided that we need a different approach to this man."

Rudd told this column that Taiwan has misread the politics of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. This is his equation -- China believes that Taiwan thinks because Beijing is hosting the Olympics that "China won't take military action in response to any independence push". That is, Taiwan thinks it has a period of immunity for an independence push. Rudd rejects this as "misplaced optimism" saying that Taiwan is deluding itself. Lest he be deemed an alarmist, Rudd said he had followed this issue closely since serving in our Beijing embassy in the early 1980s.

"I am deeply concerned about the possibility of armed conflict," Rudd told the ABC. "Do I regard it as a probability and inevitably? No. Do I regard it as a distinct possibility? Yes."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10195973%5E12250,00.html