This  article was originally published, in an earlier version, in the June 2, 2008 issue of  the Taipei Times

To say that I worry about the growing ties between Taiwan's new KMT government and China is an understatement. I'm a U.S. citizen, but my home and family are here. I don't relish the prospect of refugee life.

The stated goals of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (å�³ä¼¯é›„) for his visit to China last year — peace, expanded business ties and increased tourism — sound benign and modest enough. The word unification wasn't even whispered. Since then, business has in fact improved: the first direct flights from Taipei to Beijing and Shanghai, thousand of Mainland tourists visiting Taiwan each month, talk of greater commercial and educational exchange. But anytime one deals with Beijing, looking deeper and farther is essential.

China’s leaders, despite their bluster about invasion and occasional missile practice in the Taiwan Strait, are nothing if not patient. With, as they believe, the “current of history” on their side, they prefer a gradualist approach; secure in their positions, their plans are spun out over decades, not the four-year cycles of Taiwanese or U.S. politics.

Consider Tibet. The Chinese have been in power there since 1951, with the Beijing gradually but relentlessly wearing down Tibetan culture and identity under a program of Han Chinese immigration, the crowning achievement of which is the completion of the Bejing-Lhasa railway.

This campaign, described by the Dalai Lama as a program of “cultural genocide,” bore its deadliest fruit during last year's protests and the Chinese crackdown that followed, when Beijing justified its brutal actions as necessary to protect Han Chinese from violence at the hands of Tibetans.  Now, we're hearing similar arguments from Bejing about the need for a military solution to the Uighur-Han violence on China's western border.

Such a claim is reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s insistence on annexing the Czech Sudetenland to protect the rights of ethnic Germans, as well as  his eventual invasion of Poland, also allegedly to protect the German minority.  (Closer to home, one might recall Ronald Reagan’s claim that his invasion of newly-Marxist Grenada was motivated by his concern for the handful of U.S. citizens there).

Imagine for a moment that there is a real, long-term thaw in relations between China and Taiwan, bringing with it much greater trade, tourism and perhaps even a large, semi-permanent Chinese population in Taiwan. Imagine then that a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-style government is once again elected on an independence platform. A Chinese invasion, instead of making Beijing an international pariah, might be then viewed as a regrettable but necessary step to protect the safety and business interests of its own people.

It’s an alarming scenario, but not, I think, an alarmist one. Taiwanese would do well to weigh the short-term benefits of an accommodation with China against the long-range consequences. The little bird that picks the crocodile’s teeth eats well — for a while.