It is still unclear why Mr. Lee Teng-hui, the president of Taiwan, said earlier this month that relations between his government and China's mainland government should be conducted on a "special state-to-state" basis. (Any hopes that he had been misquoted were shattered when he repeated the comments earlier this week.) Predictably, the comment enraged Beijing and has triggered a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan's friends immediately disavowed any support for the island's independence, but that has not prevented an increase of tension in the region -- without any commensurate gains for Taipei. If anything, Mr. Lee has done his country a disservice and offered China an opportunity to score diplomatic points at its expense merely by acting responsibly. It is a chance that Beijing should not squander.

There are several explanations for Mr. Lee's comment. In an article on the opposite page, Mr. David Shambaugh, a longtime U.S. China-watcher, argues that domestic factors, such as the election next year or Mr. Lee's legacy, were the president's chief concerns. The suggestion that Mr. Lee might have been speaking off the cuff -- a habit he is noted for -- is belied by reports that a top-secret panel had been studying the implications of the statement for a year.

Yet no matter what the explanation, it must be noted that Mr. Lee did not declare independence. Indeed, he explicitly said that there was "no need to declare independence." Moreover, the president did not assert that Taiwan and the mainland were no longer separately governed parts of the same country. Such subtleties should not be lost on the Beijing government.