HONG KONG -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has asserted that China would "pay any price to safeguard the unity of the motherland," clearly implying that Beijing would not shrink from the war option against Taiwan.
Yet neither within China nor without has there been much analysis suggesting that the price paid by China would almost certainly be prohibitive.
At the very moment when China appears to be on the crest of a development wave, it is thrusting itself in a direction in which it should not want to go. China is once again threatening war in the Taiwan Strait, and even nuclear war with the United States, over Taiwan's disinclination to adhere to Beijing's interpretation of the "one China" policy.
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