Dressed in immaculate grey suit and tie, and with rimless spectacles and scrubbed features, Mr Chen Shui-bian looks more like a mainland bureaucrat than the Taiwanese politician Beijing hates most. China's ultimatum to Taiwan on Monday to stop stalling on talks about unification, or else, was widely perceived as an attempt to undermine Mr Chen, the front-runner in Taiwan's presidential election.
Of the three contenders in a closely-fought race, the 49-year-old former mayor of Taipei is most closely associated with the goal of independence for Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province. But in an interview in his office in the Taiwan capital yesterday, Mr Chen was at pains to play down the implicit threat in China's sabre-rattling - that Taiwan would face serious instability if he emerged victorious over his rivals, Nationalist Party candidate Vice-President Lien Chan or Independent Mr James Soong.
"Cross-strait relations are at a very low point, historically speaking," Mr Chen said, referring to the breakdown in talks between Beijing and Taipei last year after President Lee Teng-hui characterised Taiwan's relationship with China as state-to-state.
"I don't think it can get any worse than this." He said he would not push any independence issues after the election, nor would he seek to put into the constitution the state-to-state theory, which so infuriated Beijing. Moreover, he promised, his Democratic Progressive Party "would not hold a referendum to decide the national status, and we would not declare independence if China does not invade us".
This makes the China policy of Mr Chen, a former political prisoner under the Nationalist regime whose wife was crippled by political thugs, close to that of his two rivals, though Beijing seemed to have Mr Chen in mind when it railed against those who allegedly spoke soft and reasonable words to mask their true intentions. Dismissing the suggestion that he was the target, Mr Chen argued that in the 1996 election China fired missiles close to Taiwan to affect the outcome of the election, but this time its aim was to affect the policy of the candidates. In this the DPP candidate, known to his followers as "Abian", has a point. All three candidates accept the state-to-state policy, and there is less pressure on Mr Chen to prove his independence credentials to his followers.
"Taiwan is already an independent country," Mr Chen said, explaining why there was no need for a declaration of independence or an early referendum on Taiwan's future status, either of which would precipitate a more serious crisis with Beijing. If he won the election, ending the half-century dominance of the Nationalist Party, he said he would offer to visit mainland China, and invite China's President Jiang Zemin to come to Taiwan.
He would encourage interaction and dialogue, and would even discuss Beijing's one-China policy, though he feigned confusion about what that was. "I would prove to Beijing, Washington and even Tokyo that I am someone whom all these places can negotiate with, and I am someone who can carry out constructive dialogue, that I am someone of flexibility and responsibility. We want co-operation and not war. We want competition and not struggling against each other." So there was no need to "get too hyped up or too tense" about China's new policy. "But we want to remind the Chinese to remember the experience of four years ago, that such threatening pressure tactics against Taiwan will only further alienate the Taiwanese people".
In Washington, the Clinton administration and Congress on Tuesday sharply criticised China's threat to attack Taiwan if it did not discuss reunification. China's ambassador was summoned to the State Department to be told the US rejected the use of force or the threat of force to resolve the issue. The White House urged China and Taiwan to resolve their differences over unification without resorting to force. "We have repeated, in I think both actions and words, that we view any threat to Taiwan with grave concern," said the White House spokesman, Mr Joe Lockhart.