In response to Kuomintang (KMT) Legislator Su Chi’s proposal to cut the Ministry of National Defense’s budget for the development of the Syongfong II-E missile system, the president said while visiting a temple in downtown Taipei that Su made the proposal as if he were not a citizen of the country, but someone eager to yield the island to China. As if it were not bad enough for the country’s defense to scuttle the government’s budget for arms purchase from the United States, Chen said that the opposition, mainly the KMT and the People First Party (PFP), in the legislature are trying to cut the Defense Ministry’s budget for development of Syongfong II-E, a missile system needed for the country to defend itself.

Those who advocate this idea are people who support Beijing’s “one China” policy and nurture the idea of reuniting with China, Chen claimed, urging the public to guard against them.

At issue is Su’s call, carried in a Sunday newspaper, for the opposition parties in the legislature to put on hold the Defense Ministry’s request for NT$3.8 billion for the mass production of the Syongfong II-E missiles until the KMT controls the government after the next presidential election.

Noting that Su had “falsely” claimed last week that he had ordered the development of nuclear weapons, Chen said the ruling Democratic Progressive Party has advocated a nuclear-free Taiwan ever since its founding in 1986, and he himself had helped to expose the KMT administration’s scheme to develop nuclear weapons twenty years ago.

In order to show Su’s lack of credibility, Chen said that the lawmaker had claimed in 1992 in his capacity as the chief of the Mainland Affairs Council under the KMT administration that Taiwan and China had agreed to disagree on what means “one China”, but it was denied afterward by Koo Chen-fu, Taiwan’s then-chief negotiator with China.

As of yesterday, both the KMT and the PFP legislative caucuses seemed to be apprehensive about embracing Su’s proposal.

Legislator Kuo Shu-chun, secretary of the KMT caucus said KMT lawmakers will consider Su’s proposal seriously, adding that there are causes for Su’s concerns that President Chen might use the Syongfong II-E missile, which Su claimed to be an offensive weapon capable of reaching Shanghai, to engineer an incident across the Taiwan Strait before the March 22, 2008 presidential election.

An anonymous PFP lawmaker said his party opposed the Defense Ministry’s NT$340 billion arms purchase budget because the prices Washington charged were obviously too high, but the NT$3.8 billion budget for the Syongfong II-Es is not excessive and its cancellation might open his party to public criticism.

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