China will be watching closely to see whether the Bush administration lobbies hard for others to vote for it. So that s another potential friction point. Then there will be another vote that Congress must make on the subject of Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization. That will be a hot one, I think, because this recent surveillance plane incident will have turned some minds on Capitol Hill against voting for the WTO membership. At the top of the shopping list that the Taiwanese submitted is the Aegis destroyer and missile defense system.
Most analysts think they won t get it.
And they might, it is not clear. It s the longest military shopping list that Taiwan has ever presented. And they are likely to get a lot of it. An AOL Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.