You do not have to be d professionally trained observer to note that when hot air is blown into a balloon, the balloon gets bigger.
Such was clearly the case with the recent talks conducted to retrieve a China Airlines (CAL) cargo-liner and two members of its crew from the control of Communist China.
The aircraft, diverted to Canton by the pilot on its way from Bangkok to Hongkong, carried along two decidedly reluctant CAL crew members.
The pilot, if he had gone on to Hongkong a few minutes flying time further, could have quite easily proceeded directly to Communist China from Hongkong by himself, on a Communist Chinese plane or by train. Instead, he took the CAL plane and crew along with him on a one-way flight to "join his aging father."
To get the plane back, CAL had to agree to deal directly with Peking's "Civil Air Administration of China (CAAC)," though Cathay Pacific Airways was ready and waiting to receive the plane on behalf of CAL. The plane could simply have been flown on to Hongkong and been turned over to CAL there by Cathay Pacific, without any fuss.
So this was not at all some kind of necessary procedure to return a hijacked aircraft. It was one more Peking exercise to manipulate the media into blowing up another in an endless series of Communist propaganda balloons.
Predictably, the minimal contact between CAAC representatives and China Airlines that ended in the final turnover of the aircraft and two of its three crew members, was grotesquely inflated, in too many reports, into "direct contact" between the ROC and Communist China "for the first time since 1949." Other breathless media speculation proceeded to fathom some kind of weakening in the enduring ROC policy of "no contact, no negotiation, no compromise " with Communist China.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
As the ROC government spokesman, Dr. King-yuh Chang, very quickly and very forcefully stipulated. "The CA L-CAAC talks do not hold any political portents and have nothing to do with the set policy of the Republic of China."
That set policy, incidentally, is neither opaque nor simplistic. It can and obviously does contemplate momentary tactical divergences without fundamental portent—in this case very much like the abruptly dashing rescue by a sedate parent, attending a formal public ceremony, of a suddenly fleeing tot: the parent has not abandoned his basic standards of public behavior because he dashed off to rescue the tot.
The ROC policy is also always conscious of how much can be (and is) made of such "flexibility" by the media—a "natural" dramatization by-product which furthers all sorts of Peking propaganda objectives; that lesson was learned long ago in repetitive, direct experiences.
Above all else, the ROC government principle of "no contact" with the Peking regime is and will continue to be vigorously and wisely observed, because any basic deviation would be sharply detrimental to the interests of the people of the Republic of China on Taiwan, to the billion on the mainland, and to overseas Chinese in many countries.... And devastating, also, for the general causes of freedom and democracy—for their future prospects in a heavily armed and divided world.