Taiwan to push UN referendum despite China protest

TAIPEI, June 20 (Reuters) Taiwan is to push ahead with plans for a referendum on joining the United Nations under its own name despite US and Chinese objections, a ruling party official said today.

The official for President Chen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) confirmed the referendum drive would continue, but declined further comment because she was not authorised to talk to the media.

But she referred to a report in the today edition of the pro-DPP Liberty Times, in which party secretary general Lin Chia-lung was quoted as saying that ''regardless of whether or not the United States opposes, we will push forward with this referendum agenda''.

Beijing insists that Taiwan is a breakaway province which must be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. It accuses the DPP, in power since 2000, of pursuing formal independence.

China's Kuomintang (Nationalist) government fled to the island in 1949 after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong's Communist armies.

However it continued to sit in the United Nations as the Republic of China until 1971, when it was unseated in favour of the Communist People's Republic (PRC).

The Taiwan government has repeatedly applied to rejoin the United Nations as the Republic of China (ROC), only to be rejected each time due to opposition from Beijing.

Both Beijing and Washington, which withdrew its diplomatic recognition of the ROC in 1979, have voiced their strong disapproval of Chen's proposed referendum, which would allow voters to decide if the island should now apply for UN membership under the name ''Taiwan''.

Yesterday in the United States, a State Department spokesman urged Chen to drop the proposed referendum plan, saying the move would raise tensions with China.

The spokesman said that such a move would also ''appear to run counter to President Chen's repeated commitments to President Bush and the international community'', a reference to pledges not to change the island's status quo with China.

In Taipei, Foreign Ministry spokesman David Wang said his government wanted to continue discussions with Washington on the issue, adding that the proposed referendum would not destabilise the situation in the Taiwan Strait.

''Taiwan is a democratic country, so the Taiwan government needs to respect the voices of all kinds of people,'' Wang said.

Last week, China attacked Chen for pushing the plan, saying his aim was to ''provoke disputes between the two sides''.

Such a referendum, if it were to happen, would be largely symbolic as it would have no binding power in Taiwan's actual UN application.

Under its ''One China'' policy, Beijing insists that nations cannot have official relations with both China and Taiwan.

China has also used its clout on the global stage to repeatedly block Taiwan's entry into the United Nations, its agencies and other international bodies that require statehood for membership.

REUTERS RJ DS1143