Centerfield

The China/Taiwan issue is a difficult one. The reason China wants Taiwan so badly is more one of national pride than economic. Economically and politically it makes no sense. Much business is already done between the two. Taiwanese businessmen have invested heavily in Chinese manufacturing. If China were to invade it would most likely destroy the financial backing for much of their expansion and would alienate most of the world and make them a pariah state. If they actually went through with their threat to use nukes they would become more isolated than North Korea.

The only way the Chinese obsession with Taiwan can be viewed is in a Nationalist way. I get the feeling the Chinese have for centuries had this view of being inferior to the West. When they've tried to stand up they've been knocked back down, such as in the Opium Wars. Now that their military is reaching the point where they may actually be able to overwhelm the Taiwanese defense forces it seems they have become even more obsessed with them. But they know that if the US got involved and came to Taiwan's defense they wouldn't stand a chance. So the status quo continues with China claiming Taiwan is just a rogue province and the US agreeing to recognize only One China, while at the same time selling weapons to Taiwan and promising aid if invaded. If China ever did invade a lot of people would die and the world economy would be thrown into a tailspin, all because of China's pride.

China is a very scary prospect. I think we're going to end up going to war against them. I watched Lou Dobbs last night and Duncan Hunter, Chairman of the (House?) Armed Services Committee discussed how China was aiming to get a series of levers against us so we wouldn't be able to prevent their seizure of Taiwan: the purchase of Unocal, the buying up of the US deficit etc. He said that they he felt they believe in Lenin's quote that the free world would sell them (the communists) the rope with which to hang us (the free world.) I am not sure if I trust Bush to be hawkish enough with China, with him indebting us heavily to them and in general being a business conservative (or less charitably a corporate whore :-) ).

I believe economic freedom can precede political freedom, but that it needs to be done carefully and that we should use it whenever sensible to encourage political liberalization.

Interesting topic.

General Zhu Chenghu's comment that China's military might use Nukes against the USA is a new wrinkle indeed, but considering the source should not be unexpected nor given much credence as representing a political position of the Chinese government. China's military has a vested interest in keeping up the tension with Taiwan as that is the basis for continuing funding, growth, technological improvement, and its position within the government, in light of the absence of any other credible threat from outside China. As long as there is potential for a fight with the USA over Taiwan, the USA is a mighty enemy that the Chinese Military has to be prepared to engage. As the USA is a nuclear power, it makes sense that China's military will then also need to be a nuclear power and from time to time so declare itself to continue to justify its existance. Conclusion: we just heard a nuclear yawn.

Also, for a funny fortune cookie fortune, visit www.tastlessfortunes.com

Sam Nicolas
The Daily Belch
www.dailybelch.com

oops that would be www.tastelessfortunes.com
-Sam

I had a discussion on Monday with a Chinese manager at my company about the proposed Unocal purchase by the Chinese government. Here was the email I sent to her after the discussion was over:

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The major positive about China's proposed purchase of Unocal, and globalization in general, is the prospect it holds for world peace. The more the United States and China have a vested stake in the other's livelihood, the lower the incentive for war because of our respective inability to entirely provide for ourselves in wartime. The biggest threat then to the stability in goods and services that globalization brings is a tyrannical government that takes hold in either country that ignores the will of people, which include needs for the very products and services that the people of the "opposing" country produce.

In addition, to the handful who think allowing China to purchase US companies is tacit approval for communism, the more stake we have in China, the more likely they are to improve internal conditions within the country. Such influence could move China forward to a socialist democracy where the people have far greater say about their government, the best anyone could hope for China in the short-term. Ending trade or investment relations with China, aside from the awful economic impact it would have on our economies and ways of life, would be disastrous simply because the world can not even plan for the contingency, even if remote, of another Soviet-style implosion from within of a country that contains nearly 20% of the earth's population but provides only for itself and a few other nations.

Obviously globalization is an inherently imperfect beast. But such connectedness may be the best hope for lasting world peace.

Scott,

I don't oppose connectedness, and I don't support cutting of economic ties with China, but aren't you concerned that China might be trying to weaken us as much as possible so that they can just repossess Taiwan? Do you think we should just allow it? In some sense, it might not be a bad thing if they allow for something like the one country two systems plan they have in Hong Kong and maybe it could spur political liberalization. On the other hand, allowing the seizure of Taiwan could put us in a Neville Chamberlain-like state.

China used to put Europe to shame, and I would not put imperial ambitions past it in order to regain its "honor." Their military is rapidly expanding, nationalism is rising . . . . I am all for deterents, but they should be mutual. I have read things suggesting China has the potential to become like Nazi Germany. Like Nazi Germany, it is based on an efficient captalistic system, growing nationalism, growing military, and a totalitarian state. We've got to remain a check on Chinese ambition until they liberalize. We've really got to a find a way to aid this process.

As Bush says, democracies are peaceful. China is a country that massacred its own people under Mao Zedong, crushed democracy movements at Tianmen square, and seized Tibet with stunning brutality.

I'm just saying we've got to be careful.

I tend to think that it wouldn't be worth losing the major cities on the west coast to try (and, inevitably, fail) to keep Taiwan from Beijing. We're not talking about the Rhineland here. Our strategy is wrong-headed; we are feeding the beast, ever more letting our economic arteries flow through China, and I tend to think it would be far more productive to deal with that problem first, and see where that leads us, rather than interposing ourselves in the inevitable.

I should add that I probably watch too much Lou Dobbs, and he certainly is not neutral on these issues. In any case, the way he presented the Unocal purchase was that we were basically giving them a means to power their military and putting us at their mercy regarding oil. I think it is safer if we trust them less than we should, than the contrary.

I don't really have a problem with giving them Taiwan if they maintain the freedoms there. But I think we should be in a position so that we can influence how the transfer occurs. How about democratize, and we give you Taiwan :-)?

But if they want more than Taiwan, we've got to be ready for them. We can't just say bye-bye Japan, for instance. That would mean all-out war.

I can't respond until tomorrow morning. I am deathly tired.

We should, and will if necessary put up a brave front against an invasion of Taiwan by China, rattling sabers with the best of them. We should be willing to go all the way TO the brink.

And then no further.Ultimately we should plan to watch the tanks roll if China decides to repatriate Taiwan by force. I have little doubt that if we tried to physically defend Taiwan against invasion, they'd choose to simply reduce the island to rubble, for all intents and purposes.

I believe that political reform in China can come only through further prosperity and continuing modernization. This sort of engagment is indeed a hard thing to swallow given Tianamen, but military war with China would be at best a quixotic affair, and at worst an epic disaster leading to our eventual downfall as the world's economic and military superpower.

However, I am pretty sure our planning for the coming economic conflicts with China are well underway. If we wish to protect our economic pre-eminence, we can't just keep letting China get away with murder, even if by engaging in moredirectly adversarial economic policies in regard to China, we hinder the progress of political reform there. :-(

The Unocal purchase worries me. I generally agree with the idea of engagement rather than isolation. But China generally seems to have a very one-sided view of engagement. I can't imagine any circumstance in which they would allow an American company to purchase a significant strategic Chinese business entity. I worry that our economies will become entangled in such a way that we could not afford to punish China economically if they ever did something really stupid like invading Taiwan; we would have more to lose than they would.

On the one hand, if we reduce cooperation with China now, we risk pushing them into a corner and making them feel they have nothing to lose by satisfying their nationalistic urges with an invasion. The excuses for war used by pre-WWII Japan come to mind. On the other hand, if we increase cooperation with them as a result of their threats (their comments on the Unocal purchase were not terribly polite or deferential), they will feel emboldened, and suspect that we will be weak in the end.

Remember how they nearly killed our surveillance crew by having one of their pilots fly too close to our plane back in 2001. They did not treat their captives terribly well, and took way too long to return them too us. They are not nice people. I do not trust them.

Bingo, bk. The proper response to the Chinese threat is to fight the "war of words" to the best of our ability - but not to risk the lives of millions of Taiwanese by engaging China militarily.

The Taiwanese, for their part, voted against their President's party in last year's parliamentary elections, in part because of the President's hard line stance on relations with China.

Tom Friedman called this the victory of "motherboards over motherland." In other words, a vibrant economy and increased standard of living has caused the Taiwanese to value life over national pride.

Our priorities with respect to the China/Taiwan conflict should reflect the priorities of the Taiwanese.

My take is that standard, by-the-book posturing will suffice in the short term in dealing with the Chinese. In the long term, let things run their course, and as they achieve greater economic prosperity they will Westernize and democratize. It's a huge country full of good, smart people who can only be kept under the thumb of the authoritarians for so long.

Of course I could be completely wrong about that.

The agreement made between the Nixon-Ford Administrations and the People's Republic of China was that there was only one China, that the Beijing government represented its legitimate authority, and that we agreed Taiwan should be reconciled as China-- but that the PRC could NOT use military force in order to resolve the issue.

That's why successive US Presidents have used a policy of strategic ambiguity toward the defense of Taiwan-- commit to defense and the Taiwanese are emboldened and declare their independence, thereby changing the conditions of the agreement, and allowing the PRC to fight. On the other hand, renounce defense and the PRC can feel free to attack, since US power pretty much guarantees Taiwanese sovereignty at this point.

Now that Beijing's position relative to the US has gotten stronger than it was, they want to break the spirit-- if not the letter-- of the agreement whether or not Taiwan does so first. That's a problem.

All of which is to say, from my perspective, if the PRC can use military force to exert their will over an island that they have never had under their control, simply because the people who live their were once "Chinese" (and are still ethnically, but culturally are as different as night and day-- thereby making it almost as profound a difference as, say, the northern and southern Irish, or the Shi'ite and Sunni Iraqis), then where does that logically end?

The good news (if you can call it that) is that Beijing would *have* to use nuclear weapons in order to seize Taiwan-- their naval and marine forces are such, relative to the US, that an invasion of Taiwan is only possible at night, in their dreams. And the very forces we would need to employ in the defense of Taiwan-- the US Navy, Air Force strategic bombers and fighter jets, and air and missile defense assets-- are the precise forces we're NOT really using in War on Iraq, so we're still okay in terms of the saber rattling that we have the credibility to back it up. And the PRC knows that.

I have deleted the distracting, off-topic personal back-and-forth posts between Tractarian and myself to keep the comments substantive and on-topic.

One of the thoughts running through the comments is that maybe it wouldn't be so bad if China took over Taiwan but ran it under the same 1 nation 2 systems approach they are supposed to be taking with Hong Kong. Does anybody know how that's working? Last time I checked, it was starting to look more like China than Hong Kong.

I'm not terribly concerned about the saber rattling by a general. Clearly, they want us to take their military seriously and the threat it poses to the continental US. The use of nukes is clearly in the background on any confrontation with China--he's just making it explicit. However, it's not clear that it would make any sense for China to nuke the US. I think China is practicing the same kind of strategic ambiguity that we are.

China/Taiwan is a difficult issue. From a purely real politk perspective, we have absolutely no reason to risk a nuclear attack to defend Taiwan. There is really no strategic interest there unless you think that taking Taiwan would embolden China to go after Japan. I think that's hardly likely. With all the talk about Chinese expansionism, they have generally been pretty cautious. But Taiwan is a special case. On the other hand, it would be difficult to sit by and watch a democratic country swallowed up militarily.

The sense I get from this thread is that people see China as a menacing giant looking to step on whoever gets in its way. From what I read, though, that's not what it's neighbors think. China has been engaging in numerous regional and international organizations with the idea of persuading its neighbors that it can rise peacefully. For the most part, it has been successful, although obviously Japan is concerned about China's rise.

I don't see the Unocal acquisition having much impact on US security. I doubt that China could or would use Unocal to try to put economic pressure on the US--after all, Unocal is hardly the largest American oil company and most of its assets are in Asia anyway.

I tend to agree with Scott. We need to cooperate with China on energy matters whether we like it or not. In that regard, being in some kind of cooperative arrangement might be useful. I see the biggest problems with China arising from our mutual need for energy rather than from Taiwan. We are both competing and will compete for energy resources around the world. But China's approach is to go anywhere there are reserves and not to worry about the nature of the regime it is dealing with. This puts the US in a precarious situation, both economically and politically. If China invests in countries with poor human rights records, like Sudan, it is obviously not going to countenace the US interfering in its commercial relationships. So, to the extent that we wanted to impose sanctions, for example, on the Sudanese government (or anyone else with oil resources),China would be a big obstacle. Moreover, countries like that are much more likely to want to do business with someone like China that's not going to ask questions about how that country treats its people. The point is that, regardless of Unocal, we are going to be competing with China for resources and it might be in our interest to make sure China has some incentive not to screw us over.

I think we need to decide what kind of relationship we want with China rather than letting it be determined by crises. This means, to put it simplistically, do we try to contain China or do we engage it? Taiwan is clearly going to be a problem, but I suspect it's manageable as long as Taiwan doesn't do anything precipitate with regard to independence.

we have absolutely no reason to risk a nuclear attack to defend Taiwan. There is really no strategic interest there

Actually we do have a strategic interest in Taiwan. They are perhaps the leading manufacturer and innovator of high tech equipment, including chips and other computer equipment. If they were to fall in a military take over those industries would be destroyed. The world economy would be seriously harmed, possibly even a depression since we would have to impose sanctions on China including barring imports. If we have been engrossed in the Middle East and defended Kuwait partly due to oil, we would certainly go to war to protect the engine of economic growth.

Since the 1970s we have pursued a policy of engaging China economically in the hope that a dose of capitalism would lead to democracy. This policy has gone on for over thirty years and it has failed. They still occupy Tibet, Southern Mongolia, East Turkistan, and parts of Kashmir. They continue to oppress their own people and threaten peaceful democratic countries in the region. They continue to prop up puppet North Korea. All of these shameful activities are happening on our nickel. The policy of engagement has made the Communists richer and us poorer. We need to put more restrictions on our trade with China. We don’t have another 30 years to lose like we have lost the last 30.