Article #4
Understand These Facts, Should China’s Xi Jinping Launch an Attack on Taiwan
When Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the United States and allies had to scramble to articulate and mount a response; while signals abounded that Putin was poised to launch such an attack, the common wisdom was that too many factors militated against such a move as ultimately to dissuade Putin.
Similarly, when Hamas bombed Israel this past October 7, the action caught the United States and allies by surprise, so that even now the rush is on to respond to Hamas and the Israeli counterattacks on sites in Gaza.
United States governmental leaders and the American public should find in these instances of unpreparedness a signal that they must have a much clearer plan for a possible attack by the forces of Xi Jinping’s China on Taiwan. And they must grasp the importance for the future of democracy that Xi’s threat to Taiwan poses.
I offer the following factual assessment, open to all counterresponses and a public debate with anyone who seeks to deny the truth or the wisdom of this view, seldom rendered to readers of American newspapers, including the Star Tribune:
The People’s Republic of China is a brutal, totalitarian state, similar to Hitler’s Nazi Germany and to Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union in controlling every aspect of the lives of its people. Paramount leader Xi Jinping concurrently holds the top posts in the Chinese Communist Party, the military, and the government. Despite pretenses of having a congress, all decisions in China are made by the Chinese Communist Party’s seven-member Politburo, assembled carefully by Xi. The party-led state utilizes technology far more sophisticated than what was available to Hitler or Stalin to track online communications and physical movement of citizens; the party government exclusively dominates conventional and social media.
In the province of Xinjiang, the Xi regime has detained over one million Uighurs under forced labor conditions and has taken children from their homes and installed them in state-run schools in an effort to Sinicize Uyghur children and eradicate Uyghur culture. Similarly brutal policies have been used in Tibet, and anyone in China who dares to denounce any policy of the regime is subject to “reeducation” in detention facilities and prisons. There is no scope in China to promote women’s rights, gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, or the advancement of indigenous, non-Han Chinese people. China ranks 156th among 167 nations on the Economist Democracy Index.
Taiwan, by contrast, ranks number 10 on that index, well ahead of the United States at 30. Taiwan since 1996 has evolved into one of the most democratic, open societies in the world. Presidential and legislative elections are free and highly competitive, and the judiciary renders verdicts with factually justified and fair rulings. The Taiwanese government has recognized same-sex marriage since 2019. LGBTQ rights are recognized in employment and society; a transgender woman by the name of Audrey Tang has held a position in female president Tsai Ing-wen’s cabinet since 2016. Sixteen indigenous languages are recognized, and great strides have been made in the last decade to the address concerns and land rights of indigenous people.
Taiwan is a de facto nation with a unique history.
Taiwan’s current leading Democratic People’s Party (DPP) had nothing to do with the documents and agreements so often given reference in the press; those were generated when the Ching Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party government was still leading a one-party police state on Taiwan. The Shanghai Communique, issued in 1972 during the Nixon and Mao administrations, acknowledged that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China.” This position was consistent at the time with the official positions of Mao’s PRC (which claimed legitimacy as government of China) and Chiang Kai-Shek’s ROC (which still made the same forlorn claim from its Taiwan redoubt). And in an agreement known as the “1992 Consensus,” the PRC and the KMT (still clinging to diminished power on Taiwan) affirmed that, “There is only one China.” Today’s dangerous situation results from the increasingly bellicose PRC insistence that Taiwan is part of China and the equally forceful position on the part of the DPP that Taiwan is a de facto independent nation that is most decidedly not part of China.
Understand that Taiwan is no more part of China than the United States is a colony of Great Britain.
Taiwan historically endured outside control by the Dutch, a Chinese rebel (Zheng Chenggong or Koxinga), the Qing Dynasty, the Japanese, and the Kuomintang before emerging as a democratic Taiwanese state from the advent of the new millennium. Most people on Taiwan identify as Taiwanese, not Chinese, and prefer the existing status quo as a de facto independent nation. But if Xi Jinping should decide to launch an attack on Taiwan before the 2027 temporal target of current punditry, the United States and allies should be much readier than they were in the Ukraine and West Asia, knowing as a moral and geopolitical imperative that they must give firm military assistance to democratic Taiwan, and that current efforts to mount a collective response from the Western powers along with those of the Asia-Pacific must proceed apace.
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