Rift Drift - Village Magazine

72 May-June 2023 May-June 2023 73

he basis of American foreign policy

was established more than a century

ago. In April 1917 in advance of

America’s participation in the First

World War, President Woodrow Wilson

went before a joint session of Congress and

unequivocally declared, “The world must be

made safe for democracy”.

Communism

However, the approach to the victory of the

Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 was the harbinger

of things to come. Not long after their rise to

power, US troops were dispatched to Russia by

President Wilson in 1918 to help overthrow the

new Soviet government,

however without success. The

rise of Communism, America’s

newfound nemesis, brought

the inception of a cold war, the

bitter and protracted rivalry of

the US and USSR.

After World War II the US

had the unique and unbridled

opportunity to become the

hegemonic spearhead of

democracy. In 1947, the

enactment of the Truman

Doctrine and the Marshall

Plan picked up where Wilson

had left off. Communism,

wherever and whenever it

General Order No 1 issued by the

US Chiefs of Staff and approved by

President Truman, following Japan’s

surrender at the end of World War II,

mandated theoccupation of Japan and

Japanese-controlled areas, including

Taiwan, by forces of the Allied Powers

Mo Zedong nd Ching Ki-shek held nine privte meetings in

Chongqing, brokered by n Americn diplomt, fter WW II. The

two were civil though the resumption of ﬁghting ws inevitble

Rift

Drift

Sino-American

relations over Taiwan

are dangerous with a

war likely within years

unless the US starts

helping to manage

the situation with

sympathetic regard to

history and geography

By Marshall H Sheen

INTERNATIONAL

Tipei, Tiwn, 2023

reared its “ugly” head, had to be stopped.

Taiwan

Taiwan (also known as Formosa, o the coast of

China’s Fujian Province) had been seized by Japan

in 1895 from China’s Qing Dynasty but General

Order No 1 issued by the US Chiefs of Sta and

approved by President Truman, following Japan’s

surrender at the end of World War II, mandated

theoccupation of Japan and Japanese-controlled

areas, including Taiwan, by forces of the Allied

Powers.

The US, China and Taiwan after WWII

The Chinese Communist Party under the

leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong made sure

that the Chinese people did not become American

underlings. Guardedly, Mao viewed liberal-

Western democracy as unprincipled and, when

coupled with capitalism, treacherous.

By 1949, Mao and the Communist Party had

swept away the so-called “American running

dogs” in mainland China, and Generalissimo

Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist

Government (under the Kuomintang party) were

soundly defeated, escaping and retreating to the

island of Taiwan.

All along Chiang Kai-shek was adamant about

his ambition to recover China’s mainland,

readying his forces in Taiwan; Mao Zedong was

no less determined to reclaim this now-fortiﬁed

island.

After the declaration of ‘the People’s Republic

of China’ (PRC) by Mao Zedong in 1949, recovery

of Taiwan by Communist forces from the

72 May-June 2023 May-June 2023 73

Kuomimtang was perceived by the United States

as inevitable and only a matter of time.

Reversals of US China Policy

In 1949-50, US policy on China — the ROC and

the PRC — turned.

Leaders in Washington accepted the fact that

the Nationalist Chinese were a lost cause and

pulled the US embassy out of Nanjing, the capital

of the ROC. In August 1949 the US state

department issued its sweeping ‘China White

Paper’, detailing the “loss of China” and waiting

for “the dust to settle.”

Although the US still recognised the

Kuomintang as the sole legitimate government

of all of China, Taiwan was complicated.

President Harry Truman declared in January,

1950, that the US would not be involved in any

dispute in the Taiwan Strait and would not

intervene in the event of an attack on the ROC by

the PRC.

However, with the start of the Korean War (1950-

53), the situation in the Taiwan Strait looked less

favourable to American interests, prompting the

leadership in Washington suddenly to reverse its

position and claim that Taiwan now ruled by

Chiang/ROC— which the US called ‘Free China’ —

belonged within the US’s Asia-Paciﬁc defence

perimeter. This made the immediate retaking of

the island by the ROC unfeasible, despite two

serious attempts in the 1950s, thwarted with the

help of the US military. With the passage of time

Chiang’s dream faded and US China policy took

another unexpected — and shocking — turn.

The end of the 1960s found the US and the PRC

each facing fractious predicaments. These were

America’s protracted war in Vietnam and the

dangerously unpredictable Sino-Soviet border

clashes, respectively. As a result, both were willing

to set aside old hostilities, to bring about a

rapprochement.

Informal ‘Ping-pong diplomacy’ in April, 1971

led to a secret Henry Kissinger mission to Peking

(now Beĳing) and ultimately President Richard

Nixon’s historic state visit to China in February the

following year. In the end Nixon’s visit enabled the

signing of the well-known ‘Shanghai Communique’

which asserted a mutual understanding that there

is but “One-China” across the Taiwan Strait,

implying that this China is mainland China. This

paved the way for ocial US-PRC diplomatic

recognition in January, 1979, followed by

ambassadorial upgrade and exchange.

Diplomatic normalisation, of course, required

the United States to sever state-to-state ties with

the ROC government in Taiwan.

De-recognition of the ROC,

however, was almost immediately

replaced by a “Taiwan Relations

Act”, unilaterally passed by the US

Congress in 1979 during the Carter

Administration, which allowed the

US to sell weapons to the island for

self-defence purposes only and

saw any non-peaceful eort to

determine Taiwan’s future as “a

threat to the peace and security in

the Western Paciﬁc area and of

grave concern to the United

States”. America has had no

actual obligation to defend Taiwan

since then.

A kind of ambiguity, or mistrust,

if you will, permeated t newly

established Sino-American

relations. In 1982, an additional

“Six Assurances” were given to

Taiwan during the Reagan

Administration that further

complicated matters. However,

through the 1980s and 1990s the

relationship was maintained with

relative calm and a sense of

willingness to compromise,

accepting more or less each

other’s foreign policy interests.

The Path to War

Simply put, the US does not want

Taiwan, a beacon of liberal-

Western democratic system since

the 1990s, and a strategic protegé,

to be reunited with China’s mainland, the PRC.

The return of Hong Kong was insidious and its

democracy has been assailed since its return to

the PRC in 1997. Taiwan is economically important

too: it makes more than 60% of the world’s

semiconductors, which power everything from

mobile phones to guided missiles, and 90% of

the most advanced sort. According to the

Economist Magazine, Rhodium Group, a research

By 1949, Mao and the Communist Party had

swept away the so-called “American running

dogs” in mainland China, and Generalissimo

Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist

Government (under the Kuomintang party) were

soundly defeated, escaping and retreating to the

island of Taiwan

China’s drills around Taiwan, Easter 2023

74 May-June 2023 May-June 2023 PB

Command (AMC), Gen Mike Minihan was blunt:

Minihan wrote. “Xi’s team, reason, and

opportunity are all aligned for 2025. “My gut tells

me we will ﬁght in 2025”. By we he meant the US.

In view of the impact of sanctions on Russia

after its attack on Ukraine, China would probably

need a quick conquest of Taiwan, not a drawn-out

conﬂict.

Joe Biden has said four times that US troops

would defend Taiwan if China invaded. Each time

the White House clariﬁes that actual policy is

unchanged: Taiwan’s sovereignty should be

“decided peacefully by the Chinese themselves”.

But Biden has tweaked the phrasing. “Taiwan

makes their own judgments about their

independence”. Pelosi added that independence

is “up to Taiwan to decide”. Former Trump ocials

have gone further, calling for recognition of

Taiwan as a country and an end to strategic

ambiguity. As recently as February, US Secretary

of State Antony Blinken audaciously declared that

if push came to shove a crisis in the Taiwan Strait

would not be a Chinese “internal matter”, but a

global one. It’s an appalling geopolitical vista,

casually outlined.

A fresh perspective

Meanwhile, according to Les Echos, a French

newspaper, France’s President Emmanuel

Macron said on a visit to the PRC over Easter: “Do

we [Europeans] have an interest in speeding up

on the subject ofTaiwan? No. It would be “a trap

for Europe” to get caught up in crises “that are

not ours”. If there was an acceleration of conﬂict

between the US and PRC, “we will not have the

time, nor the means to ﬁnance our own strategic

autonomy and we will become vassals”.

The worst of things would be to think that we

Europeans must be followers on this subject and

adapt ourselves to an American rhythm and a

Chinese overreaction”. It was a timely

intervention.

Dr Marshall H Sheen who lives in Taipei was a

visiting professor of political science and resident

China specialist at California State Polytechnic

University, Pomona; an invited tenured professor

in the Graduate Institute of American Studies at

Tamkang University in Taipei, Taiwan; and has

taught at Fujian Normal University in mainland

China and the University of Victoria in Canada.

outﬁt, estimates that a Chinese blockade of

Taiwan could cost the world economy more than

$2trn.

Uniﬁcation with Dignity: Taiwan’s Choice

Interestingly, the opportunity is still there for

the Taiwanese to become consciously self-reliant

instead of grovelling to Japan and the liberal West

particularly, the US. If military confrontation is to

be avoided in the Taiwan Strait the Taipei

leadership must engage meaningfully with

leaders in Beĳing. Since Tsai Ingwen took over as

head of the Taipei government in 2016, practically

all ocial communication channels with Beĳing

have been severed, although the island’s

economy still relies heavily on the Chinese

mainland.

At one time, before its rejection in 2016 by

Taipei, the so-called ‘1992 Consensus — one

China, dierent interpretations by the two sides

— was accepted (graciously but cautiously) and

still is mentioned, by mainland China. In all of its

recent statements, Beĳing still avowedly hopes

to avoid a military-tasked uniﬁcation of Taiwan

— that being the last resort.

In 2022 a poll by the Election Study Centre at

National Chengchi University found 61% of

respondents identiﬁed as Taiwanese, 2.7% as

Chinese, and 32.9% as both.

In 1992 when the polling started it showed

17.6%, 25.5% and 46.4%, respectively. The

change reﬂects the huge political impact of the

ruling party, the DPP, and the independence

movement on the primary and secondary

education in Taiwan, particularly looking at the

ﬁgures of 2.7% v. 60.8%. By the time of Lee Teng-

hui’s presidency in the early 1990s, this group

was moving Taiwan towards desinicisation and

independence from the PCR. Lee considered

himself Japanese, not Chinese. School children’s

textbooks were thoroughly revised to show that

the Taiwanese, originally a provincial group like

Cantonese from Canton or Shanghai-nese from

Shanghai, are not Chinese but more aligned with

aboriginals and Japanese. This major change in

Taiwan’s basic education enhanced the

popularity of pro-independence leaders such as

Tsai Ing-wen, a Lee protégé, and the DPP.

Distinguishing Taiwanese from Chinese has

been a ploy of the DPP and anti-Chinese factions

to win popularity and elections. It also keeps the

US on the side of Taiwan and helps to deter the

PCR.

However, revisionist machinations aside,

Taiwan was part of and does indeed belong to

China; seized by Imperial Japan and then by the

US.

Taiwanese are unmistakably Chinese — of the

Han Chinese stock, local aboriginals aside —

bound by the same cultural heritage and

customs, national language, regional dialects or

topolects.

These counter impetuses just needs to be

managed.

Washington: Solution-Leader or

Problem-Maker?

All along, mainland China has been quite open to

meaningful engagement with Taipei as long as

the non-negotiable “One-China” principle is

ﬁrmly in place.

Few recall that in 1981 mainland China ocially

advanced a plan of uniﬁcation that allowed for

Taiwan to keep its own military and other self-

governing apparatuses.

US President Joe Biden ought to take a page

from Truman — the haberdasher from Missouri

turned president — learning when a hands-o

option ought to be deployed. Instead of stoking

the flame of cross-Strait hostilities with

provocative visits and rhetoric, ‘playing the

Taiwan card’, the US should at least seek not to

be part of the problem, but a possible solution by

facilitating dialogue.

The new status quo and the risk of war

With American help, Taiwan had the military edge

throughout the 20th century but no longer. The

People’s Liberation Army has begun beating the

Americans in war games. China boasts the

largest navy in the world, with an expected force

of 400 ships by 2025 (America has less than 300,

Taiwan just 26). It has expanded its missile and

nuclear arsenal to keep foreign forces away from

the Taiwan strait. Taiwan recently announced the

revival of conscription but it spends too much of

its defence budget on ﬁghter jets, tanks and

battleships that may have been useful 30 years

ago against a weaker China, but are now

vulnerable to pre-emption by Chinese missiles.

On Easter Sunday China sent 70 warplanes

towardsTaiwanfor a second day of military drills

simulating attacks in retaliation for Tsai Ing-wen,

meeting the US House Speaker during a brief visit

to the US. It reprised action after Speaker Nancy

Pelosi visited the island last year.

President Xi Jinping has told the People’s

Liberation Army to be ready for an invasion by

2027, according to the CIA.In February a leaked

memo from the head of the US Air Mobility

No more vssls

Joe Biden has said four times that US troops

would defend Taiwan if China invaded. Each

time the White House clariﬁes that actual

policy is unchanged: Taiwan’s sovereignty

should be “decided peacefully by the Chinese

themselves”