A few months ago I read a couple of books by the Singaporean intellectual Kishore Mahbubani. In Has China Already Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, Mahbubani discusses Taiwan.
The one exceptional trigger for a war involving China is Taiwan. Most of the time, the Chinese leaders have a lot of policy flexibility. There are no strong domestic lobbies to worry about. But the one issue where the Chinese leaders cannot bend and compromise is Taiwan. Any Chinese leader, including Xi Jinping (despite all his power), could be removed if he is perceived to be weak on Taiwan. Why is Taiwan so fundamental to China? There is a very simple explanation. Every Chinese knows the century of humiliation that China suffered from the Opium War to 1949. Nearly all the historical vestiges of this century of humiliation have been removed or resolved, including Hong Kong and Macau.
Only one remains: Taiwan. It was Chinese territory until China was forced to hand it to Japan after the humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895.
Mahbubani also discusses what sort of person would be elected if China was a democracy.
Think Theodore Roosevelt, who, if you aren’t aware, was a raging warmonger. Xi, and the CCP in general, are a moderating influence on Chinese foreign affairs. China’s population has far more aggressive feelings than China’s current rulers. They are still furious about the “century of humiliation,” and they want China to be the number one nation in the world — or certainly to be dominant in its sphere of influence, exactly as Americans did in through the late 19th century to the 20th century.
We have some really weird ideas about our own history, or about what is normal for rising or re-establishing great powers.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
They always take control of their near abroad if they can. This is why Russia is willing to fight a war for the Ukraine, if it comes to it: The Ukraine was part of Russia for centuries. China is actually being remarkably flexible about Taiwan for a rising power. The US bent every country near it to its will and took chunks of land out of both Mexico and Canada, while replacing governments in Latin and South America regularly. Britain brought Scotland and Ireland into its “union.” Germany grabbed everything near it that it could, until defeated in World War II. Japan went on one of the biggest empire building sprees in history.
Other countries, of course, will resist as best they can, and I personally think that Taiwan should stay free. But the price of its freedom is allowing Chinese leaders to save face with their own population: They are saying “Taiwan and China are part of one country.”
This isn’t the 90s, when the US had an easy veto over a Chinese conquest of Taiwan. American aircraft carriers, if they try to intervene, will be sunk by China’s massive arsenal of missiles. China has nuclear weapons and is de-facto allied with Russia, so escalation is extremely dangerous.
Taiwan and the Ukraine are not, fundamentally, the West’s business — except, of course, that the West’s semiconductor fabrication is concentrated in Taiwan due to idiotic Western trade and industrial policies.
Both China and the West are building semiconductor fab as fast as they can in their heartlands. Soon even this vulnerability will be gone, on both sides.
In the meantime, if China wants to say “Taiwan is part of China,” which is something the US agreed to as far back as Nixon, it’s a cheap way to keep a small democratic state going and avoid a potential world war.