2023-05-04 11:33:25
The essay (Solferino) which analyzes the geopolitical situation in the Indo-Pacific is published on May 5th. Between China’s imperial aggressiveness and the illusions of the West, the danger of an uncontrollable crisis
The Taiwan Strait is the most dangerous place in the world, from which the Third World War could start, writes Danilo Taino in
The promised war
(Solferino). This statement is shared by geopolitical experts and the military leaders of the superpowers. The eventual explosion would not only upset neighboring countries, as well as America should it intervene to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. Europe would enter — at the very least — a technological paralysis as it depends on the Far East for semiconductors and other digital components. This is why Emmanuel Macron’s exit in Beijing caused a sensation when, meeting Xi Jinping, the French president expressed the opinion that the future of Taiwan does not concern Europe. Behind the cynicism with which Macron gave the Beijing regime the only Chinese democracy, we can glimpse the adhesion to a pillar of communist propaganda: the affirmation according to which Taiwan has always belonged to China.
The essay by Taino, who visited the island as a correspondent for the Corriere, useful among other things to clarify this mystification. Taiwan’s history, ancient and modern, is much more complicated. Originally the island has an indigenous population, related to those of various archipelagos of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. It is colonized several times by external powers: China, Japan, European empires. When the Chinese populate it, they are mostly minority ethnic groups, persecuted on the mainland. In terms of cultural identity, Japan’s footprint is strong and is even growing among the younger generations, who look to Tokyo as a model, not Beijing. Taino combines the reconstruction of ancient history with current reporting: it tells the tastes and customs of the younger Taiwanese generationswho feel less and less Chinese.
However, the American rulers themselves are prisoners of the principle according to which there is only one China and therefore Taiwan cannot aspire to independence. That inalienable principle for Beijing since Mao Zedong in 1949 won the civil war against the Kuomintang nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek (who took refuge on the island) and inaugurated the People’s Republic. Then Mao puts the one China principle on paper in 1972 as a condition for the thaw with Richard Nixon. At that stage, Taiwan was still governed by a right-wing dictatorship that professed the same principle, cradled in the illusion of being able to reconquer the whole of China by freeing it from the Communists. It was difficult for Americans to defend the existence of two Chinas if none of those concerned believed it. Things start to get complicated in 1988 with Taiwan’s transition to democracy, happily concluded in 1996 with the first democratic presidential elections. In parallel, the fiction of the plan to reconquer the mainland dissolves. Taiwanese cultural identity asserts itself ever more explicitly and freely.
Still in 1998 Bill Clinton reaffirms the American no to the independence of Taiwan, which also involves the refusal to readmit it in the international organizations from which it was expelled after the recognition of the People’s Republic. Taino describes that US position as an openness without counterparts to Beijing’s wishesmoderated only by the pale assertion that it was in the best interests of the United States that the Taiwan question be resolved peacefully. The only mitigating factor was Clinton’s illusion that the communist regime was destined to evolve in a liberal democratic direction, as an inevitable consequence of its integration into the global economy (and into the Net).
Today America seems to pay for its mistakes. The ambiguity about Taiwan in 1972 might have seemed harmless: the overwhelming US military superiority was a sufficient deterrent against invasion. But that the military attack was in Beijing’s plans has never been ruled outnot even when the People’s Republic was much weaker than today.
The ambiguities are not all on one side. The Chinese Communists, while denouncing the American presence in Asia, have long quietly considered it as a factor of stability, in their own interest. And with reason. instructive to read in Taino’s essay the role of the White House and the CIA in preventing Taipei from building the nuclear bomb. Current theme: Today the Americans are preventing South Korea and Japan from acquiring nuclear arsenals to protect themselves from Chinese expansionism. The multipolar order that Xi Jinping says he wants risks turning against him if his arrogance triggers an escalation of rearmament in his backyard.
Xi’s foreign policy has renounced the caution of his predecessors, the astuteness and foresight of a Deng Xiaoping seem far away. Perhaps it was inevitable that economic growth would bring with it the rediscovery of imperial traditions and appetites. But the brutality with which Xi has trampled on the promises of autonomy made by Deng in Hong Kong makes the scenario of a consensual reunification that leaves Taiwan human rights and freedom less credible.
And U.S? The author’s conclusion is this: The West now knows that Beijing will not become a beneficial power only thanks to a higher GDP: its hegemonic tendencies and the export of its dictatorial model must be prevented from succeeding, without trying to make its economy fail. Easy to say, but this is the challenge facing the world of democracies today. And a fundamental chapter of this challenge will develop on the question of Taiwan.
May 4, 2023 (change May 4, 2023 | 11:33 am)
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