Last week Curtal Friar (CF) made the claim that East Asia outside of Africa was the most brutal area on the planet. I strongly disagree. I pointed out correctly that unlike the US much of East Asia is quite safe today. I myself have walked the streets of Kaohsiung, Tainan, and Taipei at all hours of the day and night and not once did I ever feel unsafe. The same can be said for other cities as well—Tokyo, Osaka, etc. This doesn’t hold true for many US cities, many places in these are as unsafe as you’d find in I don’t know—Baghdad with areas that are so bad it is not even safe to venture out in broad daylight. Few countries on earth can match the US in gun violence and outside of Iran, China and Saudi Arabia in executions. One could also add it is not Taiwan, Japan or China dropping bombs on Iraq or did so in Kosovo. Yes, China is again doing bad things in Tibet, but the US did much of the same things to its native population and was not any less brutal in its war to keep “its territory” intact. Like a recount of what was done at New Manchester, Georgia for example?

CF pointed out the actions of Mao in China or Japan during World War II, I suppose he could add the sacking of Kaifeng by the Nuzhen in 1127 or the Mongols later in the 13^th century or go back to Qin Shi Huang or I don’t know Peking Man. Yes Many Chinese died under Mao’s rule—estimates of 500,000 during the Wen Hua Da Ge Ming (Cultural Revolution), but most that died during Mao’s tenure was during the Great leap Forward (Da Yue Jin) and much of these were not due to the regime trying to kill masses of people on purpose but simply idiotic government economic policies and other polices such as the Four Pests. These polices coupled with a series of natural disasters (which is why the great famine from 1958 until 1961 in the PRC it is called the San Nian Zi Ran Zai Hai” which means the “Three Years of Natural Disasters,” not the term used elsewhere “San Nian Da Jih Huang,” meaning the “Great Three Year Famine”) lead to millions simply starving to death. This was not an intentional famine like Stalin’s actions in the Ukraine in the 1930s, but simply stupidity. Japan’s actions in China and elsewhere during the Second Sino-Japanese War and later in the Pacific War can be seen is nothing less than brutal, but the Europeans and Americans were hardly better in terms of their history.

CF makes an interesting claim in his replies to me elsewhere pointing to Christian values and its value for human life but that wasn’t always the case as “Christians” had no trouble slaughtering people in the Middle East during the Crusades or the native populations in what is today Latin America or the Spanish Inquisition. The European and American wholesale genocide of the native populations in Latin America, what is now the United States and Canada make Hitler look like an amateur. Then of course the European activities in Africa from slavery to colonialism—especially the actions by Belgium in the Congo. Then we have the wholesale slaughter of the native populations in Australia as well as a system of what can be seen as cultural genocide, which was a process that happened in the United States as well. There was of course the actions of the US in the Philippines from 1898 to 1904 or so what some have termed the Philippine-American War where perhaps as many as 1.5 million were killed. A war that often took on elements of a war of extermination and a body count that reached perhaps as high as those killed by the slaughter at Nanjing by the Japanese in 1937. Then of course there is Hitler and Stalin who killed millions between them. Also one could also add the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the list.

If you have seen my posts from time to time you will have noticed I have been very critical of US treatment towards Taiwan. At times the US seems to treat Taiwan like an abused spouse for those that care enough to shed your jingoism for a few and not simply claim I am a liar, I’ll explain why this is so. Basically the treatment of Taiwan is based on three major factors. One is a US foreign policy grounded in the school of realism, the trend toward bureaucratic status quo and finally who really makes US China policy.

The first issue is that the United States believes that the Taiwan “problem” will solve itself peacefully given enough time as long as neither side does anything to upset the status quo. Hong Kong was separated from China from 1842 until 1997, 155 years (Kowloon (jiu long) for 137 years and the New Territories (xin jie) for 99 years) and Hong Kong was separated from the PRC for 48 years. Taiwan in comparison has been separated from China for much less time. I’ll avoid discussion of the fact that for most of Chinese history, Taiwan has not been part of China and the Qing Empire’s control of Taiwan from 1683 until 1895 was limited at best and the ROC claims on Taiwan were illegal under international law as are those of the PRC, the fact remains that Taiwan—which has not been part of the PRC for a single day—has been “separated” from China now for a little more than 58 years which is almost 100 years less than Hong Kong’s separation. And while the PRC had the power to easily take Hong Kong after 1949, it never did, but made it clear as the end of the lease for the New Territories approached, that it intended to have Hong Kong back. The UK could by all rights have kept Hong Kong Island itself and Kowloon, but felt that due to the small size of these two areas (49 square miles which is about ¾ the size of Washington, DC.) that keeping these while giving back the larger New Territories (368 square miles) was simply unrealistic thus the 1984 Joint UK-Sino Agreement returning all of Hong Kong and not just the N.T.

This illustrates to the US that China is quite willing to wait, as long as necessary to bring Taiwan “back” into China and as long as Taiwan doesn’t do anything to foreclose on that possibility at some point in the future. Thus, the US sees Taiwan as the problematic partner of the three—the US, China and Taiwan. The US sees Taiwan as the one most likely to spark a conflict by pushing too far toward creating a separate identity and thus the reason the US has been bitterly opposed to the referendums in 2004 and 2008, opposed Chen Shui Bian’s calls for constitutional reforms and the de-sinification of Taiwan such as dropping the “Chinese” terms from various government owned enterprises, the images of Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-shek being dropped from the NT, trying to re-enter the UN under the name Taiwan, etc. as the US felt these actions would unnecessarily provoke China. The US view is that China will eventually transform to a economically prosperous, pluralistic, democratic state and at that point China will either be confident enough and not wedded to the battles of the past to simply allow Taiwan to leave, peacefully or that Taiwan at this point with China having an equivalent level of economic, political and social development as Taiwan will simply want to now unify with the mainland as there would be no reason—in the US eyes—to oppose unification.

At this point, either Taiwan will be independent or Taiwan will be part of China and the process would have been done with the consent of both sides, no military force was used, no one died, nothing destroyed and from the US point of view the best news of all it didn’t have to get involved. The trick is keeping Taiwan leashed long enough to allow time to solve the issue—so today the situation is both China and the US keeping Taiwan restrained so that at some point the problem can be solved—peacefully. The US sees this as ultimately in the best interest of Taiwan, the US and the region and world at large and if Taiwan has to be abused and humiliated in the process, well that is a small price to pay for peace—at least in the US view.

While the US claims to only be interested in the process and not the outcome meaning that it simply opposes any unilateral action by either side but the ultimate outcome either unification or independence or something in-between is for those on the two sides of the Strait to decide, I have my doubts. Both Bill Clinton when he visited China in 1998 and Colin Powell in 2003 used the “r-word” meaning reunification stating incorrectly that it was the policy of the US to see peaceful unification. I fear this may actually be US policy—that the US seeks to see Taiwan unified with China at some point, but done peacefully and perhaps views such unification as inevitable, but due to the political fire storm it would cause, keeps this little policy desire from the rest of us. In the 1980s, some in the Reagan Administration came to the conclusion that China would agree to any demands Taiwan had as long as it could claim Taiwan as part of the PRC and fly its colors over Taiwan, the US quietly offered to meditate and Taiwan told the US to mind its own business and the US dropped it. I suspect the hands of James A. Baker III and George H.W. Bush, the chief panda huggers in the Reagan Administration behind this. So it is not beyond my imagination to believe the US could be supporting such a policy. The US has stabbed Taiwan in the back many a time, so I would not be surprised if Powell and Clinton’s comments were not simply examples of misspeak. 

The next factor in all of this is simply bureaucratic inertia. The policy toward Taiwan and the tilt toward China have been going on since at least 1971 and formally since 1979. The policy continues like this because this has always been the policy—30 years to a bureaucracy is the same as always. Thus, the bureaucracy at State are unwilling to adjust which leads to things like forcing Lee Teng Hui to sleep on a tarmac in Hawai’i because granting a sitting president of the ROC a transit visa so he could go into to Honolulu to get a hotel room would violate the one-china policy and the same reason it fought so hard to keep from granting him a visa to visit Cornell, the school where he earned his Ph.D. State even assured China that there would be no way he would be getting a visa and the US Congress then told State that it would either grant him a visa to enter the US or they would and that then kicked off the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis—the crisis can blamed squarely on the US Department of State and their gross mismanagement of Lee visa issue.

The final issue is who makes China policy at state, well the so-called China experts. And where do they come from, well they all have advanced degrees from elite colleges in the US and were trained in Chinese history and East Asian politics. Their professors? Many were devotees of John K. Fairbank, the god of the panda huggers or one of Fairbank’s students or a student of a student of JKF. And Fairbank was completely brainwashed if you like by the Maoists, he and his students took a dim view toward the ROC and toward Taiwan. McCarthy may have purged the Maoists from State in the 1950s, but that didn’t stop JKF clones from replacing them—the bodies may have been switched out, but the ideology behind US China policy is still the same. Even for those who see China in a more objective light are reluctant to stray far from the pro-China line. Research which depends on going to China (and thus getting visas) and cooperation from Chinese academics makes one very careful about moving into areas China may find sensitive and even if you, yourself have no fear, research is peer reviewed and the pro-China cabal and those that do China’s bidding due to fear or greed would be hostile toward what they would see as anti-Chinese research and thus this colors what the future “China experts” are exposed to—and this colors their own ideas and policy desires once they set up residence at Foggy Bottom.

So in short, Taiwan’s mistreatment by the US is based on US realism, the bureaucratic aversion to change and pro-China, anti-Taiwanese ideology of those within the Executive Branch of the United States. Taiwan needs to come to the understanding that if the US is a friend at all, it is a fickle one and is as likely to side with China as it is with Taiwan.

I am sure those at State and AIT were popping champaign when Ma Ying Jeou won last month.