Taiwan’s Diplomatic Toss of Coin and its Profound Loss
By John Harrington - www.speaker.gov, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77812995
Last week, Pelosi visited Taiwan and I was wrong.
But I am not the dumb-ass in the room. Let me try to analyse the outcome of the visit this week and you tell me who the dumb-ass is.
There is so much analysis of this event in the world’s media, that for me to add my views, it would seem superfluous. With that said, there are gaps in the general analysis of the issue which would be interesting for me to cover. In particular, Taiwanese media and Mainland Chinese analyses provide critical views on the fall-out of this event, which cannot be found in English language media. Every possible angle has been explored in the Chinese language and these are all interesting. I will try to incorporate some of these opinions in my own commentary below.
First of all, what was the reason for the Pelosi visit? What is her political motivation in doing so?
Nancy has a record of challenging China. In 1989, she was in Beijing, with two other congressmen, in a demonstration to support the Tian An Men protestors. Obviously, she had zero impact. More recently, she chose to stand with the Hong Kong Democracy movement, met with its leaders and was arguably its loudest American town crier. She even stood side by side with the brain-dead leader of the Hong Kong demonstrators, Joshua Wong, and urged him to continue on his seditious mission. That was poor judgement.
Pelosi must have felt slighted with the eventual turn of events which saw Beijing masterfully squashing the violent riots in the territory. I would suppose that from that time, she would have harboured a personal grudge. After all, her internationally publicised support of the HK demonstrators was snubbed. She lost face.
There is also the matter of the eroding support for the Democrats in the upcoming mid term elections. Auntie Pelosi is a top vote garner for her party, and her district in San Francisco is chock full of Chinese Americans who have had family suffering the consequences of a humiliating defeat inflicted by the CCP during the Chinese civil war and of becoming refugees. They lost everything. These Chinese-Americans probably have an axe to grind against the CCP and it is said that Pelosi, as their congressional representative, would carry their cross as well. Otherwise, why would an Italian-American get so indignant over China?
Values? Nah. Votes? more likely. Those votes would secure her own seat in Nov, push her up within Democratic ranks as a major vote getter, and if that helps to turnaround the malaise in the party, she would step down as Speaker in a blaze of glory.
From both a personal and political point of view, it would appear that she wanted to have a show, make a fuss, and become the star in an international media event.
Biden, the State Department and the Defence Department, hastily came out to stop her going, but they kept saying it’s her personal decision.
Bullshit. Only a fool would buy that line. The CCP certainly did not, and have acted as if the Executive branch of the US government was complicit in the visit.
The other obvious thing is that the whole event was, while not “staged”, very carefully managed, probably via contemporaneous communications between key people, including the militaries, on both sides. If this visit had been serious enough to instigate war, there is no doubt that the CCP would not hesitate to take out Pelosi. But at the end of the day, she is not important enough to risk war. She is not in the Executive branch, and whatever she says is indeed just her personal view. Even as Speaker of the House, she has no power to call up the US military to help the DPP in Taiwan. Both sides were managing a PR exercise.
Essentially.
That’s why in the end, the Chinese let Pelosi’s plane land and the next day’s events pass without incident. One should not be surprised that the two governments eventually agreed on what should be allowed to happen, rather than start a war. Pelosi is not worth it for both sides. After all, she is an old auntie soon to step down from her senior role in the House of Representatives.
In the end, she spoke in platitudes in her one day of glory in Taipeh. Nothing she said was new that has not been said by the person who should matter, the President of the United States. What she said - “iron clad” support of Taiwan – has been said before. It is a meaningless statement, unless the Americans can put boots on the ground in Taiwan or send American aircraft carriers into a firing array for Chinese hypersonic missiles in the Western Pacific. Which would really be a declaration of war. Only warmongers and morons think that would happen.
For the jingoistic and undiscerning public on both sides, it was a one-upmanship contest, in which the US has scored an early point. But that has not ended. Clearly, that early score has to be settled.
That’s what we are seeing in the next three or four days. Both sides probably agreed that China would be unimpeded to do a massive live firing exercise to publicly “vent its anger” as a follow-up.
In this exercise, missiles flew ominously over Taiwan, an air fleet boldly “intruded” into previously sacrosanct airspace, not just the ADIZ, but across the median line that delineated the Chinese and Taiwanese zones of control in the Taiwan Straits and a large armada of modern warships conducted drills in every piece of ocean surrounding the island. All these represented a “warning” to Taiwan for allowing the whole thing to happen in the first place. The Tsai Ingwen government has been shown up to be powerless to do anything about it; and she was left totally unable to counter the PLA’s massive show of force. That is a slap in her face.
During this time, the US carrier fleet led by the USS Ronald Reagan that escorted Pelosi’s plane, sailed away quickly to “monitor” the situation, far to the west, safely beyond the Philippine islands. The evident arrangement between the two superpowers is that the US scores an early goal, China scores the next one, and nobody loses face.
Taiwan did not get off so easily. It has to bear a minor blow to its economy – sanctions of their citrus fruits and some fish exports to the Mainland, estimated to cost them 1/10th of 1 percent of their GDP, which is nothing more than a rap on the knuckles. But the DPP government’s inability to capitalize on its moment of defiance, its basking in the sun under Pelosi’s patronage was significant.
And all those countries which had previously declared they would come to Taiwan’s assistance in solidarity statements were seen to just, well, dodge… Japan was quick to say that Taiwan has a problem, but Japan does not; as did Australia. The G7 issued some meaningless statement about a Chinese overreaction to a “normal diplomatic visit” (a gross understatement) which Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, called a piece of waste paper.
When the shit hits the fan, everybody just ducks. It became very clear to the Taiwanese that they will be totally alone in any confrontation with China.
Taiwanese media sources were highly agitated.
Those who are pro-American, mostly the younger segments of the population who grew up after the Lee Teng Hui presidency, are heavily influenced by a Hollywood culture and the belief that everything in America is best. The nasty communists who want to take them over are just reprehensible. Like their HK democracy counterparts, they don’t even want to be Chinese. The DPP government is their hope for an American way of life. This segment of the population makes up about half of the electorate. They were upbeat about the visit.
The other half support the KMT, the old foe of the CCP, which over the last 70 years since they lost the civil war, have democratized from an autocracy under Chiang Kaishek to the pursuit of more liberal norms. In recent years, they have gravitated towards a position of seeking a compromise with the CCP and is working to integrate Taiwan back into China.
The reunification vs independence is the issue that divides the two main parties in Taiwan.
Essentially, there is no such thing as a unified Taiwanese view on whether it is an independent country, or whether all Taiwanese are seeking such independence. From what I can see, the 23 million people on the island are evenly divided. And if they are called to fight for their position, 90 percent will not.
The official and diplomatic positions are clear. No need for me to regurgitate this. Simply stated, Taiwan is unambiguously part of China. Should the US or any other country support Taiwan independence through military intervention, the vast majority of the rest of the world will not support it. In fact, the US cannot act to support Taiwan militarily because in the UN view of the world, that would represent an invasion of the sovereignty of China and a meddling in its internal affairs.
Looking at the state of American diplomacy in the last few months after the Ukraine war started, there will be worldwide condemnation of any American military action in the Taiwan Straits. Taiwan is simply not a country, unlike Ukraine, and if it seeks independence, it would be secession. An internal matter of China.
Why all the subterfuge then? Clearly, if the US stays out of the fray, there would obviously be a peaceful reunification of the two entities eventually. In my many years living in China prior to the Trump Administration, it is clear to anyone who has friends on both sides that a reunification of Taiwan and China would only be a question of when. Taiwanese businesses are already well established on the Mainland especially in the South East of China. In the city of Kunshan (100 km from Shanghai), it is Taiwan Town, with billions of investments over numerous factories from many industries, and many cross-Straits families have been established due to unrestricted travel for Taiwanese to the mainland. Fight a war? It's unthinkable.
The effort to undermine this process of ongoing peaceful reunification has arisen simply because the two American political parties are desperately fighting each other, with each clamouring to pacify Americans’ irrational fear of the rise of the PRC. There is no other reason.
Backing the DPP is an act in bad faith. That’s going by diplomatic and legal standards.
If you are the only superpower on the planet, those standards don’t matter. You could tell everybody whatever you want them to do under threat of arms, and still superimpose a moral high ground. But by recognizing China as a peer competitor, the ruling elite in America also fears losing the country’s hegemonic position, the dominance over global geopolitical affairs and the opportunities to extract supernormal profits everywhere in the world. That is the reason why two successive American administrations have chosen to confront China.
Whether you think this is right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. You may think that America is justified to defend its hegemonic position, even if in doing so, its conduct will be pilloried by every country in the world. When did that ever stop the US in acting unilaterally and in bad faith in recent years? It is now a shadow of its former moral self.
Whether the current US government is moral or amoral is not the issue. In the world of realpolitik, the issue that is central to the problem of “iron-clad support” for the DPP government is how it plans to do so should that half of its population decide to declare independence. Will it put aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Straits? Will it send the 82nd Airborne to Taipeh as it did to Poland in the Ukraine War? And take casualties of 200,000- 500,000 American boys fighting for an island that has supporters for Nancy Pelosi in her home district, but which some in the country commit hate crimes against? Will the resulting inflation that would make Argentina look like an economic miracle be acceptable? How will the general public vote when asked to support a war in Taiwan against another nuclear superpower?
Frankly, the answer is obvious. From the point of view of actually putting boots on the ground to fight for Taiwan, it will never happen. It did not happen in Ukraine against the Russians, where there is an Ukrainian population that all of Europe can identify racially with, and war against Russia would not trigger the encumbrances that the extensive integration between the US and China economies would engender. Why would it happen in Taiwan?
The US can never go into a war against China.
In the last such confrontation with the Chinese during the Korean War, Truman chose to sack General MacArthur, the great hero of the Second War World in the Pacific, its then highest ranking and immensely popular soldier, for suggesting nuking China in 1950. A couple of years later, Eisenhower, himself a great wartime leader, heard that General Mark Clark, the new commander of UN forces in Korea, wanted to further the war against China, with a plan that could lose up to 800,000 American soldiers (in the titanic struggle in WW2, the US lost 300,000 combatants), the new president decided to end the war. Within months, there was the armistice.
China is now far more powerful, influential and richer than the diplomatically reclusive and stridently Leninist country that it was in the early Fifties. It has more friends among the world’s countries than America has. The organization of a UN combat coalition as happened in 1950, or even just moral support, to fight for Taiwan cannot even be contemplated. A war in the Taiwan Straits will be regarded as naked aggression by the United States, not China.
Then there is the question of military capabilities. The following post on Quora by an American veteran, Felix Su, also Taiwanese, has been widely circulated on the internet to answer the question of whether the US military will be able to defeat the PLA:
“Sorry to pop your bubble but I am American. Served during desert storm. 11B. A military assessment is done by not being “patriotic” but by being non-biased and looking at the evidence.
I don’t assume anything. Where do you get your assessment from? I get mine from the Pentagon’s papers on China.
China has far better technology than Russia. And according to the Pentagon, there is no defense against China’s ship killer missiles.
So even if all of NATO and Japan’s ships show up along with the US, they would just get sunk. One shot, one kill. There is no way for anyone current military to stop a maneuverable mach 20 missile that can evade incoming fire.
China has proven it has the capabilities. They hit a moving ship in the SCS with 2 DF-26 and 2 DF-21. The DF-26 is a mach 18–20 missile. The DF-21 is a mach 10 missile.
China has nothing to lose because according to US simulations, the US loses badly. Losing every ship within 1,000 miles of China.
You can also go read the Rand Corporations simulation results if you don’t like the Pentagon’s. Their report is the same. They’ve been running simulations for 15 years and the US has lost badly every time.
15 years ago it was 90% aircraft lost. Today, it’s 100% and all ships.
China is the only nation to have landed on Mars on the first try. Even the US had to do it twice to land on Mars. The EU tried 3 times. All failed. Russia tried twice, all failed.
China has the best launch record in the world.
They landed on the dark side of the moon, first try. They docked a space station capsule 90 degrees to the orbiting space station. Never been done. Because it is much easier to dock with the same axis than 90 degrees.
China hit 6 out of 6 anti-missile mid course interceptor. US hit 10 out 20.
Currently, China’s missiles out class ours. Their air to air missiles out range ours. Their regular anti-ship missile out range ours and is supersonic. Harpoon is still subsonic.
They detected the F-35 stealth fighter and intercepted it before they reached the East China Sea.
I’m inclined to agree with the Pentagon. We fight China, it will be a one sided fight with US on the losing end. And this is my assessment as a scientist and a US Army vet.
While the US has been fighting Islamic fanatics for the last 30 years. China has been studying US air and sea battle tactics and designing weapons specifically to beat the US. They have succeeded quite well. All their weapons are designed to counter the US strengths and turn them into weaknesses.
And they have unlimited ammo. US ships have 90–120 VLS launch cells. At last half are land attack missiles and can’t be used to defend the ship.
Even if they don’t use the hypersonic missiles, just their supersonic anti-ship missiles can easily overwhelm our ships and sink them en mass.
Taking over Taiwan? Easy. Taiwan won’t fight. I am Taiwanese, most of my relatives are still in Taiwan. My mom watches Taiwan TV and she talks to her relatives every week.
Maybe this is before your time, check out Operation Just Cause. After suppressing Taiwan air defense, China will fly mechanized infantry and tank units over to Taoyuan airport and land there like we did in Panama.
Then drive to Taipei and arrest the DPP, what’s left of them.
Every time there is an alarm about Chinese missiles, the President runs to her plane and takes off. But she doesn’t seem to realize that fighter planes are much much faster than commercial planes.
Felix Su
Economist, Biochemist”
This is not an isolated assessment of the outcome of a US-China conflict. It is well known to those of us who follow military matters. For some years now.
And for those of you who are interested enough to do a long read, here is the link to a Rand Corp study in 2015:
War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable | RAND
Here is an excerpt:
“Premeditated war between the United States and China is very unlikely, but the danger that a mishandled crisis could trigger hostilities cannot be ignored. Thus, while neither state wants war, both states' militaries have plans to fight one. As Chinese anti-access and area-denial (A2AD) capabilities improve, the United States can no longer be so certain that war would follow its plan and lead to decisive victory. This analysis illuminates various paths a war with China could take and their possible consequences.
Technological advances in the ability to target opposing forces are creating conditions of conventional counterforce, whereby each side has the means to strike and degrade the other's forces and, therefore, an incentive to do so promptly, if not first. This implies fierce early exchanges, with steep military losses on both sides, until one gains control. At present, Chinese losses would greatly exceed U.S. losses, and the gap would only grow as fighting persisted. But, by 2025, that gap could be much smaller. Even then, however, China could not be confident of gaining military advantage, which suggests the possibility of a prolonged and destructive, yet inconclusive, war. In that event, nonmilitary factors — economic costs, internal political effects, and international reactions — could become more important.
Political leaders on both sides could limit the severity of war by ordering their respective militaries to refrain from swift and massive conventional counterforce attacks. The resulting restricted, sporadic fighting could substantially reduce military losses and economic harm. This possibility underscores the importance of firm civilian control over wartime decision-making and of communication between capitals. At the same time, the United States can prepare for a long and severe war by reducing its vulnerability to Chinese A2AD forces and developing plans to ensure that economic and international consequences would work to its advantage.
That was the assessment in 2015 – eight years ago. The Rand report is actually outdated. Why talk about it then? Well, think about this. The conclusion of the report is that even in 2015, the US cannot win against China without getting hurt. The forecast back then is that by 2025, there will be much heavier losses on the American side in such a war to the extent that it is not winnable.
This is now 2022, close to the scenario in the 2025 in which Rand assessed that there would near parity on both sides. As a matter of fact, growth of Chinese military power has increased at a faster pace than that assessed by Rand in 2015. Now, the PLA has aircraft carriers, fifth generation stealth fighters and hypersonic missiles, the Beidou navigation (ie targeting) system that is better than GPS, all unheard of in 2015. With home court advantage. The 2025 scenario assessed by Rand has already been surpassed by the late 2010s and by now, the situation is closer to how Felix Su describes it.
Nobody launches a war if it is not absolutely confident of winning, unscathed. Verbal bluster is not the same as pulling a trigger.
To add to Felix Su’s unbiased and up-to-date analysis of comparative military strengths, it’s really a toss up whether the American or Chinese navies are at par in the waters of the Western Pacific. Not in the oceans off California, not in the Atlantic, not off Hawaii but specifically in the East China Sea. The best assets of the US Navy are not its 11 aircraft
carriers, which can be challenged by hypersonic missiles and mass drone warfare, but its submarine fleet, a capability which China does not yet have. You can bet that now, China will build that up, with Russian help which also matches American capabilities. If there is a thought that submarines may pose a threat of blockade to China, Beijing had this figured out a long time ago. That is the other reason why China did its Belt and Road Initiative. Its entire western frontier, to Russia and Central Asia all the way to Africa with everyone in between a friend, is potentially an effective counter to a submarine blockade.
Experts report that the Pentagon has conducted 18 war games/simulations over Taiwan and the US has lost all 18. I don’t know this for a fact, but I have read this many times from different sources.
Whatever the actual military capabilities, war is already unthinkable in the Taiwan Straits. The Chinese, having a less reactionary government, will not start a war without thinking through the consequences. After all, they have been successful staying out of military confrontations since 1979. The problem is on the American side and they have not been NOT at war except for a few years in the entire two and a half centuries of its existence as a country. Right now, the nation is also very divided, and the problem with that is that internal rivalry between the two political parties will create a desire to outshine the other in bashing China (and Russia) which can lead to errors in judgement and execution. Worse of all, it has an incompetent State Department.
Be that as it may, nobody is that stupid to start a war between two nuclear powers, other than Nancy Pelosi. The fact that the USS Ronald Reagan scooted out of its station near Taiwan as soon as Nancy left is an indication that at least at the Defence Dept, there is still good sense prevailing. And whether it was a managed crisis or lip service to pacify the fuming Chinese, the Biden Administration at least tried to put out the fire by claiming that Nancy does not represent the US government, meaning him.
One day after the Speaker left, the true extent of the deep hole that Taiwan has fallen into has begun to emerge. Many in the Taiwanese opposition were unanimously and furiously hammering Tsai Ingwen for callously allowing her government to accept the Pelosi visit. They said Tsai could have said no (well, actually she couldn’t since she is completely beholden to the Americans), but South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol who snubbed Auntie Pelosi because he did not want to deal with an expected call for Samsung semiconductor investments Stateside, stood out in stark contrast. China is punishing the DPP government for that, and there is a simultaneous chorus of criticism from the Taiwanese themselves on the recklessness of the visit.
While the economic sanctions imposed by the Mainland is still just a slap on the wrist, that is not the case with the military exercises. The live fire zones set up by China were very close to Taiwan, in some cases less than 20 km offshore (in one case, just 12 km). Some of us can jog that distance. The median “boundary” between the Mainland and the island were completely ignored by multiple flights of Chinese warplanes; and Taiwan’s coastal waters were scenes of simulated naval battle by the PLA Navy. The Taiwanese opposition was furious, not with China, but with the DPP government for having led to this very serious degradation of Taiwan’s security because they think that this will become permanent, and nobody can do anything about that, not the Taiwanese, and certainly not the Americans.
The big joke after the first day of Chinese exercises was the flight of armed missiles directly over Taipeh. The DPP government tried to deny this, but the Japanese military confirmed that it happened. It showed up the Taiwanese lack of technical capability to detect what’s coming at them or an inclination to downplay and obfuscate the precarious situation to their own population. They got lambasted all day long by the opposition.
This is probably the greatest damage caused to Taiwan by Pelosi. The South China Morning Post described this in greater detail than in my summary above:
“Why China’s war games around Taiwan are different this time
- The PLA has held missile tests aimed at the island before but it largely abided by a tacit understanding not to cross the median line
- Beijing is trying to send a message about its growing ability to blockade Taiwan, observers say
By Minnie Chan, South China Morning Post Published: 9:00pm, 5 Aug, 2022
The waters near Taiwan have been the site of military crises over the decades – twice in the 1950s and again in the mid-1990s.
But this time is different, with Beijing breaking tacit cross-strait understandings and showing better planning of massive exercises meant to warn Taiwan, according to defence analysts.
“From repeating advanced warnings, to the formal announcement and specific operations of the war games, the People’s Liberation Army wants to show the world that they are not only combat-ready for a Taiwan contingency, but also keeping all risks under control,” said Andrei Chang, editor-in-chief of Canada-based Kanwa Asian Defence.
The PLA exercises were launched on Thursday in the wake of a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan and will continue until noon on Sunday.
Soon after Pelosi landed on the island on Tuesday night, the PLA announced it would set up six “danger zones” encircling Taiwan.
Most of the zones were well beyond the median line that separates mainland China and Taiwan while one of the areas straddled it.
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The line was demarcated by US Air Force General Benjamin Davis in 1955 after the PLA took control of the Yijiangshan islands off Zhejiang province from Kuomintang troops.
Washington pressured both sides to enter a tacit agreement not to send military forces across the line and to maintain status quo of the strait.
The mainland refused to formally recognise the line but still complied.
The last time the PLA held missile tests aimed at Taiwan, all of the mainland’s warships stayed within the median line, and while a few warheads hit waters near Taipei and Kaohsiung, none of the missiles flew over the island.
Those tests were in 1995 and 1996 in response to a visit to the United States by the island’s first democratically elected president, Lee Teng-hui.
Taipei-based military expert Chi Le-yi said the 1995-1996 tests covered the north and south of Taiwan to block its air and sea routes and were to verify the army’s “missile blockade tactics”.
“However, this time, the PLA is going further to bring east Taiwan and the southwest Bashi Channel under its missile range coverage,” Chi said.
“This is a clear move aimed at showing how they would block the entrance of vessels and aircraft from the US and Japan to Taiwan in the event of a contingency.”
To do that, the PLA has used the drills to showcase its most advanced technology, including J-20 stealth fighter jets, a navy aircraft carrier, and upgraded long-range rockets.
It has fired ballistic missiles directly over Taiwan and sent drones over the airspace of Quemoy, Taiwan- controlled islands close to the mainland and also known as the Kinmen.
Earlier, the PLA sent fighter jets across the median line, and even deployed two of its stealth guided missile Type 055 destroyers to waters off eastern Taiwan for the first time.
The Type 055 is regarded as the second most powerful destroyer in the world after the US Navy’s DDG- 1000, or Zumwalt-class, stealth ship.
“The deployment of the Type 055 is aimed at deterring military interventions from the US and Japan, and helping the PLA to monitor and assess its ongoing war games,” said Zhou Chenming, a researcher from the Yuan Wang military science and technology think tank in Beijing.
Zhou said Beijing wanted to convey to Taiwan that it could blockade the island for three days and perhaps even longer.
It could do this he said because today’s PLA was more confident than in the 1990s, with a much more powerful navy and air force.
“The war games are unprecedented and complex, showing the mainland’s air and naval superiorities,” he said.
“But the mainland has been restrained, as it realises its great impact on the livelihood of Taiwanese people and regional stability,” he said, adding the PLA was launching missiles “within manageable proportions”.
Chang said the armed forces of Beijing, Taipei and Washington were all managing to avoid the risk of conflict.
Chi said Beijing also wanted to use the war games to reduce the risk of a full-scale challenge to its one- China principle because representatives from some countries were planning to follow Pelosi’s lead.
“In terms of political purpose, the ongoing war games aim to cause a post-event deterrent in the wake of Pelosi’s visit, preventing the US-Taiwan relationship from escalating and degenerating,” he said.
As of today, my assessment is this: Taiwan has lost a lot more than the DPP government is willing to admit. I think instead of advancing their popularity in Taiwan, they have regressed. The opposition is harping on the economic risks. Although in fact they are minor at this time, the rap on the knuckles should remind Taiwan that this could very easily become a stranglehold which will choke off Taiwan’s economy. Forty percent of Taiwan’s trade is with the Mainland. China has Taiwan’s balls in its hand.
By the end of this year, there will be some midterm election (not the presidential election which happens in 2024) in Taiwan, and if the strategy to use the Americans to bolster their military deficiencies (hey, the Taiwanese are still flying some F-5s and operating M60 tanks, all developed half a century ago and much of their military inventory is totally obsolete) leads to the CCP stepping up the economic and military pressure, then the DPP will lose ground.
If the KMT resumes power, the path to peaceful reunification will be re-established.
Therefore, there are internal dynamics within Taiwan that can lead to peace in the Taiwan Straits. I would just like to remind all readers of this commentary that politics in Taiwan is by no means monolithic. It is in fact fierce, fiery and competitive. The situation in Taiwan is not so different from the US itself, a clear division between two major parties, which in their case is the DPP and the KMT. They are split along the lines of Taiwanese independence (DPP) vs gradual reunification with China (KMT). With the events of the last week, DPP has, on balance, lost a big gamble.
It is my humble opinion that governments which win the hearts and minds of their electorates have a singular task. As James Carville, Clinton’s political advisor said in 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid!” To gain and to maintain a mandate to rule, a government must deliver on the economy. For the DPP government in Taiwan, plotting to get closer to the United States won’t cut it because that is also a path to war, which destroys, not build. While the US will never put its own soldiers to fight a war with China on behalf of the Taiwanese (that I am 100 percent sure of), that path of instigating such actions will piss off Beijing and will lead to military threats, even blockades, as well as economic sanctions, as we have seen this week.
There is no economic pot of gold at the end of the road for collaborating with the Americans to contain China’s rise because not only will it not work, it will also make Beijing more determined to take over Taiwan earlier. If so, the DPP’s policies will fail to govern a pecuniarily-inclined people like the Taiwanese. Tsai’s days are numbered. That to me is the most obvious fall-out from the Pelosi visit.
As far as Pelosi herself is concerned, she had her moment in the sun, a sort of victory lap before she steps down as Speaker. For that, her whole family is now sanctioned by China, and while that may not mean much for her personally, I don’t think it is a good position to be in vis-a-vis the largest economy (in PPP terms) in the world. She may not care but her next two generations may curse her for it.
Within the US, Trump did not mince his words on the matter. He blamed Pelosi for letting China have an excuse to advance its interest. Crazy Nancy is at fault, he says. A Pelosi PR win on the 3rd August may well become an albatross going into the midterms.
For the Democrats, the attempt to look stronger vs the Republicans in China bashing may have seemed momentarily successful to the home audience in front of the congressional elections, but outside America’s borders, every country, even the G7 countries forced to comply with the west’s impulse to say something negative against China in support of the Pelosi trip, think it is a reckless idea to let Pelosi go to Taiwan. This will cause a decline of America’s prestige as a sensible great power – crazy Nancy, crazy Americans.
This is especially since the west’s sponsored war in the Ukraine is going badly. The Ukrainian army is losing territory in the Donbas on a daily basis and is probably a couple of weeks away from losing all of that territory. The Russians are already shifting forces to the south of Ukraine, likely to be in preparation of an offensive in the direction of Odessa. And where is that million man army that was supposed to launch a Ukrainian counteroffensive?
Europe is already starting to quietly abandon key parts of the sanctions against Russia, because they cannot take the feedback pressure anymore. The PR offensive is turning sour, as the truth about Ukrainian military and especially Zellensky’s incompetence is becoming obvious and the western mainstream media is rushing to reveal all kinds of problems with the war, including the abominable corruption in the country, and also potential war crimes, as was done by Amnesty International last week.
The US has to be successful somewhere else so as not to look like a has-been, and China seems like a place which many Americans love to hate. What can go wrong if a cute little place like Taiwan does not want to be smothered by big bad China and America puts its weight behind a cute little leader like Tsai Ingwen who can be made out as another hero.
America just loves heroes.
And oh, forget any help that Biden had hoped to get from China on lowering inflation in the US. Any confrontation in the S China Sea will break down the supply chains worldwide and will lead to inflation soaring to double digit levels very quickly. Of course, the US government can freeze all trade with China which will make the Weimar Republic’s inflationary experience in the 1920’s look like deflation.
As for China, the restrained reaction in the eyes of its own people has caused it some loss of face but at the end of the day, the advancement of their position in the Taiwan Straits probably more than makes up for it. The PLA has essentially wiped out the mutually accepted median line in the Straits of Taiwan and that is highly significant. Done once, it will be done again and again, and in time, China’s maritime borders will be to the east, yes, EAST of Taiwan. Will the American navy challenge this? I hardly think so, not within the firing range of those missiles demonstrated this week to be slamming into those very waters.
If so, “One China” will have a new meaning that is immensely profound. Taiwan would then lie WITHIN China’s territorial waters and within the PLA’s missile strike range, and completely in the stranglehold of Chinese economic reprisals if the DPP government goes astray. Everyone who can think clearly knows that this will be the new normal. Is that an advancement of Beijing’s position or Taipeh’s? Trump, for one, already has his views made loud and clear. For once, I agree with the man.
The military show of force is also a not-so-subtle demonstration of the long view Beijing takes in such matters of geopolitics. The US government has knee jerk reactions to everything, much like its companies chasing quarterly results. The Chinese are showing relative restraint and is behaving, in my humble opinion, like in did in HK during the riots in 2019. They did not send in the PLA then, even though all of the Chinese internet was clamouring for it. It patiently waited for the democracy movement to get overconfident, with hot heads believing its own propaganda that the Beijing-backed local government was buckling under pressure, and then staging a “military style” showdown at the HK Polytechnic campus. That led to a police siege which broke the back of the movement in just five days. The rest was mopping up and a year later, the National Security Law was passed and the riotous movement was permanently crushed.
Not one bullet fired, not one life lost. That is what I think will happen in Taiwan. Another misstep by the DPP, and they will be gone forever by economic and psychological pressure. No one dies.
The amazing part of this sorry episode is that the entire world assumes that Taiwan is monolithic. That every man on the island is seeking American support to prevent a reunification with China. Most analysts who have said their piece in the last three days have completely been oblivious to what is the most important factor that will determine the matter of peaceful coexistence or war. It really depends on who is in power in Taipeh.
At the end of the day, the whole Pelosi visit was a big PR show in the following dimensions:
- The DPP wants to demonstrate their ability to call on the Americans to defend them against the PLA as their trump card to secure more local votes;
- The Democrats need to show to the Republicans that they are not behind in China- bashing to also garner more votes; and
- The CCP needs to show to the world and its vast Chinese population that it has the determination as well as the economic and military capabilities to take over Taiwan at any time, and is only biding its time, as it did successfully in HK. That is also a political exercise.
It is all a show, and that show must not become real, or the delicate politics will be completely turned topsy-turvy.
It is my sense, that if we recognise the deep divisions within Taiwanese politics on the existential matter of reunification with China, the immediate consequence of the Pelosi visit is that there has been a complete shattering of cohesion within the island’s leadership class, and hence in the territory itself. The DPP has had a profound and irreparable loss of confidence from at least half the population. Tsai Ingwen is the cause of that.
Who then is the dumbass in the room?
Wai Cheong
Investment Committee
The writer has been in financial services for more than forty years. He graduated with First Class Honours in Economics and Statistics, winning a prize in 1976 for being top student for the whole university in his year. He also holds an MBA with Honors from the University of Chicago. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst.
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