The Two-China Problem

 

After many decades of stern, stiff, sometimes very heavy-handed rhetoric backed by naval and aerial flexing of naval and aerial bi- and triceps, and the responsive and consequential shrugs, the vox of media descended into frenzy regarding a not exactly imminent, but decisively final once-it-occurs assault by mainland China, the proverbial "people's republic", against the remnants of the Chiang Kai-shek system and Guomindang rule, if not exactly in Guomindang's safekeeping, with Chairman Xi's speech 

And consequential as never, President Tsai - the most underrated president anywhere whether regarding handling of the Covid-19 crisis in face of overt sabotage attempts, salvaging a constantly besieged economy, or the unpredictable identitarian praise for a lesbian in a domain reserved for straight white (sorry, yellow...?) males not interested in gender-corrective surgery - stood firm and, in the name of the people of Taiwan, now all that but in recognition, and the green streak of her movement - also under siege, one should point out - by holding that, under no circumstances, would the republic having achieved not only independence but that most precious prizes of all, of liberty, usher in an era of Hong Kong-esque descent in barbarity and rule under the Zhongnanhai's boot. Surely any Western liberal enamoured by these questions over all else should draw their swords at the very disturbance in sleep that the China of old, fervently patriotic, militaristic authority waved its nails at the small, free, independent-in-all-but-name republic? If not for, say it, their pocket books and bloody ignorance? 

I use strong phrases here; indeed, this defiance may be held as the great prize, if one could call it that, from China's clumsily effective destruction of never perfected but long-lasting liberty in Hong Kong, from the closing of uncomfortable shops, a symtom frightfully recognisable in other parts of the free world, to outright , to the symbolic and seemingly needless gesture of removing a statue of indignity (again, signs...) commemorating the massacre, please don't call it thus, from the campus of Hong Kong University. Whether these gestures will have eradicated liberty or the idea of it from the Dragon City we shall not know for a long time, but my personal desires to visit (as I almost did in 2014, the dread of a comparison never made unnerving now, although comfortably at least there are braver souls out there to make it for me) and attend the merry mixture of Chinese legal traditions and Anglo-Saxon common law, with the strange spice of colonial overreach in the blend, may now have faded into unlikelihood beyond even the faintest hope. 

Could this have been averted? Well, likely not. But the sealing of the fate of Hong Kong, as it was or perhaps "as it ought have been" (or at least "as Chris Patten would have us believe it ought to have been", his wit and undeniably Cassandric qualities being greatly compensated by his lack of using them even to demonstrate, at the critical moment, his revulsion until fear had become reality) has certainly sealed another path, that of the republic being abolished in full, and the polity known to the world as "Taiwan" (and the Pescadores, and so on) until the point of combat and invasion being the all-expected path to such an outcome. The Taiwanese will never surrender, will never walk the Hong Kong dao (no one bothers to mention Macau, demonstrating; at least unintentionally their greater devotion to British norms) into the jaws of Xi. This posits, as it did in 1949 and perhaps more dramatically, the two-China problem. 

Both exist, both have wide recognition, of different sorts, and the undeniable retrocession question - not really a question, had not Chiang chosen and managed to salvage his "revolution" and "government" by absconding with its best resources and best men here, of all places - is a key factor in denying to Red China that which they, in all honestly, could otherwise take or "pacify" by force. Yet, Taiwan is not a country, the republic is dead, or so Sweden has held it to be since 1950, the United Kingdom even longer, France and particularly the United States, not quite so long. How is this to be reconciled, with an ever-belligerent, and ever-stronger, Red China, the China of the CCP, the people's republic, putting its hooves across the Pacific, and then opening his maw to roar his desires. The inevitable Hitler analogy is of course spurious, but not quite distasteful, at least not for anyone swift to throw it at elected politicians in France, the Netherlands or Finland, or indeed the United States, quite incapable of building or even having the designs to build a concentration camp. In Xinjiang, and of course Tibet, this is not quite so, and whatever the regime's lackeys would tell you, this is the great fake news, if there is any "narrative" worthy of this self-insulting label. 

How then, if this is again the object, and if this object is seriously taken, is the republic to be used against the "Red" China, resurrected wrothful China, the China which seeks to dominate, expand and aggrieve the world? And how, which would be the presumed solution, should they move about? These considerations, which should have been considered with Xi's rise in 2012, if not already around 1992, with Jiang, is what now clouds the minds of these Western advocates, who must now so cynically - if not wrongly - do this volte-face and manage to explain it properly.