China, Taiwan, and the Future of Geopolitics

Taiwan is a keystone for China to cross the Pacific and
go out to the world. It is an important strategic space
that affects national security and national rejuvenation
and affects China’s external transformational links,
trade links and energy transportation links.

Taiwan is the frontline for China to contest with
international anti-Chinese forces, separatist forces
and terrorist forces. If Taiwan independence is
allowed, there will be a domino effect, which will
give excuses to other separatist forces. The
consequence would be unimaginable. So China
must never retreat.

Opposing Taiwan independence and safeguarding
unification also affects China’s international dignity,
image, influence and authority. China’s national
rejuvenation must not be symbolised by the
country’s division.

—Major General Peng Guangjian, PRC Academy of Military Sciences

Prudence alone should lead policy makers in Washington,
Tokyo and Taipei, among other capitals, to remain open
to the possibility that geostrategic rationales are among
the key drivers of PRC policy toward Taiwan … one
would be remiss in failing to think anew about why
Taiwan is now sufficiently important to the PRC that
Beijing justifies to itself the readying of military force.
Equally important is the need to avoid a blinkered view
of Beijing’s stance on Taiwan as an outgrowth of a
peculiar Chinese fascination with unity or an inflamed
reaction to historical grievances.

—Alan Wachman, Why Taiwan?

ERROL MORRIS’S fine documentary about Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, offers a number of lessons about how to deal with the challenges of geopolitics in the twenty-first century. Prominent among them is the need to be able to empathise with your opponent. As China’s power has increased over the past couple of decades, there has been a good deal of empathy, in a number of ways, from the outside world. Broadly speaking, China’s rise has been welcomed and considerable efforts have been made to foster it, on constructive lines. As far as possible, this should continue.

Empathy, however, means “being able to see a problem or situation from the other side’s point of view”. It does not mean then agreeing with the other side, or necessarily conceding to them in a contest. It is, in the first instance, simply a means for avoiding miscalculation about their motives and perspectives. The particular case that Morris dwelt on in his documentary was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But our primary concern here is the potential for crisis in the Taiwan Strait.

Let me illustrate what I mean by empathy. Seventeen years ago, when I was a relatively young defence intelligence analyst in Canberra, I attended a talk by Alan Whiting, a fine American analyst of East Asian geopolitical affairs. He spoke about China’s rise, then in its early stages, and about the alarm and shock caused by the brutal suppression of the democracy movement in China, which we customarily refer to as the Tiananmen massacre. In particular, he stated that there was a certain rather paranoid attitude in Chinese military and Communist Party circles to the effect that the United States was the single greatest threat to China’s national security.

When the time came for questions, I said that perhaps we should exercise our imaginations a little in regard to such perceptions, before dismissing them as paranoid. Imagine, I suggested, that, instead of the United States having a nuclear arsenal fifty to a hundred times larger and far more diversified than China’s (the year was 1991), a GDP per capita that was then at least twenty times larger than China’s, dominance of space, the oceans and the skies and military bases in or security relationships with South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Marianas, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand and so on, things were actually the other way around?

Suppose, instead, that China had a nuclear arsenal and GDP per capita both twenty times as large as America’s; that it dominated space; that its air force dominated the skies, its navies both the Pacific and other global oceans and that it not only had Japan and South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines firmly within its sphere of influence, but had military forces stationed in Canada, Mexico and Cuba, as well as alliances with Britain and Brazil; and that it had established a protective relationship with a self-governing Hawaii that was resisting US claims of sovereignty. Would anybody in America, I asked Professor Whiting, be in the slightest doubt that China represented the greatest security threat to the United States?

Whiting gave every appearance of being irritated by the question, but he need not have been. My intention was not to suggest that the United States had hostile intentions towards China. Rather, it was to point out just how things might look from inside China if you were a proud and ambitious Chinese military officer or political cadre. We can ask this same question now, almost two decades later and we need to do so more than we did in 1991, because China has become a great deal wealthier and more ambitious in the intervening years. We need to ask such questions, above all, as regards Chinese thinking about the geo-strategic significance of Taiwan, and the relative power of the United States and China. FOR

MANY YEARS, both as an intelligence analyst for the Australian government and as a public intellectual, I have argued that China lacked the military capabilities to seize Taiwan, that its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan was contestable on historical grounds and that its best interests would actually, if paradoxically, lie in offering Taiwan de jure independence in the same spirit that the British empire offered Canada and Australia de jure independence more than a century ago. I still believe all these things. However, as I sat down to prepare this paper, Alan Wachman’s monograph Why Taiwan? Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity, published in 2007 by Stanford University Press, was sent to me to review. It is an absolutely first-class piece of scholarship and has given an edge to my reflections on this topic that they might otherwise have lacked.

Wachman knows that China cannot, for the present, simply seize Taiwan, but he notes, as most of us have done, with growing disquiet, that China is intent on shifting the military balance across the Strait and that it is succeeding in this endeavour. He agrees that China’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan is contestable. Indeed, he breaks new ground in showing why this is so and demonstrates, I think, that Taiwan was always viewed as an external territory by Chinese leaders from the early Qing when it was first invaded, to the late Qing when it was ceded to Japan, by Sun Yat-sen and by Chiang Kaishek, and by Mao Zedong and his colleagues—until 1942. It was never viewed as a part of China proper until the 1940s. Indeed, both Sun Yat-sen (in the 1910s) and Mao Zedong (in the 1930s) spoke of encouraging and supporting the peoples of Korea and Taiwan to assert their independence against Japan, not of asserting Chinese sovereignty over them.

Finally, Wachman points out that China has, in the 1990s, indicated that it does not lay claim any longer to Mongolia or vast territories in the Russian Far East and Central Asia which also belonged to the Qing empire. Yet it insists that it must and will take back little Taiwan—an island half the size of Tasmania, though with fifty times its population. Why? Because it sees Taiwan as a strategically vital piece of terrain in view of its growing trade and its geopolitical ambitions.

This is all exceptionally interesting history and well worth pondering. However, Wachman’s signal contribution is to point out that there has also been, since the time of the seventeenth-century Qing strategist Shi Lang, a line of thinking in China that Taiwan is a strategically crucial piece of territory for China and should be controlled by it for that reason.

Shi Lang’s concern in the late seventeenth century, and that of Qing statesman Li Hongzhang in the late nineteenth, was that there was a possible threat to China from the sea. If China did not occupy Taiwan, a hostile foreign power, European or Asian, might do so. Japan did, from 1895, of course. Even so, it was only half a century later that the idea of Taiwan as belonging to China by right started to be asserted. Why? Wachman argues, persuasively, I think, that it was because the world had changed and the salience of Taiwan had increased. This has become ever more so just to the extent that China has ceased being merely an introverted continental power and has become a major trading state with a rapidly growing stake in sea lines of communication.

Above all, however, Wachman notes the increased ambitions of China to extend its power and increase its prestige as a great power dominant in East and South- East Asia and dominant in naval terms in the Western Pacific. This is the heart of the matter and it is with regard to these ambitions—not merely with regard to some real or imagined grievance dating back to the 1890s—that we must grapple. It is in regard to the importance of Taiwan to an ambitious China that we must exercise our capacity for empathy; but also look to our own interests with great circumspection. For to empathise is not necessarily to concede. We all need to think long and hard about whether China’s ambitions with regard to this island can or should be acceded to or resisted.

Empathy with China’s ambitions would consist, surely, in being able to feel with Chinese nationalists that there is no good reason for the United States to presume that it should be the naval hegemon in the Western Pacific, able to contain China behind the first island chain from the Kuriles to the Philippines. Why should not China hold sway in these waters? It is, after all, a state of great antiquity and cultural eminence, which dominated these waters in Yuan and Ming times and was looked up to then by regional states, including even Japan. The Americans intruded after defeating Japan in 1945, but the world has changed and China, as it becomes a renascent trading state, should surely be acknowledged as the natural hegemon in East Asia, at least on a par with the role the United States has long arrogated to itself in the western hemisphere. There it has, since the time of President Monroe, famously declared that it will brook no interference by any outside power. Why should China not be at liberty to make a similar declaration about East Asia?

Note that I express these views candidly, as if I were in the shoes of, say, Admiral Liu Huaqing, the so-called Alfred Thayer Mahan of China. If we can empathise with such views, which is to say comprehend how and why one might sincerely hold them, we are better placed to respond thoughtfully and constructively to them. At a minimum, we are less likely to misunderstand what China’s motives are for asserting that Taiwan is an inalienable or “sacred” part of Chinese territory. For it is not actually either of those things, but such rhetoric, never used before 1942, plays an increasing role in China’s declaratory policy just to the extent that it has ambitious goals that it hesitates to openly avow—for fear of triggering concerted resistance.

THE QUESTION we must then confront is: should China’s ambitions in this regard be resisted? The subsidiary question is: if so, what is the most intelligent way of doing this? By way of inviting reflection on this grave subject, I want to put such considerations in a deeper context: that of the lessons from history, East and West, which are most instructive in circumstances of the kind we are now confronting in East Asia. For when we contemplate the ambitions of an Admiral Liu Huaqing or a Major General Peng Guangjian for their great country, we can readily foresee the dangers of what Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon called, in their book by this name in 2007, “a war like no other”.

I am an historian and international relations analyst by training and for me the greatest primer in geopolitics is still The Peloponnesian War, by the Athenian general Thucydides. Written 2400 years ago, it is one of the greatest of the world’s classics. In it, Thucydides again and again recorded speeches in which the representatives of different city-states or even factions within citystates argued the case for their state’s interests or their faction’s policies. The effect is very powerful and is an education in the rhetoric of geopolitics, even now. The central insight of Thucydides was that the great war was a tragedy, not a moral melodrama. He did not take the point of view that one side was good and the other bad. Rather, he pointed out, taking great pains to be objective, the ways in which human beings get caught up in the meshes of their own perspectives, fears and ambitions and thus dragged into bitter and destructive conflicts.

In writing as he did, Thucydides laid the foundation of serious historical and geopolitical enquiry. Two thousand years later, none other than Thomas Hobbes described Thucydides as “the most politic historiographer that ever writ”. In this same sombre spirit the great nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, in the third book of his magisterial Roman History, described how Carthage built up a Phoenician empire in the Western Mediterranean in order to counter the westward migrations of the Greeks, only to end up on a collision course with the rising power of Rome. It did all of this, over several centuries, Mommsen concluded laconically, “because it could not do otherwise”.

The consequence was the Punic Wars of the third century BC, which ended in the downfall of Carthage and the rise of Roman power in the Western Mediterranean, at the very time that the King of Ch’in was conquering all other surrounding kingdoms and creating the Chinese empire. The fate of Carthage was tragic, but we should remind ourselves that this seems so only in retrospect. The Carthaginians were not victims. They were ambitious, rich and proud and set out to defeat Rome. They failed and their failure led to the destruction of Carthage and many centuries of Roman dominance in the West. It is the fateful character of the collision between the two states to which Mommsen was drawing attention and which is food for thought now, as we contemplate the possible collision in East Asia between China and the United States.

John Mearsheimer, in his book under this title in 2001, described this pattern as the tragedy of great power politics. Our present challenge is to learn from this pattern and enquire as to ways in which a comparable fateful drift to war might be constructively avoided in the next half-century. I say “constructively avoided” because I do not counsel that China’s ambitions simply be acceded to; nor do I believe that we should see China as necessarily an enemy with whom, sooner or later, we shall have to fight. Rather, by exploring the perceptions of the various actors in this potential tragic drama and the possible outcomes of a fateful collision, I believe we can enlarge the scope for an integration of a rich and proud China into a Pacific comity of nations without either kowtowing to it or going to war with it.

“The growth in the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta,” Thucydides wrote in around 404 BC, “made war inevitable. Still, it is well to give the grounds alleged by either side, which led to the dissolution of the treaty [between them] and the breaking out of the war” (Book I: 23). As China’s power increases, the United States is in the position of Sparta and many of us face dilemmas as to where we stand. Taiwan is inescapably implicated. The question is: is war or the things that might flow from efforts to avoid war by bowing to Chinese power, inevitable; or can we shape the future in less ominous ways? I have argued, in my own book, Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) that this is possible; neither war nor submission to a new Chinese empire is inevitable.

In saying this, however, I am not being merely optimistic. I am not predicting that everything will work out peacefully and constructively, for indeed it may not. I am seeking to highlight the nature of the challenges we face if things are to work out well. And in doing so I have in mind a further historical analogy—that of the First World War, which so many pundits in the decade leading up to it declared would not occur, because it would be too costly to the great powers and would make no economic sense. Precisely such thoughts are often enough articulated in our time and they have even more plausibility now than they did in 1910, when Ralph Norman Angell published his book The Great Illusion, arguing that “the integration of the economies of European countries had grown to such a degree that war between them would be entirely futile, making militarism obsolete”.

In his study of the First World War, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (2004), David Stevenson argued trenchantly that neither the outbreak, nor the duration, nor the horrific costs, nor the nature of the settlement of the war was inevitable. Political leaders were and should be held accountable for the decisions they made which brought it all about. This is surely true in important ways. And yet, the same can be said of the Second World War, both in Europe and Asia; and of other wars. The reality is that human affairs are prone to such cataclysms and we have yet to discover any general remedy for them. We must, therefore, grapple in earnest with the challenge of avoiding such a cataclysm in the case of the rise of China.

THE FIRST PREMISE on which such an effort might reasonably be based is that the very American hegemony in the Pacific which China’s more ambitious geopoliticians now long to push back has been the precondition for peace and growing prosperity in the Pacific world and East Asia since 1945. While it is possible that this role will become of decreasing necessity in the decades ahead, at least it cannot be said that American hegemony has been onerous or oppressive in decades past. There is, therefore, a general interest in avoiding a war which could shatter the Pax Americana and the flourishing global economy that has, with all its imperfections, underwritten not only Western prosperity since 1945, but Asian prosperity, starting with Japan’s resuscitation after 1945 and including China’s over the past generation. The First World War had such a shattering effect on the nascent global economy that had developed under the Pax Britannica because Germany violently challenged the international balance of power with the wealth and military muscle it rapidly accumulated after its unification by Bismarck.

Yet the benefits of globalisation before 1914 did not prevent a cataclysm and they may not do so a century later. Even as regards internal debates and geopolitical restraint in China, we cannot be certain that things will hold steady. We know that a similar sense of ambition and growing self-assurance in Japan in the years after the Meiji Restoration culminated in the cataclysm of the Pacific War and that, long before then, in the 1880s and 1890s, Japan was already using coercive diplomacy and military power to extend its sway on the East Asian littoral and on the Korean peninsula in particular. S.C.M. Paine’s excellent history The Sino-Japanese War 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power and Primacy (2003) sets this out with admirable lucidity. Taiwan was an early target of Japanese imperialism and our apprehension now is that it could be an early target of Chinese imperialism.

This last claim goes to the heart of the matter, as Alan Wachman has pointed out. By and large, both China’s declaratory policy and the polite diplomatic language used by other states contrive to suggest that taking Taiwan back is simply a matter of China’s sovereign rights, which were violated by the unequal treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. I must say that the term “unequal treaties” always strikes me as rather odd. Since when were treaties between a victorious and a defeated power “equal”? Were the treaties between China and tributary or barbarian states at the height of China’s imperial splendour “equal” treaties? But in any case, this is a largely misleading issue, since China’s interest in Taiwan has far more to do with the future aspirations of China than with any past wrongs.

Or to put it a little differently, the loss of Taiwan as a territory controlled by the Qing dynasty came to seem significant to the modern rulers of China just to the extent that they aspired to extend Chinese power out into the Pacific. The particular emphasis given it now has to do with wanting to become a naval power in the Pacific, not with any overriding interest in the island for its own sake. And it is for this reason that the international society of states needs to think carefully and strategically about the matter. For China to want maritime security is understandable; for it to aspire to be the predominant naval power in the Western Pacific, to push the United States out of East Asia and to control the Taiwan Strait, through which Japanese and South Korean trade flows in such quantities, is another matter.

You will notice that, in making these remarks, I am not yet saying anything about Taiwan being a democratic trading state with a right to determine its own destiny. That may be so, but it is ultimately a secondorder issue in the larger scheme of things, just like China’s assertion that it has some inherent right to sovereignty over Taiwan because of the Qing conquest of the island or the Cairo or Potsdam declarations, which promised the island to the Republic of China once Japan was defeated. The fundamental issue is the geostrategic significance, or what Wachman calls the “salience” of Taiwan in the eyes of Chinese grand strategists and the major powers other than China, for it is this which will almost certainly determine the fate of the island in the next ten to twenty years.

I SUGGESTED EARLIER that we should at least empathise with China’s aspiration to dominate the East Asian littoral and the Western Pacific, but I do not therefore intend to imply that we should acquiesce in such domination. What we do need to do is to think through carefully what varying degrees of such domination might entail. We would need to do that, moreover, even had China embarked on a program of democratisation as extensive as its program of economic reform over the past generation. The fact that it manifestly has not done so and that it remains a dictatorship further complicates the matter. Finally, the fact that it uses the language of historical grievance to press its claims should also give us pause, since it suggests an underlying mood which is truculent rather than friendly.

This was a point Gordon Chang made, early this year, in the Weekly Standard. He argued forcefully that China does not want to be friends with the United States:

Washington and Beijing have fundamentally
inconsistent objectives. Americans believe they
have a role in Central and East Asia. The Chinese
do not agree. To implement its grand strategy,
Beijing is creating multilateral organizations, such
as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, from
which the United States is excluded. Moreover,
Beijing has worked hard to separate Washington
from its two allies in the region, Tokyo and Seoul.
This, despite all the happy talk one hears in
Washington, is a zero-sum contest.

Of course, one cannot help asking why China seems to Gordon Chang to be so dangerous a threat if, as he wrote only a few years ago, it is going to collapse quite soon. If, actually, it is not set to collapse, then his earlier prognosis was in error, in which case his prognosis regarding China’s geopolitical threat to the interests of the United States and its allies might prove equally wide of the mark. Yet there was some basis for his collapse thesis and there is some basis, also, for his expression of alarm at what he describes as the “ruthlessly pragmatic” disposition of the Chinese leadership. And this disposition, though it is somewhat more complex than Chang seems to allow, could contribute to triggering a conflict in the Taiwan Strait that would be profoundly destabilising in the region, however it played out.

Gordon Chang’s sense of alarm or antipathy is not shared by everyone charged with analysing these matters, of course. In Australia, there are many analysts and politicians who believe both that China has a perfect right to assume sovereignty over Taiwan and that it will do so sooner rather than later. Two years ago, a very senior Australian intelligence analyst and China specialist, now back in the groves of academe, e-mailed me that he had “no sympathy for the idea of Taiwanese independence”, thought that reunification was both “inevitable and would be no bad thing” and believed that the view of the history of Taiwan held by those in the DPP and the TSU who were called the Greens was “dangerous nonsense”.I responded to him that it was, of course, entirely possible that reunification might occur, but that I thought the job of intelligence analysts was to consider various possibilities. I remarked that my own abiding interest lay in the ways in which strategic
intelligence could be undermined by dispositions which take the form “I have no sympathy for X and believe that Y is inevitable”.

I do not believe that China has a perfect right to assume sovereignty over Taiwan and I do not even think that we should use the term “reunification” to describe such a prospective assumption. Taiwan has never been part of the People’s Republic of China; it was forcefully occupied and colonised by the Republic of China between 1945 and 1947, then kept under martial law for forty years, and its people have fought for and called for their independence on a number of occasions. Nor do I believe that the absorption of Taiwan by China is inevitable. But the operative question, surely, is: would it be a bad thing if this did occur? Here two things are closely related: the way in which it occurs (with or without the peaceful consent of the people of Taiwan) and the extent to which other regional states would feel vulnerable if China controlled Taiwan.

Just to the extent that China insists on having its way, there is reason to fear that it would use control of Taiwan to exert pressure on other states in the East Asian and Western Pacific region. It sometimes appears that Chinese strategists resent any suggestion that such proclivities on China’s part should be kept in check, but if they are not, we face a most uncertain future. China must, in this sense, be contained, but not for that reason thwarted in its legitimate aspirations. The question is: how do we collectively strike the right balance? And, above all, how does this balance come to seem right in the minds of proud and patriotic citizens of China, including its best military officers?

I mentioned earlier that one can empathise with the aspiration of some, at least, of its leaders for China to exert a sway over its immediate region comparable to that which the United States has long exerted in the Americas. The more innocent or less reflective among us may think that such sway would be benign indeed, if only China were a democratic state like the United States. Yet a little serious reflection will suggest that the truth is considerably more complex than that. The United States defeated Mexico in 1848 and annexed a great deal of its territory. In 1898, it defeated Spain and took extensive colonies from it, including the Philippines. It also annexed Hawaii, with a view to extending its naval power into the Pacific. It intervened in the affairs of Mexico again in the early twentieth century, as in those of the Central American states, especially Nicaragua. Its long arm has been extended deep into the Southern Cone in recent decades and often with violent results. Above all, it has conducted a hostile campaign against Castro’s Cuba since 1959.

Is this kind of geopolitical behaviour what we would accept from a democratic China? If not, why not? And if the United States can do what it has done for decades to Cuba, on what grounds can it reasonably object if China treats Taiwan in the same manner? Yet by and large China has not done that for some time. It has been more restrained with regard to Taiwan than the United States has been with regard to Cuba, even though it claims sovereignty over Taiwan; something the United States has not claimed over Cuba. It is parallels of this nature which lead many even of my own countrymen to question whether we should be so concerned about China’s claims or Taiwan’s fate. What I think this underscores is that there is, actually, nothing inherently objectionable to China being more powerful and influential than it is and that standards of objectivity and consistency are required if we are ever to reach a constructive accommodation in East Asian affairs of the rising aspirations of China—whether it remains a dictatorship or becomes a substantially more open and democratic state.

I suggest that there are three underlying problems that must be addressed in the search for such an accommodation.

• China must be enabled, and see itself as enabled, to become a fully developed trading state in the twentyfirst- century world order;
• China must not be encouraged to believe that it is welcome to do this as a dictatorship or as a geopolitical menace to any of its neighbours;
• Taiwan, as a de facto democratic and self-governing state, must be allowed to determine its own relationship with China and not be forced to kowtow to a dictatorship in Beijing.

Can all of this be accomplished? Certainly it can, in principle, but not quickly or easily, and the chief danger lies in things being precipitated, especially by an impatient or recalcitrant China over the next decade or so.

AT THE HEART of the matter lie three questions for those of us who are outside China and have some kind of stake in the matter:
1. Do we believe that the entrenched mindset about Taiwan in much of China can be changed?
2. Do we genuinely believe that the legitimate interests of a prosperous and self-respecting China can be met without Beijing assuming sovereignty over Taiwan?
3. Do we believe that an assertive China could be kept in check, should it move from the threat to the use of force in regard to Taiwan?

There is no simple or unalterable answer to any of these questions, but our strategic conversation about this vital matter must keep returning to them and must keep generating better or clearer answers to them. If the answer to any one of these three questions is No, then the danger of conflict in the Taiwan Strait is and will remain serious. If the answer to (1) is No, then the problem cannot be solved at all, even if conflict is long postponed. If the answer to (2) is No, then we should expect China, even under a non-communist government, to seek sovereignty over Taiwan. If the answer to (3) is No, then we should expect China to use force at some point as its relative power increases.

Unfortunately, we cannot be altogether confident that the answer to each of these three questions is Yes. However, so much of a constructive nature has been accomplished over the past generation, both in China and elsewhere, that I see a genuine possibility of affirmative answers to the first two questions in the near future. What is important is seeking to ensure that the answer to the third question remains Yes without such constraint negating efforts to generate the affirmative answers to questions one and two. I believe it is fairly clear that American policy has tried to steer this course for a long time, but that it has often not been seen in this light in Beijing. The 1996 intervention by President Clinton, when he sent two aircraft carrier battle groups, including the USS Independence, to the vicinity of Taiwan was intended to signal a cautious and restrained US attitude, but it seems to have been experienced by some in Beijing as a humiliating demonstration of American power, which has spurred them on to acquire the military means to deter the United States from intervening at all.

I argued at length, in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China, that the most thoughtful and principled of China’s intellectuals and citizens have been demanding accountable government and the enfranchisement of civil society—what we all call democracy— since the 1890s and especially since 1919. Many of them, of course, have also sought a strong China. The Communist Party promised to make China strong. It is now at a curious watershed in its violent eighty-sevenyear history. It has no right to be ruling China now, given its appalling record and its acknowledgment that markets, not Marxism, are the prerequisite for prosperity. Logic would suggest that it must mutate into a different kind of party and yield its monopoly on political power, as the next couple of decades proceed. It has not yet done so, but it has changed its mind about many things over the past generation and we should seek to encourage more change.

As we seek to encourage such change, however, we must constantly conduct the experiment of trying to look at the situation itself and at our own actions through the eyes of a Chinese nationalist or strategic planner. How, we must ask, can a paradigm shift be brought about in the way such eyes view the independence of Taiwan and US naval primacy? That this is possible is clear from the history of the matter, but what is equally clear from that history is that the kind of strategic utility Chinese planners perceive in Taiwan has long since been perceived by pre-communist Chinese strategists, all the way back to Zheng Chenggong and Shi Lang in the seventeenth century and by Japanese and American strategists in the twentieth century. It cannot and should not merely be dismissed, but nor can it be simply accommodated, especially while China remains a dictatorship.

My own view of this matter, as set out at length in Part II of Thunder from the Silent Zone, is that, paradoxically, China’s net interests would be best served by offering Taiwan de jure independence and seeking to cultivate its goodwill as a neighbour. That way, the freedom of the people of Taiwan would not be threatened, and overweening Chinese ambitions would not give Japan the jitters or cause the Philippines and other regional states including Australia to look with growing apprehension at the rising power of China. Equally, China’s legitimate desire for maritime security and national pride could be met under these circumstances and far more readily than by assertions of pre-eminence and the use of military power. Senior figures on the Central Military Commission and cadres at the Academy of Military Sciences may well respond that China is doing nothing other than what the United States did under President Theodore Roosevelt and that it is objectionable to insinuate that great naval power is appropriate for America but not for China. But that way lies collision, with all the consequences it would entail. And China, quite as much as the rest of us, should very much want to avoid those consequences.

Paul Monk is a principal of two Australian companies, Austhink Consulting and Austhink Software.
His articles in Quadrant include “Taiwan: Thinking Outside the Chinese Box” in the November 2001 issue.