First, I'll start off with a Polish joke that was circulating back around 1990:
One day President Bush (Sr.) and First Secretary Gorbachov woke up next to each other and learned they'd been in a coma for 50 years. Lying between them was a current newspaper. Gorbachov grabs the paper and starts reading. After a few moments he begins chuckling. Bush asks him why, and he responds "Oh, nothing. It's just that there's an article here that says the U.S. is economically, militarily and therefore politically in decline." Bush angrily grabs the newspaper and begins reading it himself. After a few moments he also begins chuckling. "What're you laughing about?" asked Gorbachov warily. "Oh nothing," responds Bush. "It's just that it says here that there was a minor incident on the Polish-Chinese border this morning..."
Sorry Sgrig, no offense intended.
I had some friends from Taiwan as a student (MAN, could they cook!) and a friend who's been living and studying Chinese in Tapei for a few years has confirmed for me that there's been a resurgence of native Taiwanese nationalism over the past decade (or so), that emphasizes local native cultural virtues over Han Chinese values, whether mainland or Guomingdong-inspired. My friend told me that many of the old people remember the Japanese occupation years with affection and enjoyed speaking with him in Japanese (he'd spent a year in Osaka). This came as a shock to me, although perhaps this is because the Japanese occupied Formosa long before their ultra-nationalists came to power. I've been told that the native languages are increasingly being used in public places, in advertisements, even in parliament. Chinese still dominates, but cracks are beginning to appear.
Excellent overview of the UN situation, K-D. The issue has been simply that there is one seat for China in the UN and that hasn't changed since the UN's inception; the issue has been who represents China. I think this is the crux of the problem. Some observations:
1. Today's Wall Street Journal mentions that China has increased its military budget for next year by 17%, putting the overall Chinese government budget into deficit spending. The aim: "recovery" of Taiwan. The reality is that modern Chinese nationalists, led by the Army, are determined to incorporate Taiwan into the mainland's political fold. Although I've heard voices of reason in Beijing claiming that it may not be in China's best interest to incorporate Taiwan into the People's Republic - forcibly or otherwise - it is clear the nationalists are driving events. China is preparing for war to recover the island, and it is fully aware that its opponent will not be limited to the already-formidible Taiwanese army. Within a decade or so, we may get that ugly CNN announcement.
2. The "Ein Volk, ein Nation!" concept has driven much of 20th century Europe's views on who deserves independence and statehood, and therefore has influenced the rest of the world to differing extents. I'm not convinced it's the best way to go though. Europe is currently involved in an effort to establish a limited "civilizational" state, a sort of confederation, and one wonders if a similar Chinese model wouldn't be a better solution than attempting to create a massive Beijing-ruled empire. A Sinic civilizational confederation, a "CU" or "SU" (Chinese Union/Sinic Union) with sovereign states (China, Tibet, Macao, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and perhaps the Koreas, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.) would not only create ideal localized/decentralized conditions for capitalist development but would also open up trade barriers and borders within Southeast Asia. That said, I am of course aware that this is a pipe dream because the only time any historical Chinese state or empire was decentralized was when it was coming apart at the seams, collapsing into civil war. The Chinese, like the Russians, love very heavily centralized control. The Qinshihuangdi model of governance still reigns in China.
3. From a Western viewpoint, I think Taiwanese independence is worth fighting for. The West, especially the U.S., has invested too much political and economic capital in Taiwan to abandon it to nationalist Chinese imperial designs. Walking away from a functioning democratic ally in peril would be a serious blow to Western prestige around the world.
4. It seems as if a developmental cycle, a learning curve, has been in the works over the past century +; it began with the West establishing its imperial domains throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, only to see them fall apart or break away in two very bloody world wars. Russia caught on in the very end of the West's imperial age and entered its own similar imperial age from 1944-1989, while modern-day China seems to be just entering that phase. After the shock of the collapse of their empires had faded, Western scholars began to tabulate the real costs and effects of their imperialism and came to realize that more often than not the empires were highly inefficient, and ended up costing the imperial states far more than they were able to extract from them through exploitation - not to mention the human rights cost. This is a lesson I think some modern Russian scholars are also coming to, though their conclusions have not been fully digested yet by the population-at-large. (Sgrig? Some input?) China seems to have taken nothing from these examples, and seems bent on building an Imperial Chinese Age in Southeast Asia. The Chinese, like many former victims of Western imperialism, have programmed themselves to believe they are exclusively victims and are blind to the reality they are treading down similar paths as those taken by the Western imperialists more than a century ago. Again, a failure to see the truly human dimension of history, and its universal lessons and effects.
And loudly spiking the fire so that Taiwan continued to remain a problem betw China and the USA. The Chinese side was pretty much content to leave things as they were, leaving it to time. They got better things to do.
