US fans tensions with China
By Eva Cheng
Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui's July 9 statement of a desire for "state to state" relations with China has increased tensions, leading to Beijing's July 31 seizure of a Taiwanese military supply vessel and its August 2 test of the long-range ballistic missile Dong Feng 31, which can carry a 700-kilogram nuclear warhead. Some media commentators seized on these moves as "evidence" of powerful Beijing bullying little Taiwan yearning for independence.
Such a reading is, to say the least, myopic, but Washington's subsequent announcement of plans to sell to Taiwan high-tech early warning E-2T Hawkeye 2000E planes and F-16 fighter jet parts was portrayed as helping the weaker and poorly done by party in somebody else's dispute, rather than being an act of self-interest.
This interpretation of Washington's role is miles from the truth. Historically and today, Washington plays an active role in maintaining high military tension in east Asia.
Asia is not Washington's only target. Military tensions help to justify the US's offers of military "protection" around the globe. This takes the form of military alliances like NATO, US war bases and weapon sales overseas and a huge military budget.
Even when the conflicting interests might not warrant military action, Washington has turned on its war machine from time to time to prove that a "security threat" was real, or to exact submission. The most recent case was in Serbia and Kosova. This military hegemony is crucial to maintaining US capitalists' economic edge.
Asia's strategic importance for Washington rose sharply 50 years ago. The 1949 Chinese Revolution threatened to cut off a potentially huge market from capitalism. Added to that were the anti-capitalist struggles brewing in many parts of Asia, partly inspired by the Chinese victory.
This prompted Washington to turn its anticommunist propaganda to full blast, setting the scene for its barbaric bombing of Korea in 1950-53 under the cover of United Nations forces. Directly threatened, China militarily assisted Korea's resistance. Earlier in this century, China had assisted Korea's fight against their common enemy, Japanese colonialism.
Since then, Communist North Korea — though certainly flawed from a socialist point of view — has been demonised and aggressively undermined by Washington. The US's crippling sanctions against North Korea continue today.
Whenever it has been convenient, Washington has seized on China's continuing assistance to Pyongyang to take North Korea as a proxy for China.
Latest excuse
Washington's latest excuse to whip up tension in east Asia was provided by North Korea's test firing of a missile last August. The US and Japan, which have been in a military alliance since the 1950s and have sought to expand it since 1996, took the opportunity to announce their development of a state of the art "theatre missile defence system". Washington suggested it could "protect" even Taiwan.
This move infuriated the Communist rulers in Beijing who, since coming to power in 1949, have been trying to dislodge Taiwan's governing Kuomintang (KMT), China's ruling party before 1949.
During its 1945-49 war against the Chinese Communists, the KMT started to shift its base to Taiwan, where Chinese emperors from the mainland had ruled for most of the last few centuries. After 1949, the KMT's rule was reduced to Taiwan, plus two tiny but strategic islands — Quemoy and Matsu — just off the mainland coast.
Many factors have promoted the Taiwanese people's rejection of things from the mainland, notwithstanding the fact that the bulk of Taiwanese originally came from there. Some of these factors were: the emperors' ruthless rule of Taiwan until 1895; Japan's colonisation during the next 50 years; and the KMT's brutal dictatorship from 1945 to 1987 (the KMT is still in power, but lifted martial law in 1987). This ill feeling was strengthened by Stalinist misrule in China.
Taiwan's economy was little connected with the mainland until the late 1980s, when China's capitalist transformation switched to a higher gear, attracting considerable Taiwanese investment.
These historical developments fostered a distinct Taiwanese identity, which has been expressed more openly since the pro-independence movement gained ground in the 1980s.
The Taiwanese people's blanket rejection of mainland China because of its oppressive rulers is irrational but understandable. They needed to be convinced that, in the long term, their interests and those of the mainland people could be better served if they belonged to the same state. (Taiwan has a population of 21.5 million and China has 1.3 billion, and Taiwan's economy increasingly relies on the mainland as a source of supply, including of labour, and sales.)
Self-determination denied
Convinced or not, the Taiwanese are entitled to determine their political future, free of coercion. Such coercion has been coming from two main sources: Beijing and Washington. While Beijing's intervention is crude, Washington seeks to manoeuvre between conflicting positions to enhance its own interests. If that means selling out the Taiwanese people, so be it! Washington had no problem dumping overnight its pre-1979 recognition of Taipei as the custodian of the Chinese state.
Because of Taiwan's value as a strategic base from which to undermine Communist China, Washington's support for the KMT stepped up after 1949, economically and militarily. Not unconnected with the 1978 start of capitalist restoration in China and the US's bid to get a bigger slice of the Chinese market, Washington switched diplomatic recognition in 1979 from Taipei to Beijing, promising to maintain only unofficial contact with Taiwan and to supply it with only "defensive" arms.
Beijing's triumphalism in the wake of that switch proved premature. Despite suffering widespread diplomatic isolation, Taipei continued to receive Washington's backing, only more subtly. What contacts are unofficial and which arms are "defensive" can always be fudged.
The first major moves to liberalise those definitions came in September 1994, following France's 1992 sale of 60 advanced Mirage fighters to Taiwan, rivalling the US's influence. From 1994, among other changes, Washington backed Taiwan's entry into multilateral bodies such as the Asian Development Bank and the World Trade Organisation, and Taiwanese top officials were allowed to transit US soil, including staying overnight. In June 1995, Lee Teng-hui stayed overnight in the US, infuriating Beijing.
Beijing tested missiles near Taiwan several times in the few months before Taiwan's first presidential election by popular vote in March 1996, when campaigning for independence was becoming more visible. To counter-intimidate Beijing, Washington located two aircraft carriers near Taiwan.
Lee's July 9 statement was neither accidental nor new in substance. Such statements have always been intentionally provocative.
Lee's timing was influenced by Taiwan's March 2000 presidential election and Washington's recent propaganda offensives against China — the allegations of theft of US military technology and a Chinese missile build-up, the plan for an anti-missile system in Asia to include Taiwan and the ridiculous excuse given for the May 7 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Ignoring Beijing's concern about the US's new anti-missile system, secretary of state Madeleine Albright lectured Beijing in early March that the "real source of the problem" was the proliferation of missiles — that is, other people's missiles. A few weeks later, the US started bombing Serbia with thousands of its own missiles.
After its show of strength in Serbia, Washington resumed its offensive in Asia with new vigour in the name of stepping up protection for Taiwan against Beijing, and for Japan and South Korea against Pyongyang.
The Taiwan Security Enhancement Act was recently put before the US Congress. The act would, among other things, require the Pentagon to "cooperate" with Taiwan on defence planning, threat analysis, military training and personnel exchanges.
Washington would be empowered to provide Taipei with specific weapons systems, including anti-missile equipment, air-to-air missiles and submarines. Officially, direct contact between the US and Taiwanese military has been banned for the last 20 years.
Taiwan has once again become Washington's star protectorate when the US needs to invent new excuses to keep its global war machine in top shape. To that end, the further demonisation of China and North Korea comes in handy.