Monday, February 11, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
It was a drop in the lachrymose of Mitt Romney’s farewell address to the Conservative Political Action Committee acknowledging his defeat in securing the nomination for Republican candidate for president. But it was there in a flat matter of fact language. And had the attention not been focused on the narrower politics of the American presidential contest, it might have garnered some attention from the media. Romney said in terms not usually used by any contemporary American politician that one of the threats facing the U.S. that had to be addressed by his more or less newly found fellow conservatives and their Party was “China”. Romney may just have planted a signal flag along a route that zigzags in his own party between its old Wall St habitués in the onetime Rockefeller [Bush I] wing who think they see commerce inevitably modifying any China’s aggressiveness and the security-first [Theodore] Rooseveltians to whom his successful rival John McCain says he owes allegiance.
And it is certainly a marker on one side of a broader national debate. That discussion wobbles from a commanding admiral, Admiral Timothy J. Keating,Commander, U.S. Pacific Command, publicly suggesting the U.S. might be willing to help steer the Chinese through the difficulties of getting aircraft carriers into service in the effort to find an accommodation between American and Chinese military which has characterized recent Pearl Harbor luminaries. At the other end, is former Bush Administration Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton arguing for a restoration of formal diplomatic relations with the Taipei government which “…would strengthen the U.S. and the region by signaling to others the strength of the U.S.' commitment to Taiwan and the region.”
But as so often happens in history, while the American political campaign titillates the American body politic with its flavor of the day aspersions, events in East Asia rumble on with an inevitable if unpredictable effect on the subdued American debate.
Although the optimists, foreign as well as domestic, have already written off the effects of the worst weather in more than half a century in China, the long term effects are likely to be horrendous for China and its relations with its near neighbors in Greater China. Inflation has been a concern since food prices shot up dramatically late last summer and have been rising ever since. The loss of crops and delayed movement of food is bound to impact negatively on this basic problem for the greater part of China’s population which still lives at subsistence level. Nor will inflationary food costs — which have been immune to the government’s draconian price control efforts along with fuel — be the only economic effect of stalled traffic throughout much of the subcontinent. Inflation is one of China’s old curses along with famine, floods, and droughts – some of which seem to be in the immediate future. And now with having become” the workshop of the world”, a rising price for China’s exports would not be helpful at a time when the U.S. may be leading the world economy into a downturn if not a recession.
Then there is the curious effort of the Chinese leadership – even rousing members of the politburo from their sickbeds to go out to assuage the complaints of millions caught in the crush of the Chinese New Year’s massive migration. One can argue that apologies delivered personally by megaphone by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to enormous jostling crowds in railroad stations or the personal appeals of President Hu Jintao to coal miners in the pit to produce more of China’s main energy source may be a new turn for the largely more than aloof Party leaders in the past. So, too, are media campaigns which included everything from going back to the old Maoist stories of martyred ordinary working, losing their lives in an effort to restore electricity. Or, even more demanding, asking millions of migrant workers to forgo their once a year holiday with kith and kin in their home villages.
For a regime which rules with an iron fist and its own vagarious interpretation of the law, it is bound to suggest weakness. That would be no help in trying, so far unsuccessfully, to rein in local and regional Party and government satraps abusing and exploiting the local peasantry using the regime’s economic gain as its only criteria for legitimacy.
Meanwhile, in the sideshow of Taiwan – its errant ways as viewed by Beijing from time to time made a principal propaganda concern – the only time in China’s long history that a democratic process has succeeded continues to evolve. A hard fought presidential campaign is underway between the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party [DPP], “ethnically” the party of the locals who have bitterly resented the former ruling Mainlanders of the Kuomintang [Nationalist] Party after their defeat and migration from the Mainland in 1949. Waving their own bloody shirt, the initial repression of the locals after their arrival, the DPP has now dreamed up a totally artificial “plebiscite”. It will pose the question of whether the Island should again apply to the United Nations as an independent country and under what name since it is still officially The Republic of China. Even the KMT [in that odd way democratic parties have to court their opponents’ constituents] has suggested only a variant of the proposal, despite its more accomodationist position toward Beijing and the Mainland’s recently acquired more tactful courtship of the KMT and its adherents.
Despite the fact that both Taiwanese parties are seemingly dangerously close to the “red lines” Beijing – and Washington’s more cautious voices inside and outside the Bush Administration – has drawn, that is formal independence, everyone seems to be counting on Communist leadership restraint. That’s despite a growing battery of missiles on the China Coast opposite Taiwan which could be a very effective terror weapon against the Island.
Still, if for no other reason, almost all calculations on the Mainland – economic, political and psychological – appear to be geared to the August XXIV Olympiad. Almost mythologically, the Chinese leadership appears hypnotized by the concept that the international recognition and applause which would come with a successful Olympics would solve the myriad domestic and foreign problems growing for the regime.
The whole hoo-hah is irrelevant, of course, since Beijing can veto Taiwan’s admission to the UN even in the unlikely event it received an okay from the General Assembly. Beijing has kept the Taiwanese out of the World Health Organization in spite of Beijing’s well publicized own failings in cooperation on communicable disease [although Taipei does have membership in the World Trade Organization and the Asian Development Bank.]
You would never know, of course, that at another level, the Mainland-Taiwan relationship is moving in a completely different direction. Trade between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in 2007 for the 11 months to November amounted to more than $92 billion, up 15.3 percent from a year earlier. Taiwan’s surplus was more than $40 billion, a 20 percent increase over 1966. There are an estimated 50,000 Taiwan firms on the Mainland, something like $70 billion [at least] in investment, and more than half a million Taiwanese [at least] – working there, many at the heart of the huge multinational export drive.
Yet, despite all the folderol about relations with the Mainland, it may be “the economy, stupid!” which decides the Taiwan presidential election. Parliamentary elections a few weeks ago gave the KMT and its allies a continuing and larger majority in the legislature, but the popular vote was much closer, apparently mainly because of the economy and allegations of corruption. GDP growth in Taiwan was 5.4 percent last year but is expected to drop to 4.5 percent in 2008 — pretty respectable by Western standards but not compared with Taiwan's neighbors. KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou says, coyly, "We are no longer an Asian tiger; we look more like a sick cat."
Still, politics are not always logical nor dictated by economics. The tired old cliché that nations which cooperate do not go to war is hardly documented in history [read U.S.-Japan trade figures in the 1930s or French-German economic exchanges before their many wars]. Given the growing signs of a somewhat roguish element in China’s People’s Liberation Army – the antics of a Chinese flyboy which brought down an American surveillance aircraft, the cancellation of a scheduled visit by a U.S. carrier group to Hong Kong, unannounced submarines stalking U.S. and Japanese warships, the unannounced rambunctious shooting down of its ageing communications satellite, etc.— China’s heavily camouflaged military expansion might get its head in a crisis of the regime.
The still unresolved question of North Korean nuclear armaments, where Beijing has had a strong hand to play and may or may not have thrown down its cards, may be a cozy playpen for State Dept. professional negotiators. But its lack of resolution is a continuing concern that those on the U.S. side seeking a settlement through Beijing may be on a dead-end rather than a detour.
These subterranean movements are all strong and have portent for the future decision-making for whoever wins the American presidential sweepstakes and which, among other issues, Romney rather eloquently laid out in his l’envoi.