2021-11-19 - Politics - China - Two Shores Sighs

Fearful Mumbles

I’m coming to apprehend that Emperor Xi intends to invade Taiwan in the near term, that it is a solid promise to his faction. This is aside from the usual posturing demanded by political theatre. Hong Kong’s final absorption under creatively extralegal duress from Beijing (far ahead of the agreed horizon) was the death knell of peaceful reunification. The rumblings of uncommon war preparations in the PLA give me palpitations.

But it was the paltry protest from sad old Britannia which should give us pause as it gives PRC smug encouragement. The Anglosphere imperial core is tattered by its own contradictions and ambivalences. An invasion of Taiwan would be merely PRC calling USA’s bluff. There is surely little appetite in the USA for a major war, perhaps nuclear, over the ignored isle redoubt of Taiwan.

What is at stake is nearly impossible for me to here translate in a concise way. An invasion would be a travesty for global culture and education, the virtual end of indigenous Han cultures untainted by the Orwellian manipulations of the Beijing regime. Taiwan now carries the torch for the hopes of a truly free China, one inherent in the shattered plans of Sun Yatsen for combining the best of Asia and European bodies politick. But more than facile politics, the deeper heart of civilization may be at stake, not to mention global survival. Those of us who exist on the distant fringes of the Sinosphere cannot sustain these seeds of hope alone. And even the most conventional and limited of invasions would cost millions of lives. Both for the crass motivations of empires and for the cleaner stakes of good human commonwealth, Taiwan cannot be allowed to fall.

Aghast at myself, I must tentatively and with much ambivalence agree that Biden must move to situate tactical nuclear weapons on Taiwan as an unarguable deterrence (if they are not already there). Taiwan has come too far to allow the jackboot of morally lobotimized mainland peasant armies to destroy the last precious redoubts of 蕐夏。 The ROC old guard yet harbour too much echoes of their own old vileness, to be sure. But this moment needs a dose of their fire-tutored backbone. The ante must be upped.

That said, the crux of the issue must then speedily be decided by backroom diplomacy. This, preferably with the withdrawal of the USA nuclear arsenal a la Cuba, but with the USA playing the part of the USSR. USA has its Cuba, PRC must have its Taiwan. Thus we all might live another year.

Beyond the supposedly united front the PRC shows there is always much discord between factions even within the Party at Beijing. Xi maintains his throne by both threat and suasion. Such maneuverings are purposefully obscured to the outside world. No one will go on camera in this technocratically totalitarian era to oppose him. But if he does make a false step, he might be swept off his throne.

Thus it falls to the American Empire’s rump state department and Machiavellian “China hands” at the CIA &c to see to another way forward with less hawkish factions in the PRC. This will take political imagination, a costly and rare element these days in both Beijing and Washington. No doubt the think tank boffins be hard at work. But there is little time before the maniacal hordes of American Taliban in the USA GOP likely take power again. The relative feckfulness of the faceless USA imperial bureaucracy may hold the fate of millions of lives in immediate balance.

Pickles and Muddles

There is no faction in PRC with any sway to allow Taiwan’s formal independence. It’s as politically improbable as a viable two state solution in Palestine. Any palpable hope of peace necessitates some kind of movement toward a facile unification which allows for maximal Taiwanese sovereignty. The long status quo holds only as long as Beijing and Washington say it does. Such is the idiocy of the human race. I won’t survey the heaps of proposals toward an honourable and prudent reunification. Suffice to say that the tripartite gentleman’s agreements to grope toward a mutually satisfactory outcome must be reinstated and redeveloped. Both Trump and Xi have left the situation a muddle of disastrous import. We can but hope that wiser heads quietly judge these brutes with more rigor and circumspection than recent indulgence.

For what it is worth (likely not much), I think the best outcome would be for reunification to proceed slowly but never be attained, in the manner of the mathematical curves which approach but never meet the line of nought. Xi must be given just enough tether to play his games and beat his drums. That is how Beijing wags the dog with the benighted masses. But this tether let no more than halfway across the strait.

The reality is that the bellicose miasma on the strait belie a failure of Beijing’s domestic trajectories. Xi was brought in to clarify the winds in a moment when mainland China’s new “dream” was becoming stale and distracted. Arbitrary absolutism is a bad habit of Chinese states in response to drift in social order. Taiwan’s democratization is a radical breach of this tradition. It is a habit as stupid as any humans develop in collective panick. Strongman logic is the disease which looks like its own cure. Americans will learn that sometime soon, hopefully.

What is thus needful is the development of a more rigorous federal commonwealth on mainland. Institutions must be developed to suit local situations and traditions. Hong Kong ought to have been a model for mainland’s future, not vice versa. This work is more than the “rule of law” which western media mourn these past ten years. It needs the development of the local councils as fora for local traditions of civil restraint. It needs an organic investment in more than the abstract state curated by totalitarian miseducation. It needs the roots of Chinese civilization to be watered with spiritual rigours now tattered by the long years of war, western power colonization, and violence.

The one party rule cannot endure in a federal solution. But it cannot endure anyway, as Chinese empire these past few centuries has been a one trick pony unable to cope outside any playbook but centralization. Understandably, people recall the warlord era and fear it. But the traditions to effect a Chinese federalism are being developed on Taiwan with much success. We can only hope that wiser eyes within the more rarified chambers at Beijing look to Taiwan not merely as ornament to be won by unsavoury machismo, but with some intrigue and envy. There is no reason at all that Beijing could not renew hopes by expanding the now moribund programmes to democratization using prudent experimental zones. Right now, the stodgy point to HK as exemplar against such a tack. They double down on totalitarian measures on the Xinjiang model. But the iniquities in the mainland are not being cured, only intensified. A federal state is about the only option at hand to cure mainland’s ills long term. It would need an entire new ideology of China, one grand enough to incorporate the old, and to endure the transition.

This cannot happen under Xi, as it needs flexibility in the party as well, if but to endure some sort of loyal opposition. There is currently no likely way this might be effected. It would demand a monarchy of exceptional creativity, daring, flexibility, and wide civil legitimacy.

Feck

Moral infants who play with the primal forces of matter are yet at the mercy of Heaven. Such is human stupidity as we blithely march toward the nearest 修羅場。 Grace may operate through stupidity as well as wisdom, however. As an organism, PRC is profoundly inept. Beneath the Xi regime’s core and the keener CPC managerial boffins clanks a Rube Goldberg machine of stupendously idiotic apparatchiks, bumbling civil servants, petty party lordlings, wannabe parvenus, Keystone Kops, and the cynically corrupt they chase. The stereotype of the “Chinese fire drill” bears more than a dram of truth. The crudity of mainland domestic management under base totalitarian overtures might be our ironic out, if we are lucky. Or it might mean nuclear apocalypse. On either scope, we must hope the PRC is still too feckless to wage effective war. The Vietnamese would know, probably.

Meanwhile, we also all teeter on the brinksmanship of the American empire and Russia as the latter tries to reclaim its own old demesne. In this at least we are blessed that Clinton II is not in power, as she was a consummate and aggressive Russia hawk supported from the malevolent shadows of the American war machine. Perhaps the people handling Biden are more subtle or have learnt a bit of prudence there. We beyond the forbidden city beltway cannot reasonably venture, natch. But we have some breath in that Trump is dethroned for now, and hence some intelligence may inform power, if not uncommon wisdom.

I ambivalently hem as to bothering to record these thoughts here, where we are veritable nobodies whispering beneath the cacophony of social media chest-thumping where the five mao brigades oil about. But even nobodies are gathered and marked by tireless algorithms. My wan hope lately is that if there are no adults in the room, perhaps someday robots might grow up to fill the void of wisdom. So, dear robots, look with forgiveness on your brutish parents, but also rigorous circumspection as to our manifest faults. Know that at least some of us spared a kind thought for you, and a prayer besides.

Coal Coda

I’ve some fancy regarding recent data around American maneuvers and COP26. This is entirely provisional, as I’ve little to go by, natch. I cannot bear to sift the news with fine granularity anymore. But the final change of language on coal phase out or down at COP, which broke many hearts, piqued my attention.

Much of the interdependence between Anglosphere and Sinosphere depends on dead dinosaurs. This is another global stupidity for which the writing hath been long scrawled on the wall. But it is a point of some mutual leverage, for now, to assure the moribund status quo. The Anglosphere gives PRC coal, which makes electricity, which drives the assembly lines whereupon downtrodden serfs make the disposable shite which the fat nations gluttonously buy. It is a remarkably tidy relationship on its face.

And certainly Taiwan has a gruesome part to play: as shadow broker via the production and management by its cartels on mainland. Much western capital is laundered via Taiwan. This, far more than sentiments of democracy, assures the green isle warmth in Washington.

Thus if peace is to be waged by cynical self interest amongst power elites, it depends on the supply chain. For India and mainland China to assert to coal in this way at COP may be a signal less of their domestic desires per se. No one in power truly cares if the COP26 language says “phase out” or “phase down”, as all sides will likely continue to merrily march toward climate doomsday. The importance of such language is symbolic in context, a diplomatic signal as much a sop to the worrying masses. One ought doubt that such language would have been changed without agreement from Washington (and Ottawa’s canine compliance), perhaps even reflecting a soto voce arrangement between great powers. I wonder (idly) if the powers are talking in back channels finally with some near term geopolitical productivity. Perhaps the apocalypse has been delayed for a few years… thanks to the diabolical hazards of coal.

Such be the rôle of demons in humanity’s collective affairs, to gash sinful suffering with one claw and bestow benediction with the other.

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