Hegemonic Warfare Watch: Taiwan in the Pivot

Michael Mazza over at AEI argues that Taiwan has a crucial role in the US "pivot" toward Asia....

Yet Taiwan can take steps to ensure that US forces would have access to the island’s facilities during a time of crisis, even in the absence of a formal access agreement. Taiwan, for example, could invest in infrastructure that would enable the island to serve as a logistics hub for US forces in the event of a conflict to the island’s north or in the South China Sea. Along similar lines, Taiwan might stockpile supplies that would be of use to American forces operating in the region. Doing so would complicate China’s war planning, improve deterrence, and enhance America’s ability to come to the aid of Taiwan and other allies during an emergency, all without provoking Beijing in the way that formal access arrangements or actual US presence would.

Mazza also argues that the best way Taiwan could help "the pivot" is to beef up its own defenses so it can hold off China longer.

It's more interesting to consider whether Taiwan would get involved as a supply base in a US-China conflict over islands in the South China Sea. "Taiwan" as such has no claim to any of the islands that the ROC claims, and the ROC claim is the same as Beijing's -- the whole of the South China Sea belongs to the ROC. If the US enforces another nation's sovereignty in the area then that would bring the US into conflict with the ROC. The pragmatic thing for Taipei to do would be to quietly help the US and harvest that big economic stimulus. One could easily see a DPP government doing that, but a KMT government might balk at helping the US hack away its China fantasies. Reviews like Mazza's show how stupid and short-sighted the US was to support Ma Ying-jeou, in effect helping Beijing over the long run in many different ways.

Meanwhile Taipei, ever working on never getting the fighters it needs, is now asking for F-35s.

Washington, July 10 (CNA) A delegation from the Taiwan-US Inter-Parliamentary Amity Association of Taiwan's Legislature said Wednesday in Washington that Taiwan wants to purchase advanced F-35 fighter jets that best suit its defense needs.

If we wouldn't sell them F-16s, why on earth would we sell them F-35s? This constant mention of F-35s is just another delaying tactic to prevent the island from ever getting fighters.

Keep an eye on the China-Russian reconciliation aimed at the US. Joint military exercises. Brr.... this should last about as long as it takes Moscow and Beijing to start feuding over who owns Central Asia. But the weapons transfers from Russia to China have a profound effect on Taiwan's defense situation...
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Daily Links:

• Phils-Taiwan fishery meeting tied to shooting, investigation
• If the Chinese economy has hard landing, who is most exposed?
• Soulik kills two
• Taiwan-New Zealand sign free trade pact (WSJ). Note the background paragraph, it's just horrible. Taiwan and China HAVE NOT agreed they are part of the same China for the past twenty years, and they did not split in 1949. Hello, nuances. The pact....
  

  Wednesday's pact calls for Taiwan to lower tariffs on virtually all its imports from New Zealand, including meat, dairy products and kiwi, over the next four years. Tariffs on fresh and long-life milk and ground deer antlers—popular in Chinese medicine as a growth tonic, arthritis treatment and even as an aphrodisiac, among other uses—will be phased out over a longer period, 12 years, to protect Taiwanese farmers from a flood of cheaper imports. New Zealand, in turn, will eliminate tariffs on Taiwanese electronic goods.

  "ground deer antlers." Yeesh. Meanwhile commentary in TT argues that NZ products threaten Taiwan farmers. Probably not very much. 
• Transparency International totally screws up corruption survey, still defending it. There's a news story in this, international media people.
• My man Drew goes from Hualien to I-lan via Taroko. Awesome ride, awesome write-up

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

China Stuff

The China Reform Monitor passed along some interesting stories in this week's edition:

Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reports that the strengthening of Chinese competition in the global arms and military equipment market is the most serious threat facing the Russia’s military-industrial complex. “In the field of military-technical cooperation, Russia and China are focused on the same regional markets, large emerging countries keen to pursue a military-political line that is relatively independent of Western countries,” the report noted. On the other hand, however, “Chinese policy is giving rise to increasing fears among neighboring states in Southeast Asia, which provides Russian exporters with new opportunities.” 

The article noted that Myanmar had surprisingly chosen Russian fighters over Chinese jets, even though the junta and Beijing are reputed to be close. Meanwhile it noted that India and China are still confronting each other over the disputed Himal region:

In response to China’s rapid development of road and rail networks in Tibet, India will complete a network of military roads on its side of the border by 2013, India’s Border Roads Organization (BRO) Director, General S. Ravi Shankar said in comments carried by India’s Economic Times. About 63 percent of work has been completed on 27 roads in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and 12 more in Ladakh are already complete, he said. In response to China the BRO has undergone a restructuring process since 2007 and has purchased equipment that will allow it to build 5 km of roads per day in the inhospitable mountainous environment.

Hopefully they will have the courage to connect the roads so that trade and travel can take place, and my intrepid friend Michael Fahey, longtime local cyclist now currently cycling at a few thousand meters in northern India, can enjoy another interesting route.

Finally, this report on Kazakhstan from the CRM:

In Kazakhstan the opposition political party co-chairman Azat, Bulat Abilov, has called on the Kazakh authorities “to suspend all the contracts currently in force with China, make them public and make all the loans attracted during the past two years - almost $20 billion - the property of the public.” Abilov said that the party would submit to the city mayor's administration a request to hold an anti-Chinese rally in Almaty on May 28 to oppose the “influence of China on the country's economy.” In comments carried by the privately-owned Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency, he said: “Chinese expansion, Chinese influence, Chinese capital and investments are increasingly penetrating the economy of Kazakhstan and over the past five years Chinese companies have virtually become owners of Kazakh oil resources.”

Lessee.....look at the region -- China is the leading foreign investor in Iran and Afghanistan and is forging close links with Pakistan, to whom it is the leading supplier of military equipment (a move with obvious implications for India). With China busy expanding all across central Asia, the criminal stupidity of our Afghan policy should by now be clear: Washington is killing Americans and Afghans to make Afghanistan safe for Chinese expansion. It has to stop. Now.
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Daily Links:

• Mark Valencia has a piece at NBR entitled: Foreign Military Activities in Asian EEZs. Its language and construction is severely pro-Beijing: "Indeed China's increasing assertiveness and expanding spatial perception of its security needs conflict with ever more aggressive and intrusive U.S. military intelligence probes." The US is aggressive and intrusive, China is merely assertive. The euphemism there for territorial expansion, "expanding spatial perception of its security needs", is priceless. I've discussed Valencia's pro-Beijing constructions before here.
• At CSIS, Dave Brown has a sturdy Establishment summary of China-Taiwan relations, informative with a useful timeline at the end.
• Latest issue of Taiwan What's Up out.
• James Holmes on how maps of the PRC's missiles pointed at Taiwan can be misleading.
• With all the focus on Taiwan's drought and the Mississippi floods, extreme weather is whacking Columbia (11 months of rain), Alberta (drought + wildfires), China ("a severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province temporary unusable") and other areas. No April before 2005 was as hot as this one. 
• Jens Kastner in AsiaTimes on how Beijing might use a tourist boycott against a DPP Administration. I sure hope they do; it is exactly the kind of move that backfires. 

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Feeling the FEER

On Saturday I met some friends beneath the great gate of Nameinflux Hall.... UPDATE: forget it. I'm wrong.

Also in the news, Taipei has dropped plans for missiles that can hit Shanghai. The missiles were deemed necessary to enable Taiwan to strike China's bases on the coast opposite Taiwan.

Finally, since all news is ominous news today, let's take a look at this piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review posted yesterday. Entitled.....

Georgia's Lessons for Taiwan
by Jeffrey Bader and and Douglas Paal

....it is one more in a number of pieces that have attempted to extract lessons from the Georgia mess. The first interesting thing here is the authors: Jeff Bader, longtime China specialist with many government positions, is an advisor to the Obama campaign, rumored to be one possible author of the letter from Obama to Ma Ying-jeou. He also works for Stonebridge International, which advises US corporations on how to enter China (see this great piece by Ken Silverstein in Harpers last month).

We last heard from Douglas Paal on election day. A former AIT director appointed to the position (he didn't come up through the diplomatic service) Paal was widely held to detest the DPP and Chen Shui-bian. On election day this year he showed up to stage a dog-n-pony show for the KMT about Ma Ying-jeou's green card. Naturally, the FEER article contains the usual gratuitous hacks on Chen Shui-bian:

2) Don't provoke the bear, or the dragon, expecting the eagle to fly to the rescue. Georgia's President Saakashvili has shown a propensity for statements and actions that seems to say to the United States and Russia, "Let the two of you fight over me." His goal has seemed to be to encourage the United States and Russia to see Georgia as the target of a zero-sum security game and to appeal to the U.S. conscience to back him up. Taiwan's former president Chen Shui-bian took the same approach to the triangular relationship among Taiwan, the United States, and China. The result in Saakashvili's case has been to leave his troops alone to face an angered Russian military. In Chen's case, it led to heightened cross-Strait tensions, but in Taiwan's case, the United States showed wisdom and took issue with Chen and his provocative behavior and withdrew its support.

What really happened, as readers of this blog know, is that Chen's "provocative" behavior was the result of a sustained campaign to discredit Chen's actions and suppress Taiwan's international space by China. Thus China was "provoked" whenever Chen took action in the international sphere to expand Taiwan's presence or promote an independent foreign policy. This policy of "being provoked" by Taiwan's democracy was highly successful, and as Bader and Paal approvingly note, eventually the US even took the lead in helping China to attack Taiwan's advocacy of its own international space. It was a sad moment for US foreign relations..... I also love the way that the article says Chen did the same thing as Saakashvili in "provoking" the Great Power next door -- except, of course, that Saakashvili launched an unprovoked attack on South Ossetia that involved mass killing of civilians and attacks on Russian peacekeepers there. Yes, that's right -- closing the National Unification Council is politically equivalent to shelling civilians.

Another hack occurs later on...

4) Geography matters. Small nations near large powers should not forget who their neighbors are. Cuba has not prospered through its 50 years of defiance of the United States. Taiwan's newly elected President Ma Ying-jeou seems to understand well that an improved relationship between Taiwan and China is essential to Taiwan's future security. In the absence of unambiguous security commitments from the United States, such as those enjoyed by countries like Japan, small states might best seek a balance to the strongest possible U.S. commitment to their defense and survival, hedged by a non-hostile relationship with their big power neighbor. Taiwan's example shows that prosperity and full-blown democracy can find their way in a tyrannical shadow.

Here Bader and Paal stand reality on its head. As we know, the DPP well knew that improved relations with China are essential to Taiwan's future security, which is why the party repeatedly offered to talk to Beijing, including peace talks. That is why they legalized China investment, set up exchange programs, negotiated on contacts ranging from direct flights to tourism, and so on. The problem was not the DPP, but China's consistent rejection of talks. Since Ma does not insist on either democracy or sovereignty for Taiwan, it is easy to see why China is willing to talk with him -- note that Bader and Paal simply ignore the fact that the real issue is differing views of sovereignty, not differing views of the need for good relations with China. A remark grossly unfair to the DPP and its foreign policy unit.

The advice is all good advice, of course; it's the intepretation of history that's the interesting part. And of course, the appearance of a connection between the Obama camp and Paal.

MEDIA NOTE: The article's endnote reads:

Mr. Bader is director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Paal is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Observe that the article does not mention that Bader has business interests in China, nor that he is affiliated with the Obama camp (from what I've heard, corrections welcome). Paal used to be a V-P for JP Morgan after leaving the American Institute in Taiwan. Interestingly, Paal's Carnegie Endowment for Peace page on him does not mention that. Paal worked in the Bush, Reagan, Carter, and Ford Administrations, and was once a senior official for Asia in the National Security Council. The blurb at the end in fact is an excellent example of Ken Silverstein's remark in his excellent Harper's piece...

In 2005, Bader joined the Brookings Institution, and invariably this is the affiliation cited when he publishes op-eds or delivers speeches. Hence, readers and listeners must imagine that Bader is a neutral, impartial observer.....

[Taiwan]

Twofer Tuesday

Dr. Peng Ming-min, one of the great men of Taiwan's history, has some words of sage advice on the Chen Shui-bian mess in today's Taipei Times:

Although Chen’s actions are sad and infuriating, from a historical perspective it is just an episode in Taiwan’s struggle for democracy and human rights — don’t forget how many people have lost their lives or their property, families and freedom for these ideals.

Despite its disappointment, I believe the public will learn a lesson and understand that we must never relax in our pursuit of ideals.

Peng, who lost an arm in WWII and ran for President in 1996, has been one of the most important figures in the Taiwan independence movement for forty years.

Also on tap today is a devastating insight from Jerome Keating, delivered against the rising class of China specialists in US. People argue that China has far less soft power than the US, but they appear to have it where it counts, as Jerome pegs perfectly:

Begin then with academia, examine how US scholars in Russian Studies have always been able to separate culture from government with Russia; they can appreciate Russian art, architecture, writing, culture etc. but condemn its authoritarian rule. With China it is the opposite; US Sinologists have become so enamored with their self-perceived mystique of Chinese culture, art, etc. that they then use this to make excuses for China's authoritarian rule. Who has not heard this excusatory refrain, "See how far China has come in the last century." Have you ever heard a similar refrain about Russia?

As US Sinologists seek their free invites to Chinese universities and Chinese backing for their research, they go to great lengths to defend and explain how this poor country is being misunderstood. You don't find that same kind of pandering by US Russian scholars. From a different angle, if one were to look inside the Soviet Union, you likewise would not find Russian Sinologists as enthralled about China as their American counterparts. No Russian Sinologists and or advisers suffer from a debilitating awe of Chinese culture or tradition; they have a sounder base in reality.

Those are the central two paragraphs of a piece on the Russia-Georgia-US mess.

[Taiwan]

Three for today

Some informative articles out there on East and North-east Asia this week. First up is a long look at Russia's foreign policy, oil and gas wealth, the pipeline network, and Russia's moves in the Far East and especially involving North Korea:

The most significant issue involving Russia in Northeast Asia is its abundant oil fields and natural gas reserves. The Asian Financial crisis of 1997-1998 that devalued the Russian rouble and the dramatic rise in the price of crude oil and natural gas in the early 2000s has given Russia newfound economic muscle. [5] The state-controlled Gazprom is the third largest corporation in the world in terms of market capitalisation and it will grow even stronger, many experts predict, as the industry is swiftly re-nationalised. “Russia’s economy is about oil,” explains Natalia Orlova, chief economist at Moscow-based Alfa-Bank. [6] In 2006, oil and gas were estimated to account for 65 percent of Russia’s exports and 60 percent of federal tax receipts, making it the world’s largest gas exporter and second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia. In 2007, Russia’s foreign exchange reserves swelled to $476.4 billion USD, more than in the entire Euro zone.

Also up is an article on how Japan's rice holdings can save the world from the current rice crisis:

The simplest mechanism to stop the crisis has the U.S. authorize Japan to sell its surplus rice stocks directly to the world market at a price that covers its acquisition and storage costs – probably below $600 per ton, to whichever importer wants to buy. Once this happened, the Philippines was at the front of the line, and quickly arranged to buy 300,000 tons of the Japanese stocks. But other countries have urgent import needs as well, and no additional supplies have been forthcoming. It is important to realize that this additional rice does not “solve” the world’s rice problem—rice at $600 per ton is still a major burden for the poor – but it has the potential to prick the speculative rice price bubble. Indeed, immediately after the announcement of the Japan-Philippines deal, world rice prices fell by $200 a ton over a week.

Finally, the International Affairs Forum has its latest China Briefing out, full of articles and interviews on China's internal and external affairs, including The Beautiful Island. It's by turns informative.....

Nearly all of Beijing’s centuries-old cityscape has been bulldozed in recent years, despite legal protections and the brave resistance of residents and the nascent Chinese preservation movement. Redevelopment in Shanghai has been equally catastrophic, forcing the relocation of tens of thousands of families. China’s cities are also rapidly sprawling across the landscape, churning precious farmland into highway-laced landscapes of superblock housing estates and gated single-family subdivisions. As early as 1995, the built-up area of Shanghai (including the city proper and its inner suburbs) covered nine times the land area it did just a decade
earlier—jumping from 90 to 790 square miles.

....provoking...

IA Forum: How would you describe Sino-U.S. relations under the Bush Administration?

Scott Kennedy: I think they’re generally cooperative and constructive, particularly since late summer 2001. The relationship got off to a bad start with the EP3 [spy plane] incident. When the problems with that were identified, in the summer of 2001 the Bush Administration realized that a confrontational relationship with China was not in the U.S.’s best interest and so they started to change. That sentiment was magnified with 9/11, and so the problems we had with China were put on the back burner and the much larger problems the U.S. faced took center stage. Gradually, over time, the two sides developed a pretty good working relationship. Right now U.S. policy toward China under the Bush administration has to be one of its most obvious successes, which I think distinguishes it from U.S. foreign policy generally during this period.

....prescient....

China displaced the United States to become the largest trading partner of India during 2007-08. During the same twelve month period, the Sino-Indian border—the longest disputed boundary in the world (2,520 miles)—witnessed nearly a hundred incidents of incursions and tense stand-offs. These co-evolving economic and security trajectories are a microcosm of a complex chess game being played out between Asia’s second and third largest economies that will have an increasingly significant impact on not just their dyadic relationship but also on the wider Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

.... and just plain silly...

Unlike organic nations that are formed naturally over time, the Chinese nation is a product of the Chinese people’s experience of being abused and humiliated by outside groups. Their shared suffering at the hands of common enemies transformed Chinese from being “a tray of loose sand” into a nation. In effect, Chinese nationalism from its very beginning has been reactive and xenophobic.

An engaging compilation of information and opinions. Kudos to the IA forum for putting it all together.

And from the world of Way Cool: this Asian photography exhibition 1840s -1940s in Australia has a some amazing and moving photos. To see them, click on THEMES at the top of the home page.

[Taiwan]

Sizzler to Own Taiwan

Bloomberg reports, not on the steakhouse, but on a Russian missile that is giving US planners indigestion with its ability to make mincemeat of US naval defenses....

The missile, known in the West as the "Sizzler,'' has been deployed by China and may be purchased by Iran. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England has given the Navy until April 29 to explain how it will counter the missile, according to a Pentagon budget document.

The Defense Department's weapons-testing office judges the threat so serious that its director, Charles McQueary, warned the Pentagon's chief weapons-buyer in a memo that he would move to stall production of multibillion-dollar ship and missile programs until the issue was addressed.

"This is a carrier-destroying weapon,'' said Orville Hanson, who evaluated weapons systems for 38 years with the Navy. "That's its purpose.''

"Take out the carriers'' and China "can walk into Taiwan,'' he said. China bought the missiles in 2002 along with eight diesel submarines designed to fire it, according to Office of Naval Intelligence spokesman Robert Althage.

A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia also offered the missile to Iran, although there's no evidence a sale has gone through. In Iranian hands, the Sizzler could challenge the ability of the U.S. Navy to keep open the Strait of Hormuz, through which an estimated 25 percent of the world's oil traffic flows.

Brrr....

(hat tip to initechnology) [Taiwan] [US] [China] [Taiwan Independence] [Taiwan Relations Act (TRA)] [Russia] [Iran]