Steve Yates, whose most recent piece explains why The Call was the right move, noted on Facebook about my blog post yesterday:
Reminder, China-Taiwan stuff is not really a partisan issue in the US. Michael Turton is a D and I am an R.He also said that I am a delightful person to talk to, which is only true if you've had a few whiskies. But more importantly, he put his finger on the real issue, which is that this should not be seen (or become) a left-right ideological battle. Nope, this is another kind of split, identified by the sagacious Chris Horton (@heguisen), a Taiwan-based journalist who has been putting out solid work in the NYTimes of late (and who really is a delightful person to talk to). He tweeted yesterday:
Interesting coincidence that of the China journos/commentators that aren't freaking out about the phone call, large % have lived in Taiwan.Yup -- the conversation between China and Taiwan types sounds like this:
CHINA PEOPLES: [Background: Orff's Carmina Burana] ZOMG Tsai and Trump talked by phone. The apocalypse is nigh!Yesterday Evan Osnos had a widely circulated response in the New Yorker, which several people sent to me with various negative comments. Note the way pro-China language is normalized in his presentation:
TAIWAN PEOPLES: [Background:Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville ] Dudz, chill out. This is great! Have a margarita. Nothing is going to happen. And give me another one of those mojitos, they're excellent.
CHINA PEOPLES: [Background: Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead](howls of anguish at lost gatekeeping possibilities) But this changes everything. It's radical!
TAIWAN PEOPLES: [Background: Poppy's Money] Dudz, there are some good English teaching jobs in Dubai, I hear.
CHINA PEOPLES: [Background: Dvorak's Requiem, Dies Irae] But we spent 40 years building these protocols!
TAIWAN PEOPLES: [Background: Queen's We are the Champions] Yeah, well while you were building protocols, China was building... islands.
Taiwan broke away from mainland China in 1949,I've complained about the reflexive use of "Mainland" as an act of pro-China discourse many times on this blog. It should simply be banished. The history is also wrong. Actually, Taiwan had been part of Japan since 1895, and would continue to be under Japanese sovereignty until 1952, at which point its status became undetermined under international law, a position it has held ever since. The ROC government moved to Taiwan in 1949. It was the KMT and the CCP which split in 1949, not Taiwan and "China". Taiwan had never been part of any Chinese empire.
One also has to love the use of abusive language in passages like this:
Though expert reaction to the Taiwan call was generally negative, the move was applauded by a subset of conservative Asia specialists who have long pushed for the U.S. to draw closer to Taiwan as a check on China’s expanding power.Experts reacted negatively, specialists supported it, an opposition which occurs in several places in the piece. Dan Blumenthal is described as a "specialist" not an expert. Especially delightful, that formulation. Never mind that the assertion is wrong, as I can make up a long list of lefty Taiwan "specialists" who loved The Call and hold many of the same positions as the conservative Asia experts. But Osnos is so reflexively focused on China he never thinks of Taiwan as a thing in itself with its own group of specialists who might be worth listening to. This attitude is more fallout from the common move among commentators of seeing Taiwan only in terms of China...
Osnos then goes on with the SOP China Explainer response in which China's future reaction is presented even before China reacts:
Whether it says it or not, China will regard this as a deeply destabilizing event not because the call materially changes U.S. support for Taiwan—it does not—but because it reveals the incoming Presidency to be volatile and unpredictable.Osnos, like virtually every commenter with a China-centric orientation, doesn't ask what China could be doing to please the US (The China Explainers never task China with the responsibility of responding to US needs, except in vague and ideologically-approved ways as in his commentary on how to avoid the enemy trap from last year). Nor does he stop to consider the effect on relations with Taipei or Tokyo (upgraded US relations with Taiwan are good for Tokyo, Manila, and every other nation facing Chinese territorial expansionism). The reflexive, obsessive focus on What Does It Mean For Our China of this crowd is every bit as ideological and narrow-minded as the people they criticize.
Instead, he scolds the US for being potentially volatile and unpredictable. As I have noted many times on this blog, "anger" for China is a policy choice which it deploys to manage and manipulate other nations and individuals who comment on foreign policy. One of the tragedies of the China Explainers is that they treat this anger as everything but what it actually is, a deliberate policy choice, and the constant flow explanations that the commentariat offers, like the bullshit "century of humiliation", are often little more than repackaged CCP propaganda and function as a kind of apologetics. Again and again we are told China is basically the Jessica Rabbit of countries: it's not bad, it's just drawn that way. Consider how Osnos' commentary on how to fix US-China relations last year softens China's territorial expansion in the South China Sea:
The U.S. must differentiate between controversial assertions of power, like those in the South China Sea, and fair reflections of China’s growing contribution to the world, such as the new banks. Likewise, China cannot afford to pretend that the world is unruffled by the profound, if inevitable, change it has introduced in the international order. For both parties, a willful focus on the strengths risks underplaying the weaknesses in their respective positions.China's moves in the South China Sea are naked territorial expansion, not "controversial assertions of power". Yet Osnos would never describe Trump's phone call as a "controversial communication between two presidents of democracies".
Thus, Osnos' complaint about unpredictability is simply a variant of the old game of China managing US foreign policy via anger and sensitivity. It replaces "We mustn't do X because it could anger China!" with "We mustn't do X because China will think we are unpredictable." In every case, the onus is on the US to cede its freedom of action because poor China is so especially sensitive and must be coddled.
China, of course, will do whatever it wants no matter how the US behaves. We're so lucky that our current policy has totally prevented China from suppressing Taiwan's international space, from launching missiles around Taiwan, deploying paramilitary and military forces to Japanese territory in the Senkakus, Philipines waters, and the South China Sea, constructing islands in the South China Sea, suddenly announcing an ADIZ over the Senkakus, turning Laos and Cambodia into protectorates, quietly deploying coast guard ships to Laconia Shoals off Borneo to expand its territorial claims, kidnapping booksellers from third countries, ramping up its military presence on the Indian border, and playing territorial expansion games in Himalayan meadows owned by Bhutan. Damn Trump's advisers for disturbing that peacefulness!
But the whole claim that Trump is unpredictable is both incorrect and nakedly ideological. In reality, it was easy to see what the new policy would be because of who Trump picked to advise him. I wrote about it on this blog, and if a cheeto-eating, panjama-wearing, basement-inhabiting blogger whose only brilliance is the sheen of alcohol evaporating off his skin could see that, surely awesome China Explainers like Osnos should have been able to. If China was unable to predict something like this, it was ill-served by both its intelligence services and by its American brokers. Like Evan Osnos, for example.
Oh yeah -- Who did China have monitoring the media in Taipei which announced The Call hours before it occurred? Obviously nobody. Hello, intel failure.
If you didn't know this was going to happen, you haven't been listening to Trump's advisers talk and write for the last decade. Which, come to think of it, is probably true. Having dismissed them as irrelevant fringers, many commentators simply had no clue what Trump's advisers would do.
In other words, it isn't that "Trump is unpredictable". It's that everyone failed to see this would happen (except those of us lefties in regular contact with Trump people who we disagree with but regard as humans like ourselves, except much better shaved and dressed). But rather than humbly admit that the China Explainers did not properly evaluate things, they withhold humanity from Trump's advisers and claim that the China Explainers couldn't have screwed up, the only explanation is that Trump must be unpredictable. Which is a Bad Thing.
Osnos writes:
Trump has also shown himself to be highly exploitable on subjects that he does not grasp. He is surrounding himself with ideologically committed advisers who will seek to use those opportunities when they can.Obama and presidents before were so lucky to have enjoyed the services of ideology-free advisers. Poor Donald, alone in a room with those ideological wolves. You can almost smell the Establishment class bias here: if only the right people were in charge of Trump's policy instead of those scruffy and disagreeable neocons. Do those guys even shower?
Similarly The Call shows the massive confirmation bias in the Commentariat. Media: We didn't know this was going to happen, we are never fooled, therefore it could only be that Trump was impulsive. LOL.
It was easy to see there were going to be changes, as I noted above. This one is perfect: it's a phone call, not rebasing of soldiers to Taiwan or a dramatic weapons sale or diplomatic recognition or formal support for Taiwan independence or anything concrete and interesting. This was a small and measured rejection of previous policy, not an IED tossed into Xi Jin-ping's privy. It was the media response that made it huge, not the call itself.
Osnos, like many, refers to the possibility that Trump might build luxury hotels in Taoyuan having some effect on the decision to take a call from President Tsai. Changing the rules of the game is something that Trump's China advisers have been saying they would do if they got power for years and would have occurred whether or not luxury hotels were flying out of the ground in Taoyuan (Osnos even links to a Jan 2016 piece to that effect by John Bolton, which was written long before alleged hotel plans occurred). This phone call is about their dreams of redirecting US China policy, not about Trump's dreams of unlimited wealth. The currently circulating hotel story is presently an unevidenced smear.
This leads to another point, I've also made countless times on this blog, a fact which Osnos hides from our view. The people who comment on China and rotate in and out of the government in China-related positions frequently do business with China. They get junkets and conference invitations and access to officials on and off the record. The anguish and vitriol expressed by that crowd hides the sudden recognition triggered by The Call: we're not in charge any more! What is this going to do with our (financially remunerative) gatekeeping and commenting positions? What is going to happen to our (lucrative) consultancy positions? There's a lot of money at stake (Ref: Silverstein, The Mandarins). But everyone look over here! That Trump, he's putting hotels in Taoyuan... SQUIRREL!
Oh, btw, smear is a game two can play. Word has it that Chinese capital is trying to invest in that airport project too. If I wrote that Osnos is just trying to divert attention from his Chinese buddies investing in the Aerotropolis, that would definitely be a smear, because Osnos is so uninformed about Taiwan I doubt he even knew that. But so many don't give Trump's team the same benefit of the doubt nor try to understand where they are coming from. That's because they are objective truth-telling reporters speaking truth to power, while the other side is clearly a collection of ideological robots.
NOTES:
As of this writing, despite many complaints, Huffpost still has not corrected its erroneous claim that the US is one with many other countries in acknowledging that Taiwan is part of China.
Thanks to @wilfredchan, who observed as I did yesterday, in greater detail:
Nelson Report comments are at the bottom of this post....
For Amusement Purposes Only: Charles Krauthammer spoke from his deep well of Taiwan expertise
“The Chinese are extremely sensitive about these nuances in diplomacy,” said Krauthammer. “They've been at it for four thousand years, and the rules were laid down by Kissinger and Nixon when they made the opening, and it was that we'd be allies of Taiwan, but we would have to observe certain rules… that Taiwan is part of China.”Too bad we don't agree that Taiwan is part of China... as for the rest, Orientalizing the Chinese is a 19th century game. Let's stop with the "they've been at it for four thousand years..."
_______________
Trump-Tsai Call Roundup:
- Taiwan News report of impending phone call
- Walter Lohman: Trump call could help reform US-Taiwan Relations
- New Bloom: A Surprise Shift?
- Peter Lee: Trump in the China shop
- Finger licking good: Ketagalen Media: Why the media doesn't get the Trump call
But when the political class slavishly jumps to the defense of a status quo with China that has already moved on, it reveals a severe lack of imagination...Virtually none of the reporters previously covered the Taiwan issue, but now they are piling on to score political points. They scold the Trump administration simply to demonstrate their own superiority on foreign matters. Yet when this happens, the only people getting hurt are the citizens of democracies that have been seeking assurance from their friends to grow the island nation’s international space.'
- C Donovan Smith: Parsing the Significance of The Call
- The Guardian: Donald Trump's phone call affects global stability.
- NYTimes: A single phone call... ZOMG you know the rest.
- NYTimes: This... could... change everything.
- China Post: Call is Risky Bet for Tsai
- LaoRenCha: Careful what you wish for
- Comical AP timeline cannot get a thing right.
- AP (in WaPo): Trump call...
- Gordon Chang: Putting China relations on a new footing
- Steve Yates and Christian Whiton: Trump was right to Talk with Tsai
- CNA report of Tsai Administration Summary of The Call
- Taoyuan Mayor: Trump wants to build luxury hotels in Taoyuan
- Mondo: Trump telefona alla presidentessa di Taiwan. La Cina protesta ufficialmente: รจ scontro
Daily Links:
- Beijing warns Taiwanese businessmen not to use their profits for independence.
- Taiwan Explorer weighs in: things are gonna change with Trump
- Manufacturing activity expands for ninth straight month
- Big anti-gay marriage march
NELSON REPORT COMMENTARY CLICK READ MORE
