Article

2003-11-26 East Asia

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Posted by Sorge 2003-11-26 12:07:03 AM|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 We won't encourage Taiwan right now because we're involved in Iraq. I sincerely wish we could, but the fact remains that going to war would endanger the troops in SK. Not too mention the whole damn country of SK. We need to take out NK first, then look towards Taiwanese independence.

Unless we have more troops, that is. We're stretched thin even for a technological army like ours.

Posted by Charles 2003-11-26 12:18:33 AM|| 2003-11-26 12:18:33 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 Sounds like a plan Sorge--just remember--when we did the "push them into a corner routine" with Japan we got Pearl Harbor! When we played that with Russia it more or less worked--are you ready to roll the dice with another nuclear power? (albeit a smaller one)

Posted by NotMikeMoore 2003-11-26 12:21:40 AM|| 2003-11-26 12:21:40 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 I still say that it's hard to invade Taiwan when millions of starving NorKs are streaming across your borders and your wheat harvest was bad so you'll have to rely on outside sources for food.

Can the Chicoms multi-task?

Posted by Anonymous2U 2003-11-26 12:26:45 AM|| 2003-11-26 12:26:45 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 Charles; People don't realize that the South Korean Army is vastly superior to the North Korean one. Better armed, better trained, better feed, and an air force better than China's, let alone North Korea. The South Koreans don't realize how brittle the Norks hordes are.

NotMikeMoore; The point of the article is to move faster so China cannot have their own Pearl Harbor. China doesn't have the Air Force or the Navy--or the Army for that matter--to challenge us right now. Strike while they're weak.

Posted by Sorge 2003-11-26 12:28:28 AM|| [http://www.forgottenfronts.com/] 2003-11-26 12:28:28 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 OK Sorge I'll buy that--if you're sure some Politburo Nutcase won't pop a nuke on LA to tell us to F*off

Posted by NotMikeMoore 2003-11-26 12:32:04 AM|| 2003-11-26 12:32:04 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 China won't try to take Taiwan. It's beyond their ability to prepare for a sure victory. Don't forget that China is a very big country with many problems. Their long term approach will be to have the US pave the way. So lets not pave the way.

Posted by Lucky 2003-11-26 12:48:44 AM|| 2003-11-26 12:48:44 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 I think Lucky's right - what I fear is an irrational striking out by China in the face of an epidemic or AIDS or financial catastrophe to try and rally the masses regardless of cost. I think they'd lose badly, but the cost would be high (but still worth it)

Posted by Frank G 2003-11-26 12:52:43 AM|| 2003-11-26 12:52:43 AM|| Front Page Top

#8 Willy Lam: He pointed out, however, that the hardlinersâ belief that an ugly Sino-U.S. confrontation is inevitable is gaining ground among a growing number of moderate leaders.

A moderate Chinese leader is like a moderate al Qaeda member - the distinction is kind of pointless.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2003-11-26 12:54:45 AM|| 2003-11-26 12:54:45 AM|| Front Page Top

#9 This has nothing to do with us. If the Taiwanese want to become Chinese they will. If they don't China doesn't stand an ice cubes chance in hell of making them. Taiwan's got over 20 million people and I believe around a 300 billion dollar GDP. Can you imagine how difficult it would be for us to take over a country that didn't want to be ruled with those stats? Now imagine China doing it. Impossible. Why the hell does China even want Taiwan anyway and now I hear they want to annex parts of north korea? These guys are living in another century.

Posted by Damn_Proud_American 2003-11-26 1:07:55 AM|| [http://brighterfuture.blogspot.com] 2003-11-26 1:07:55 AM|| Front Page Top

#10 NMM: when we did the "push them into a corner routine" with Japan we got Pearl Harbor!

Like many of NMM's other left-wing anti-American* theories, that's kind of silly. In no sense did the US push Japan into a war - declassified Japanese documents show that the Japanese military was planning on taking Southeast Asia to get their own supplies of oil anyway. The American embargo merely hastened Japanese operations. (A China under Japan's domination would not have been a benefit for American interests - the Chinese would have proven to be willing and capable servants of Japanese empire, just like the Koreans in the Imperial Japanese Army, whose atrocities against Allied troops were particularly notorious).

China has big plans for East Asia. What we do on Taiwan may speed up or slow down the timetable, but won't alter the essence of China's plans. At the time of the Sino-Japanese War, there was no essential difference between the Chinese and the Japanese ideologies - except that the Japanese were in a position to bend the region to Japan's will. Now that China is coming into its own, its traditional expansionist tendencies are coming back into focus.

* that blame America for everything bad that happens in the world

Posted by Zhang Fei 2003-11-26 1:08:17 AM|| 2003-11-26 1:08:17 AM|| Front Page Top

#11 I wrote: A moderate Chinese leader is like a moderate al Qaeda member - the distinction is kind of pointless.

That should have read: "Comparing a hardline Chinese leader with a moderate Chinese leader is like comparing a hardline al Qaeda member with a moderate al Qaeda member - the distinction is kind of meaningless".

Posted by Zhang Fei 2003-11-26 1:11:32 AM|| 2003-11-26 1:11:32 AM|| Front Page Top

#12 The article notes that a good time for Taiwan to declare independence would be right before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Apparently Chinese diplomats are warning other countries that the Olympics would not stop the PRC from invading Taiwan if the latter did make such a move.

Posted by Steve White 2003-11-26 1:12:55 AM|| 2003-11-26 1:12:55 AM|| Front Page Top

#13 Oh, NMM...

Seeing as how you're possessed of the typical leftist's superior intellect, please enlighten us as to how AmeriKKKa really caused the Rape of Nanking.

Posted by Jeff 2003-11-26 1:31:48 AM|| 2003-11-26 1:31:48 AM|| Front Page Top

#14 Zhang Fei,

When you say China has big plans for east asia... Do you mean China is looking at Taiwan as the first of many invasions to grow the chinese empire or are you just referring to their attempts at strengthening their sphere of influence in the region?

Posted by Damn_Proud_American 2003-11-26 1:55:42 AM|| [http://brighterfuture.blogspot.com] 2003-11-26 1:55:42 AM|| Front Page Top

#15 OK Zhang Fei--the US has never done anything wrong--we are always 100% right--happy now? And we'll just forget there was "ever" a Chinese Empire predating the Japanese that was just as militaristic, but lost? Ethnic anger anyone?
Jeff--I never said that--what I said was we pushed an inferior power into a corner--in the case of Japan by not selling them raw materials they needed--I certainly don't justify Japanese actions--so get off your Fox News bandwagon! What I meant was if the Chicoms felt threatened enough by Taiwanese Independance--how would you/we react to them threatening the nuclear option on LA to keep us Non-involved ?

Posted by NotMikeMoore 2003-11-26 2:00:11 AM|| 2003-11-26 2:00:11 AM|| Front Page Top

#16 One item in the CNN article that was edited out is rather interesting -- that in the event of a confrontation over Taiwan, China would warn regional allies of the US not to allow us basing and other support in any conflict. Brilliant plan! If true, this would indicate that China remains comparatively inept in foreign policy. Rattle sabers at the neighbors and they'll probably have Vietnam asking us in to Cam Ranh Bay, besides cementing Japanese-US cooperation.

I continue to assume Taiwan will play it smart and prosper and reform while continuing with the charade that they're part of China (in any meaningful functional sense). If not, I suppose China might try something stupid, but odds still seem against it.

I'm no keen observer of internal Chinese affairs but its seems unlikely the political class would go along with some adventure that would end up having the country humiliated, its military devastated, its economy in crisis, and the region inflamed against it. All of which would be results of any mistaken attempt to challenge the US.

Posted by IceCold 2003-11-26 2:09:21 AM|| 2003-11-26 2:09:21 AM|| Front Page Top

#17 how would you/we react to them threatening the nuclear option on LA to keep us Non-involved ?

Any nuclear threats made against the US would definately keep it involved, probably more than ever.

Posted by Rafael 2003-11-26 2:19:00 AM|| 2003-11-26 2:19:00 AM|| Front Page Top

#18 And Rafael--you think that is OK? We all know damn well no US President will let LA be nuked to save Taiwan--get Real

Posted by NotMikeMoore 2003-11-26 4:06:14 AM|| 2003-11-26 4:06:14 AM|| Front Page Top

#19 This all seems quite silly. China is well known for taking the long view of things, and modernization and democratization on the mainland seem to be a requisite for Taiwan reunification. All they really have to do is wait a few years, or decades, and they will get Taiwan. Trying to take it by force would end up destroying the very reason for having it as part of China in the first place.

Posted by Ben 2003-11-26 4:19:50 AM|| 2003-11-26 4:19:50 AM|| Front Page Top

#20 Zhang Fei--as usual you are an Ameri-fascist--but I'm really scared for agreeing with Ben

Posted by NotMikeMoore 2003-11-26 4:28:48 AM|| 2003-11-26 4:28:48 AM|| Front Page Top

#21 Can China nuke LA,certainly,last I heard China had something like 2 dozen ICBM's.
Could the U.S.totally and competely destroy China,certainly.
Hell a couple of Cruise missles on the 3 Gorges Dam would pretty much destroy China.

Posted by Raptor 2003-11-26 8:07:33 AM|| 2003-11-26 8:07:33 AM|| Front Page Top

#22 NMM--If China threatens to nuke L.A., we should threaten to nuke the whole of China. We cannot allow nuclear blackmail, or it will happen over and over again. Incidentally, in the view of the ChiComms having nukes, do you support research towards an Strategic Defense Initiative?

Ben--You've got to be kidding me. China is doing nothing, absolutely nothing towards democratization. And they have uttered three threats in three days, that doesn't sound much like "the long view of things" to me.

Posted by Sorge 2003-11-26 8:11:11 AM|| [http://www.forgottenfronts.com/] 2003-11-26 8:11:11 AM|| Front Page Top

#23 I think I've figured it out. I've noticed in the past that good news for Bush makes the loony left go frothing insane, and their trolling and idiocy goes through the roof.

Yesterday we saw revised economic numbers; NMM went apeshit.

Looks like another point of data supporting the theory, IMHO.

Posted by Robert Crawford 2003-11-26 8:40:04 AM|| [http://www.kloognome.com] 2003-11-26 8:40:04 AM|| Front Page Top

#24 Ice Cold, you made a great point about Cam Ranh Bay, the Vietnamese are already asking us to come in. It's already in the works but on the down low. W/Okinawa & Japan getting skittish about us there, the U.S. has been looking at alternatives (inevitable really) Viet Nam would be of interest right off China's flank. Very strange, 30+ yrs later and we may be back in Danang & Saigon City as friendly's w/bases. There was a big write up about this in the Marine Corps Times last week.

Posted by Jarhead 2003-11-26 8:45:13 AM|| 2003-11-26 8:45:13 AM|| Front Page Top

#25 Perhaps we could pay the Vietnameese enough to set up another National Training Center specializing in guerilla warfare. I expect we could find some locals who would make kick ass OpFor.

Posted by Shipman 2003-11-26 8:55:32 AM|| 2003-11-26 8:55:32 AM|| Front Page Top

#26 Hell a couple of Cruise missles on the 3 Gorges Dam would pretty much destroy China.

That's the way to do it. Instead of nuking China and causing radiation everywhere, just have a miniature Noah's Ark! It would be cruel wiping out all those lives (Estimated 300 million), but more would die if we used Nuclear Weapons.

Although washing away all that top-soil into the sea might cause a slight hunger epidemic....

Posted by Charles 2003-11-26 8:59:26 AM|| 2003-11-26 8:59:26 AM|| Front Page Top

#27 ben is correct and yet not correct (understand grasshopper?)

China DOES stand a good chance of getting Taiwan peacefully in the long run, and is prepared to accept the status quo. But that is not what the article is about. It is rather about China's fear that Taiwan, with US support would break the status quo by declaring independence. That would be a humiliation to a regime that is no longer Marxist and, in the absence of democracy, relies on nationalism for legitimacy.

This may be excessive saber rattling - but it seems to me be true that if we dont restrain Taiwan from going to far in the direction of independence WE will be provoking the war.

Now, as some have pointed out, thats not necessarily a bad thing. If a war with China is inevitable someday anyway, better in 2005 then in 2025, when we are likely to be less dominant. (Iraq is not all that relevant, since this would essentially be a naval and air war, not a land war - if we keep air and naval superiority China can't land a battalion on Taiwan - if we lose it a landing isnt needed - taiwan is an industrialized trade dependent economy - if China can blockade the island, the society will desolve.It would be desirable to improve our relations with Russia before such a war though)

So the question is whether a US-Chinese war is inevitable. Thats a huge question, and one I think beyond our ability to debate seriously here.

Posted by liberalhawk 2003-11-26 9:52:27 AM|| 2003-11-26 9:52:27 AM|| Front Page Top

#28 NMM: And we'll just forget there was "ever" a Chinese Empire predating the Japanese that was just as militaristic, but lost?

For a change, NMM writes something sensible. This is what I've been pointing out all along - that China is today a huge country because of its traditional expansionistic tendencies. Empires have difficulty with the status quo - they either expand or contract. Minorities on an empire's boundaries can look over the border at other nations and wonder why they're being ruled by people of another ethnic group. Something has to give - either the empire expands, to quash the nascent nationalism by annexing the nations on its borders, or the empire contracts, riven by wars for national self-determination.

NMM's claim was that FDR pushed Japan into an unnecessary war - i.e. the trade embargo to protest Japan's invasion of China caused Pearl Harbor, which was not in America's interests. My point is that NMM (together with the assorted anti-American leftists who cooked up this theory), in his haste to blame America and sanctify the Japanese, has overlooked the crucial fact that a China under Japanese control was not in the American interest, from a national security standpoint. In time, the Japanese would have pacified China, because they were prepared to do what was necessary, meaning large-scale massacres of any among the civilian population who aided the Chinese resistance (anchored by Moose Dung on one end, and Cash My Check on the other)*. A Japanese empire incorporating China would have been a significant threat to American interests in the Pacific, especially the Philippines. The US oil embargo was just an attempt to slow down the Japanese war machine - why feed the enemy when you may have to fight him in a few years? (Note that we still weren't spending any real money on the military back then - it took Pearl Harbor to change that, meaning that continued trade with the Japanese would have strengthened the Japanese military relative to the US military).

NMM seems to be saying that FDR imposed the embargo with the mistaken notion Japanese militarism was uniquely immoral. The truth is that, whatever its morality, the Japanese conquest of China threatened American interests by giving Japan's military machine access to China's population and resources for warfighting, which, coupled with an expansionist ideology that would have been familiar to and easily accepted by the Chinese, would have posed a significant threat to US interests in the Pacific. The analogy is to the Napoleonic Wars - where FDR merely imposed an embargo on Japan, the British actively intervened to stop Napoleon from conquering all of Europe.

* And the Japanese are not unique in doing this. The Chinese have been known to massacre entire cities. In the Taiping Rebellion of the 19th century, the Chinese Imperial Army is reputed to have executed 100,000 rebels after they had surrendered.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2003-11-26 10:46:40 AM|| 2003-11-26 10:46:40 AM|| Front Page Top

#29 One question that bears asking is how much money does Taiwan business have tied up in investments in China. The island is not going to risk a conflagration and lose everything, from the Taiwanese businessman's economic point of view. I wonder how many people in Taiwan actually have independence fever that are not invested in the mainland. I am sure that there are alot of Taiwanese that are doing underground things for the PRC. I also wonder if the PRC is beating this Taiwan drum as national policy, or is it semi schitzofrentic with the PLA-types stirring the pot.

Posted by Alaska Paul 2003-11-26 11:04:29 AM|| 2003-11-26 11:04:29 AM|| Front Page Top

#30 The intense saber-rattling, the bickering over NKor, and several other, less-obvious occurrences in China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, makes me wonder what role Russia is playing, and why. Some of the things I see don't make sense, either militarily or diplomatically:

Is China using Korea to push the Japanese into rearming, or is NKor doing that all on its own? Does China understand that Japan is even contemplating building a nuclear arsenal because of the fiasco in Pyongyang? Is that in China's best interest?

Does China understand that its behavior in the Spratleys has alerted Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia that China has the same type of hemispheric dominance in mind that Japan had in the 1930's?

Does China understand that the problems with Uigurs in western China aren't going to go away, and they're digging an even deeper hole alienating India?

China's behavior appears to be irrational. We've seen irrational behavior several times before in China's recent history: the border clashes on the Indian, Vietnamese, and Nepalese borders, as well as their infiltration of northern Burma, have always come back to bite them. The "Great Leap Forward" was an unmitigated disaster that severely damaged China economically, militarily, and politically. They share a LONG, mostly open border with Russia, yet constantly pick minor quarrels over the smallest of incidents. The current "rapproachment" was a farce, and disintegrated almost as soon as it was begun.

The Japanese tied up millions of its soldiers occupying territory that never paid for itself. There is a clandestine independence movement in Tibet that requires thousands of Chinese soldiers be stationed there, and most (if not all) hate it. Will China make that same mistake by invading territory simply to provide a "border cushion"?

China thinks the United States is totally occupied in the Middle East, and doesn't have its eye on anywhere else. Hopefully, that's not true. In the meantime, China's neighbors are beginning to understand that the Dragon to the north and west is a dangerous menace, and are preparing themselves for the worst. Whether their current rhetoric is merely sabre-rattling or an attempt at intimidation, they grossly misjudged the potential effect. Many of China's neighbors are preparing for what many see as an unavoidable showdown with the Dragon, and are acquiring the necessary capabilities to inflict serious injury, if not totally destroy it.

Posted by Old Patriot 2003-11-26 11:26:17 AM|| [http://users.codenet.net/mweather/default.htm] 2003-11-26 11:26:17 AM|| Front Page Top

#31 NMM wrote: what I said was we pushed an inferior power into a corner--in the case of Japan by not selling them raw materials they needed

Indeed, one could note that Mr. Roosevelt's policy of incrementalism pushed the Japanese into attacking us as part of their war strategy. Lesson to be learned: incrementalism doesn't work with thugs.

Something every Democratic presidental candidate ought to learn. For further examples, see this white paper:

Kennedy, J, and Johnson, LB, "Incremental Punishment of a Communist State as a Policy of Stopping Insurgency in a Neighboring Country", McNamara Press, Washington, DC, 1962-1968, pages 1-58,554.

Posted by Steve White 2003-11-26 12:27:41 PM|| 2003-11-26 12:27:41 PM|| Front Page Top

#32 The Japanese tied up millions of its soldiers occupying territory that never paid for itself. There is a clandestine independence movement in Tibet that requires thousands of Chinese soldiers be stationed there, and most (if not all) hate it. Will China make that same mistake by invading territory simply to provide a "border cushion"?

Actually, OP, from some intel reports that a friend allowed me to see, the Chinese appear to be moving towards an "ethnic submersion" method. They're offering incentives - not the least of which is freedom from the draconic birth control the central government is trying to impose - for all Chinese citizens who are willing to move to Tibet and settle there permanantly.

Their hope is to render Tibet as Chinese as Taiwan. Or any Chinatown in the US, for that matter. Slowly squeezing out all of the native ethnic groups by outbreeding and outnumbering them, reducing them to minorities in their own lands.

Ed Becerra.

Posted by Ed Becerra 2003-11-26 6:30:44 PM|| 2003-11-26 6:30:44 PM|| Front Page Top

03:16 Lucky
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