Do you believe a vibrant democracy of about 20 million people on large island off the coast of Asia is worth defending?
Good, then you accept that defence of Taiwan against Chinese aggression is a worthy cause and disagree with those who urge we be "realistic" about the "inevitable" incorporation of Taiwan into the mainland (you know, as we had to be "realistic" about East Timor).
It is hard to see how Australians can take any other view than that Taiwan is worth defending. After all, what is the difference between Taiwan and us? That they are of Asian stock, and we are of mainly European stock? That is hardly good enough.
That Taiwan used to be part of China? In the 106 years since Japan occupied Taiwan in 1894, Taiwan has been ruled from the mainland only in the period 1945 to 1949, and then by the regime which still rules it. In 1894, the Imperial Parliament in London still legislated for Australia: a point that matters not at all for any claims London may now have on us. Why is Beijing's claim over Taiwan any different?
There is no principled reason why a functioning democracy of 22 million people should be turned over to the control of a corrupt, one-party dictatorship which showed at Tiannimen Square in 1989 a willingness to slaughter its own people to stay in power. As time marches on, the Chinese claim becomes more and more threadbare while Taiwan's consciousness of itself as a separate society from China becomes stronger and stronger.
We are left only with expedience: that China is large country, a growing power, a huge market and we must therefore accept its wishes.
The problem with this "realism" is that it is mostly a tissue of fantasy.
China has a lot of people: so does India. Yet we do not have people madly boosting the Indian market, talking about the inevitable rise of India, how we must be realistic and accept India's claims.
In fact, according to World Bank figures, the Chinese economy is smaller than Britain's or Italy's and its per capita GNP is lower than Papua New Guinea's. The size of the Australian economy is about 40 per cent of China's. The failure of the Chinese state is at least as likely as its success.
Corruption is the market for official discretion. The more official discretions, the higher the likely level of corruption. Command economies are totally run by official discretion, so tend to become totally corrupt.
China has a command polity coupled to a pseudo-market economy. There are no real property rights, or rule of law, just official "connections" (known as guanxi), favouritism and bribes. The Party has no popular goodwill left: it only has fear, inertia and the lack of any alternative. It is unlikely to be supplanted, but the party-state could easily just collapse. All it would take would be a major failure -- such as a severe economic downturn, a foreign humiliation -- which deprived the regime of its last reservoirs of authority.
It is not the regime's strength which threatens Taiwan, but its weakness.
The regime's aggressive posturing over Taiwan is a resort to nationalistic chauvinism, and seeking foreign success and succour, to prop up the regime's legitimacy.
Most Western businesses which invest in China lose money. Western businesspeople can be incredibly naïve. They see one billion people and imagine a huge market. But only a tiny percentage of Chinese homes have a land phone connection. As there are no property rights, and no rule of law, everything is a matter of official whim. There is no free press or open debate to test claims, or to genuinely inform.
The risks and costs of doing business in such an environment far outweigh any likely gains -- as so many Western businesses find to their cost.
Chinese official statistics are works of fiction. In the old Soviet Union, such statistics were known as "ceiling statistics" (because one looked at the ceiling, and invented a number). In large sections of the economy, there are no real markets, to provide genuine information about scarcities and preferences: just a grey sludge of bankrupt state firms, whose real assets are steadily being stolen by the party-managers and whose sea of bad debts which may yet drown the Chinese financial system.
China is not a "market" of one billion people, but a billion people trapped in a sludge of corruption and cynicism with pockets of success and conspicuous consumption.
Reversing the folly of agricultural collectivisation and permitting commercial activity did release a huge amount of energy which permitted high growth rates (from a very low base), but that burst of prosperity has spent itself, as the economy comes up against the blocks inherent in the nature of the regime.
To see the Chinese state as solid, and the Chinese market as a huge commercial opportunity, are both fantasies of Western imagination and greed wrapped in a lack of understanding and genuine insight.
But the path of being "realistic" about forcible Taiwanese incorporation into China is a far more deluded fantasy than that.
It is completely unrealistic about American attitudes and perspectives. The American Left despises the Beijing regime because of Tibet and Tiannimen. The American Right despises the Beijing regime as communist and because of 50 years of commitment to Taiwan: commitment which Taiwan's evolution into a thriving democracy has both vindicated and cemented. It is clearly the strong sentiment in the United States that reunification of Taiwan with the mainland can only occur if the Taiwanese people consent to it -- and it is highly unlikely that such consent is will be given. Anything else but resistance to any Chinese aggression would be an abdication of America's view of itself and its place in the world.
"Realism" about Taiwan is also completely unrealistic about popular reactions. Aggression is aggression, oppression is oppression. The images of any Chinese attack would horrify and revolt. "Realism" would seem pathetic and horrible, as it eventually did in Timor.
It is also completely unrealistic about how Australia would look if we preached acquiescence. Why is Taiwanese democracy not worth defending, but ours is? The hypocrisy would stink to high heaven: with the potential to do us incredible damage in American eyes.
The argument that being "part of Asia" means accepting Chinese claims is as pathetic as the claim that one couldn't resist Nazi Germany if one wanted to a "good European". On the contrary, being a good regional neighbour means saying Asians are worth defending too. Preaching acquiescence would say that we think Asian freedom and democracy is strictly second-rate. It would be a betrayal of democracy and a betrayal of ourselves.
Worse than that, it would be a betrayal of the people of China, and even more the people of Tibet. We would be saying that it was OK for the Chinese regime to seek to keep itself in power by seeking foreign success as a substitute for granting its people real rights, real freedoms and a genuine say in their own future.
We would be saying that China's oppressive colonisation of Tibet is just to be accepted. It is not an act of friendship to the Chinese people to join in the dance of delusion and pretend that fundamental changes do not have to be made in China -- changes that go beyond anything any Chinese regime has ever achieved, or even attempted -- if China really is to achieve mass prosperity.
And for Australia or any other interested party to do anything to lead China to conclude that a sudden seizure (if and when that becomes militarily possible) would be acquiesced to makes such an adventure more likely, not less.
There are very few policies which are so stupid that they are neither realistic nor moral. The path of acquiescence about a Chinese attack on Taiwan manages to be both. It is the most deluded, unrealistic "realism" of them all.
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