Beijing and the Banana Republicans

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

4/25/01

 

Just when you think things can’t possibly get worse under George of the Junta, Putsch, the Banana Republican, whatever you want to call him, he manages.

Today, he decided that what the Yellow Peril really needed was a good old fashioned, chest-thumping, John Wayne on steroids, Dr. Strangelove on LSD all-American threat. In a declaration that doubtlessly came as a surprise to the Department of State and our ambassador in Beijing, Putsch announced that America was willing to engage in armed combat in order to defend Taiwan. It will also come as a surprise to a large chunk of what is laughingly called "American industry", since much of their industry is in Mainland China and not Taiwan because Taiwan’s wages, safety regulations and even taxes are higher than what China’s are.

Putsch’s unrehearsed revision of foreign policy is going to have fallout–perhaps literally. Threatening China, especially egregiously, is not going to end happily for Putsch and company.

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on China. I can barely pronounce the name of their leader, and can name perhaps five of their provinces. Granted, that puts me ahead of 95% of the population.

But the Chinese are human, and being human, will have some fairly predictable response patterns.

First, it’s important to remember that China does not regard Taiwan as "a breakaway province", as our lazy and useless media like to describe it. Taiwan is unfinished business, the last unresolved area left from a civil war won decisively by Mao-Tse Tung over Chiang-Kai-Shek.

To put it in terms that we can relate to, it would be as if it was 1900, and while the North had won the civil war years earlier, the southern half of Florida was holding out, getting massive aid from Pottsylvania because the Pottsavandals had a grudge against the US and were also using southern Florida as a economic colony. America is not happy about that, but because Pottsylvania is much more powerful, they have to accept it. But America knows, deep in her heart, that Florida is rightfully part of America. (An ironic statement given the past election, I admit).

Imagine you are this fictional America of a century passed. Part of the country is still in rebellion, propped up by this generally hostile superpower. This country is not only preventing you from resolving a wound in your history, but it’s spying on you, insulting you, claiming you are plotting against it – and simultaneously doing all the things it loudly declares you are guilty of.

But the saving grace is that despite the ideological slaps and crows, Pottsylvania is basically pragmatic. They are opening trade with you, and as long as you leave Florida alone, and promise not to invade Canada (something you weren’t planning on anyway), they settle for empty noises from the windbags in Parliament and stupid national debates on whether you are morally fit to trade with, what with you having nearly as many prisoners as they do and so on. Pottsylvania is a pain in the ass, but they are very powerful, and have the saving grace of being essentially rational. In the meantime, you are slowly luring Pottsavandal industry away from Florida and to you, making yourself more important to their interests than is Florida.

But then, out of the blue, Pottsylvania has a coup d’etat. While everything is superficially the same, the new head of state is a weak and stupid man propped up by those favorite vehicles of tinhorn dictators, the military, the captains of industry, and the church.

As you and everyone else on earth wonders what the hell is going to happen with Pottsylvania, this new leader leads the country deep into the fields of fascism, using the courts to strip the citizenry of many of their rights (things like making it legal for the police to detain any citizen for up to 36 hours on even the most minor infraction), and promising to build upon an already huge military apparatus to fight adversaries that, it turns out, he can’t even find on the map. He has a dust up with you, and you come out slightly ahead, making him apologize for the incident, but once you fulfill your part of the deal, he whips around and tries to claim it wasn’t really an apology after all, a cheap and tawdry schoolyard move that demonstrates that he lacks honor or courage.

Pottsylvania is the world military power, and it is now spinning out of control, run by a imbecile who is in the grip of a shadowy coalition that is a bizarre mix of the pragmatic, the bellicose, and the demented. A power struggle among these factions is obviously going on, and the winner will be pulling the strings of the puppet Presidente. The guy you can see is a fool, and the guy you want to deal with is a faceless mystery.

And then he makes a sudden change in policy, and announces that he’s prepared to go to war on behalf of Florida. This is utterly shocking, given that you are a far bigger trading partner with Pottsylvania than is Florida, and indeed, many Pottsylvanian companies have erected factories within your border.

The vacuous moron is talking war, and you don’t know who is pulling his strings, so you don’t know just how seriously to take the threat.

Another, quicker example of what the whole world faces: The heavily armed NRA guy down the street who never bothered anyone is standing out on his front yard waving a gun around and shouting incoherently. What do you do?

In the real world, the here and now, the Chinese leaders are pragmatic and unsentimental. They don’t mind being murderous bastards, but all things being equal, would just as soon not be. Except for areas they annexed some fifty years ago, and Taiwan, which they regard as their property, they leave the neighbors pretty much alone. They are interested in building an economic empire rather than a military one.

And here’s America, dangerously in flux, and suddenly a lot more belligerent.

If I was in Beijing and watching this, I would be thinking along the following lines:

The industrial complex (the pragmatic one) isn’t the one pushing the leader to talk about going to war in a civil squabble. They, after all, have more invested in China than they do Taiwan. In fact, Taiwan has been pretty much superfluous to American interests for twenty years.

The military (the bellicose one) knows that a land war in China is unthinkable. What is America going to do on the ground against 1.3 billion people? And there’s no other arena for such a war except Taiwan, which, like Vietnam, is at the end of a long supply line and populated by people with divided loyalties.

That leaves the religious leaders (the demented), who need a bogeyman and an outside enemy with which to frighten the population and assert control. They probably don’t want war any more than the military and industrial complexes do, but have to make much more strident noises.

But it’s an insanely dangerous game to be playing, especially since it presents a challenge that must not be ignored.

Militarily, China has few options. A strike on Taiwan would invite attack, possibly nuclear attack. (The new regime has been making fantastic noises about developing new nukes that will destroy one square mile of city instead of one hundred square miles, and so–they suppose–the rest of the world won’t mind if they actually use such weapons as a "deterrent". Utter lunacy, but the new American leadership doesn’t seem quite aware that it’s insane.)

But the Chinese can play brinkmanship, feint and counterfeint and erode American will. And the Chinese are unparalleled at those types of games. They basically invented the games of intrigue and brinkmanship. Putsch’s handlers are rank amateurs compared to them, and in a game of face, the Chinese stand to win.

But China will respond. They have to assume their efforts to build a pragmatic working relationship with America have failed, and they must emphasize other options. They will start building the means by which they can neutralize and possibly destroy America. They’ll leave Taiwan alone while increasing the appearance of threatening the island (brinkmanship) while their economy continues to grow at a 10-15% rate per year–far faster than America’s. They might reasonably expect to catch America in fifteen years, and a nation that has had six empires, each of which lasted longer than America has, has learned to be patient and watch for an opening.

In the meantime, America is racing to become a big third-world banana republic, which means massive corruption and stagnation will follow. America, led down to ruin by the Banana Republicans, will have a population little interested in Asian affairs in the fairly near future.

At which point, they can just use their trade and industrial leverage to engulf Taiwan, and make it an economic colony of their own, and eventually bring it back in without bloodshed.

That’s the good future possibility. The bad one has eventual war between the US and China, with nobody standing to gain a thing, and everyone standing to lose terribly.

And here in America, just as in Beijing, the same question is being asked: who is controlling Putsch, and what do they want?