Tag: Taiwan

Dangerous Neighbor

“Are you a journalist?” asked the woman in an overflow crowd of thousands, who, like me, couldn’t fit into the packed stadium for a Democratic Progressive Party rally on the eve of Taiwan’s election.

“Or do you just love Taiwan?”

With a broad smile, I told her: “I love Taiwan.”

This, my second trip to the beautiful island nation, was as inspiring as my first, in 2019.

Two other women in the crowd explained they flew in from Italy to cast their ballots — believing the future of Taiwan depended on their vote. Which, of course, it did.

Most poignant was my conversation with a couple who had escaped the Chinazi clampdown in Hong Kong. After discussing how those 2019 protests helped “wake up the world,” I snapped a selfie with them.

Then, five minutes later, they came back to ask me not to post their picture on social media without blacking out their faces. You see, they have relatives still in Hong Kong who might face harassment or worse from the Chinazis, if they were outed.

“Enjoy the freedom of Taiwan today,” a Taiwanese man had offered earlier in the day at the Kaohsiung Museum of History. “It may be gone tomorrow [Election Day].” He feared a KMT victory would usher in a government far too willing to cozy up to the Chinese regime.

On Saturday, however, DDP presidential candidate Lai Ching-te won a clear victory. His triumph was declared by the gaslighting Butchers of Beijing to be an “extreme danger.”

But it is obvious to all that the nation of Taiwan is a danger to no one … and Communist Party-ruled China is a danger to everyone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* One doesn’t need to look to Asia to see the threat from China. Chinese dissidents in the U.S. and Canada are routinely harassed and threatened, which our governments seem unable to do much about. And the website we’ve launched — StopTheChinazis.org — has numerous writers but only two have chosen to use their real names. Why? Fear of reprisals from the CCP against Americans here in America.

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international affairs Internet controversy

Sit Back, America?

“America just needs to sit back,” insists Joseph Solis-Mullen, author of The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Dangers. This, he says, is the best reaction to an admittedly aggressive China.

On his podcast, Tom Woods asserted that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be “a net-negative for the overall cause of human liberty” before asking Solis-Mullen: “So is your position that that’s a very unfortunate thing but there is absolutely no way the United States is going to defeat China over Taiwan, so what’s the point in trying?”

Solis-Mullen answered in the affirmative: “the U.S. would lose an attempt to block China from absorbing Taiwan.”

To illustrate, he noted that “it’s 80 miles off the coast of China,” and said “imagine someone trying to invade Cuba, for example, and the United States was determined not to let them. Of course, they couldn’t.”

An unfortunate formulation, since the U.S. is not threatening to invade Taiwan; China is!

Better to have said, imagine an eastern hemisphere power trying to protect Cuba from an invasion by the U.S. Since to this day you can find American politicians advocating a conquest of Cuba, the analogy is more nearly exact.

And perhaps for similar reasons as to why Cuba remains unconquered, Taiwan is actually defensible — especially with U.S. naval and air support.

While a recent CSIS war game showed massive death and destruction should China surprise Solis-Mullen by launching an amphibious assault, it in turn found China’s navy devastated and the attack repelled. Ian Easton’s look at The Chinese Invasion Threat also concluded that Taiwan can defeat a PLA invasion force.

Today, treaty obligations require the U.S. to come to the military defense of Japan and the Philippines, both under threat from China. The Taiwan Relations Act mandates that we provide Taiwan (which lies between them) with the wherewithal to defend itself and President Biden has repeatedly pledged direct U.S. military assistance should China launch the unprovoked attack the CCP regularly threatens.

Solis-Mullen advocates we abandon these obligations. He seems to recognize it means a complete U.S. withdrawal from Asia and Chinese Communist Party “domination,” but his notion that it “will not impact our prosperity at all” is naïve.

Sitting back to watch another evil empire gobble up free peoples would be, as Tom Woods put it, a huge blow “for the overall cause of human liberty.”

Seems like the wrong armchair position.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Can’t Eat Chips?

“The hawks will generally talk in terms of ‘the technology will fall into China’s hands,’” says political scientist Joseph Silos-Mullen, referring to a threatened Chinese invasion of Taiwan, where 90 percent of the world’s high-end computer chips are fabricated.

“That would never happen,” the author of The Fake China Threat assures, “because the United States has already said publicly that they would destroy — that they would literally bomb out of existence — those very factories.“

Wow. Sure seems those semiconductor chips are awfully important.

It’s a “pretext,” he argues — and I’m quoting from his November Tom Woods Show appearance. “Even if China had [the high-end chip fabs], why wouldn’t China want to sell [chips] to the rest of the world? Right? What good is it just to hold all of the semiconductors? It doesn’t make any sense.”

After Solis-Mullen complained about a lack of follow-up questions in mainstream media discourse, historian and podcaster Woods inexplicably failed to ask him one. Instead, Woods doubled down by dismissing previous fears that some authoritarian dictator might monopolize “all the oil.”

Woods inquired incredulously, “What would you do with it? Unless you have a fetish for it. What would you do with it?”

“Drink it?” Solis-Mullen jokingly asked.

Hahaha. But, seriously, Mr. Woods, no concerns at all about “so-and-so” having a monopoly on oil? Not even Putin? Or China’s Xi Jinping?

¡No problemo! Xi can’t drink the oil, after all. He would just have to sell it to us … and surely at very reasonable rates.

Right? Whew! That was close.

Maybe the CCP could “never” get its hands on those fabs producing all the high-end computer chips, but if somehow it did, are we really supposed to believe it wouldn’t be YUGELY advantageous to China?

Say, militarily?

You know, should this “fake” threat keep becoming more and more real.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

It’s a Date

Taiwan, China, war, defense, freedom, technology

“Do not mess with Taiwan before 2028,” Vivek Ramaswamy instructed translators to tell Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, “before the end of my first term, okay?”

Responding to a question from Hugh Hewitt on his radio program, Ramaswamy — the entrepreneur, author, and GOP presidential candidate — urged a “move from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity.”

The right idea, I guess, just not elaborated in the clear-thinking manner I have been hoping for.

You see, there was a “second part” to Ramaswamy’s foreign policy prescription. “That commitment is only as far as 2028,” he explained, “by which point I will have led the United States of America to achieve semiconductor independence, and we will not take the risk of war that risks Americans lives after that for some nationalistic dispute between China and Taiwan.”

“Some nationalistic dispute”?* Sure, between the democratic miracle of the last century and a genocidal totalitarian regime that claims it … along with claiming 90 percent of the South China Sea, the world’s busiest waterway.

A skeptical Hewitt heard Ramaswamy “saying ‘I will go to war, including attacking the Chinese mainland, if you attack before semiconductor independence. And afterwards, you can have Taiwan. So if you just wait until 2029, you may have Taiwan.’”

Let’s make the world safe for semiconductors!

But … not for people?

Ramaswamy’s transactional approach might make the Taiwanese feel less inclined to assist our efforts toward semiconductor independence. And what a terrible message to send other allies in the region!

As the democratic countries of Asia and the world are stepping up and coming together to push back against Beijing’s belligerence, the U.S. ought not jeopardize this by suggesting more convenient dates for calendaring in future Chinazi invasions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* From the interview, Ramaswamy appears ignorant of Taiwanese history; namely, the fact that the Nationalist Chinese forces that fled to the island in 1949, as well as their offspring, comprise a distinct minority of the island nation’s population. Meanwhile, the native Taiwanese had been under Japanese colonial rule for the previous fifty years and, prior to that, never completely under Chinese control.

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Here-at-Home Problem

China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, censorship, propaganda

The China problem is “not just a distant ‘over there’ problem,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R‑Wisc.) recently argued. “As the spy balloon incident as well as the illegal CCP police stations on American soil illustrate, it’s a ‘right here at home’ problem.”

It’s also a just-north-of-us problem. Canada is currently expelling a Chinese diplomat and dealing with the fallout over China’s interventions in Canadian politics, along with big financial gifts to a foundation for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father.

An article in The Globe and Mail nonchalantly explained the reasons China is engaged in trying to control the speech of every one of the planet’s inhabitants. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has many international goals:

“build acceptance abroad for its claims on Taiwan, a self-ruled island that it … reserves the right to annex by force.”
“play down its conduct in Xinjiang, where the office of former UN Human Rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet last year said China has committed ‘serious human-rights violations.’”
“generate support for a draconian 2020 national-security law to silence opposition and dissent in Hong Kong.”
“quell foreign support for Tibet, a region China invaded and annexed more than 70 years ago, and to discourage opposition to Beijing’s militarization of the South China Sea and sweeping maritime claims in the region.”

Having committed a long list of crimes against humanity, the CCP understandably demands that everyone keep their mouths shut.

Rep. Gallagher believes the U.S. should improve “our deterrent posture across the Taiwan Strait” and communicate “in clear terms that we will not stand idly by while the CCP continues to increase its aggression internationally” — while President Biden has repeatedly pledged U.S. military support for Taiwan.

But for some reason, Biden has never discussed the prospect with the American public.

As if it weren’t our concern, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war general freedom international affairs

Playing With Fire?

In merely the last month …

Belligerently attempting to enforce China’s illegal claim to virtually the entire South China Sea, a People’s Liberation Army jet intercepted a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over international waters, coming within 20 feet, forcing the U.S. pilot to take evasive action to avoid a crash.

And a war.

Which China’s continually threatened invasion of Taiwan would definitely precipitate. The sort of military assault that the PLA practiced this week, Reuters reported, sending 57 aircraft and four ships into “the sea and airspace around Taiwan, focused on land strikes and sea assaults.”

Yet talk of a deadly conflict with China is not limited to Southeast Asia.

“Is India Getting Ready For A War With China?” was the headline of Peter Suciu’s 19fortyfive.com story last month detailing a clash between these two nuclear-armed, billion-plus-people nations sharing a disputed 2,100-mile border.*

The good news? The world may be waking up to the enormous threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Japan has announced it will double military spending — and deploy U.S. tomahawk missiles “capable of striking targets deep inside of North Korea and China.” To better counter the Chinazi threat to itself and neighboring Taiwan, the Japanese also have made “path-breaking” agreements to cooperate with the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

Take a smidgen of comfort, too, in the recent Center for Strategic and International Studies’ war games, which saw Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. “rapidly cripple the Chinese amphibious fleet” in beating back a Chinese invasion of the democratic island nation.

In renewing “its longstanding threat to attack Taiwan,” the CCP warned that foreign countries were “playing with fire.”

Correction: we’re no longer just “playing.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* CNN explained that the tensions between the two countries increased “sharply in June 2020 when hand-to-hand fighting … resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in Aksai Chin-Ladakh.”

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