Despite his cringe-making fawning, Trump got very little change out his comic opera performance with Xi Jinping. His abject posture gave the game away. In the hardball game between the superpowers Xi has the advantage. Trump the hustler tries a selling line to make a deal. He parades the tech bros. Xi is unmoved. Trump the needy one pleads with Xi to help end the Iran war he himself started. How daft can he get?
Why would Xi bother himself when China has bounced off Trump’s tariffs and holds the whip hand with its near monopoly of access to the raw materials essential for computer technology? The power equation favours China. Patriotic Chinese people well capable of independent thought like my granddaughter’s Beijing hosts before Christmas rationally prefer their place in the Chinese system of control to what they observe of American democracy today.
What’s to stop Xi marching into Taiwan less than two miles away from the Chinese coast at its narrowest point, when Trump sets such a terrible example? In his own backyard he has kidnapped the Venezuelan leader, blockaded Cuba, threatened to annex Canada and Greenland and take back the Panama Canal. All because he needs to feel stronger against the threats of Russia and China at a distance. Trump is playing at reducing his commitment to Taiwan in the interest of doing a deal with Xi based on scaling up American exports to China and scaling down Chinese dumping on America under pressure of continued tariff war. But China has redirected its massive export drive elsewhere . Big loans and wolf warrior diplomacy advances Chinese power to rival and replace the American presence in much of the world.
The main checks on Chinese ambition don’t come from Trump’s attempt of deal making. They arise from the response to Chinese aggression in the region an invasion of Taiwan would provoke; harsh sanctions against a Chinese economy overdependent on exports, imposed not only by the West but by China’s powerful neighbours on either side of the Pacific Rim. They feel as threatened as Taiwan by China’s relentless moves to turn the western Pacific into a Chinese lake. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia the states of south Asia and Australia with India in the wings are formidable adversaries.
So I reckon in the high stakes game, Taiwan is safe so long as the Chinese regime feels secure. But at the heart of every regime democratic or autocratic alike lurks the worm of insecurity which exposes itself as identity neuralgia. The Communist party’s aggression is predicated on its terrific resentment of centuries of western imperialism, rescued by Mao’s revolution. For them Taiwan is the last vestige of the old regime Mao defeated. Like Putin, Xi dismisses western support for democracy as a cynical attempt to undermine its achievement and deny China its rightful place in the world. Which by those rules inevitably means confronting American power.
Does it have to be this way? Do we have to revert to 19th century nationalist rivalries unchecked and barely arbitrated? You would think wouldn’t you, that after the terrible losses suffered in two world wars and equally devastating revolutions – between 40 and 80 million in China , between 20 and 60 million in the former Russian Empire, exact figures unknowable – big states impelled somehow to absorb smaller states sharing a similar background for their own fulfilment would realise that wooing them is better than threatening them? The same goes for Putin over Ukraine in spades. The problem arises when the smaller state refuses to be absorbed.
For rough parallels I turn to our own upheavals in Ireland of a century ago. After three years of guerilla war in the war of independence with its horrible cycle of atrocity and reprisal, the suppressed truth that had for long lurked deep in the British psyche surfaced at last, that despite many similarities and even affinities, the majority Irish really did prefer to be politically separate. On the Irish Ireland side , the ecstasy of commitment to armed struggle drowned out the doubts harboured by many. If they were able to make the country ungovernable under the British they were able to govern it themselves. However the legacy of partition and the physical force tradition it left behind dogs us still. Might freedom have been achieved without it? The counterfactual is of course unproveable. But the possibilities of achieving it without the guerilla campaign was a subterranean agenda agonised over even at the time. Ireland was fortunate. After the civil war a decisive majority opted for parliamentary democracy after what Kevin O’Higgins soon to be assassinated by a dissident called ” the most conservative revolution ever.” The proto fascism of the Irregulars insisting that the only valid mandate could come exclusively from the IRA was rejected. But the legacy of what became increasingly fringe republicanism lingered in absurdly refusing to.recognise subsequent Dail mandates and therefore the legitimacy of the state, almost right up.to the point the modern Sinn Fein first got elected to it. There are lessons here about achieving something closer to democracy for China and Russia. For up to now democracies have never fought each other.
Gradual absorption through trade and contacts is an alternative approach favoured by some in Taiwan. The problem arises when they insist on freedom. By its suppression of the one China two systems negotiated with the British for Hong Kong involving the imprisonment of individual campaigners for press freedom like Jimmy Lai, China’s fears are nakedly exposed, that the germ of democracy would spread like Covid and bring the whole edifice crashing down. So sad to say we are relying on the Chinese state more than defaulting American statesmanship to avoid plunging the world into deeper chaos.
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
Discover more from Slugger O'Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
