I wrote the following paper two days ago, it became too long and unwieldy for John Menadue's blog. Difficult to cover multiple dimensions and several centuries in a short note. I will be trying to convert it into shorter notes, but I am concerned that making it brief tends too often to lead to that standard current era genre of "I'm just so smart, take my word for it" adopted now by everyone and dog, as truth and awareness of wider context and history vanish.
So here below is my disorderly draft, as is for now.
...but first, see this Caspian Report video essay released since my writing below. Caspian Report becomes more professional, I wonder who sits in the back room. This video essay raises questions. I might question some of the argument, or inflection, but it's a valuable start point. I marvel at the geostrategic circumstance of writing from Azerbaijan... where you have the geostrategic at the breakfast table and on the bus, not just in mental speculation.
Also valuable in this moment is the series of essays produced twenty four hours ago by the South China Morning Post. The SCMP, in Hong Kong for a very long time, is owned these days by Jack Ma, who created Alibaba, something of a parallel with Jeff Bezos, creator of Amazon, owning the Washington Post. See this video from the World Economic Forum to understand the Jack Ma perspective, as counter to China as monolithic boogeyman role cast by many commentators.
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Here then is my draft paper of 29 August, on the status of Taiwan and Hong Kong.
It is written with Australian readers in mind, but of wider value.
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The situation in Hong Kong becomes more difficult. And reporters covering Hong Kong increasingly bring Taiwan into the story. It is useful to have an understanding of the history underlying the status of Hong Kong and Taiwan in China and the attitudes that come from turbulent history.
If you depend on the news from the Australian Broadcasting Commission (let alone the less responsible) you will understand our neighbourhood in East Asia not with balance but mainly in violent terms, with a rush to cover demos more familiar in tabloid rabblerousing. And with curious fear of change in the balance of power, promoting the security and strategy industries in their militaristic focus in international affairs. It is easy to see how government ministers could be perplexed.
More level heads can be found regarding Hong Kong.
“I can understand the disquiet of Hong Kong people subject to a China that under Xi Jinping has increasingly stressed the control of the Chinese Communist Party, over every sphere of life in China and not just in Hong Kong. But Hong Kong lost that battle before it even began.
“Ever since the end of the Qing Dynasty in the late 19th century, the legitimacy of Chinese governments – Imperial, Republican or Communist – has rested on the ability to defend China’s sovereignty and its borders. I don’t think Beijing is eager to exercise direct control over Hong Kong. But the unity of China is not a matter on which any Chinese government will ever compromise.”
“Harsh Truths for Hong Kong” Bilahari Kausikan. former head of the Singapore Foreign Ministry, July 9, 2019. https://globalbrief.ca/2019/07/harsh-truths-for-hong-kong/
“A Hong Kong ruined by instability, anger and perpetual protest works for no one — not for the government, nor for the protesters, nor for Beijing. It would be a tragedy for the world to see this wonderful and vibrant city avoided by visitors, its population divided and demoralised. A resolution in which the grievances of the protesters are addressed, the administration is restored in credibility, and the Beijing government is recognised for having acted responsibly and respectfully might seem like a distant prospect at the moment, but it is precisely this outcome that all parties, and the world, should support.”
“On the Brink” Inside Story 16 August 2019, Kerry Brown, former Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. https://insidestory.org.au/on-the-brink-2/
On 19 August the South China Morning Post published four essays, which are invaluable to understanding the evolution of the situation. Start here, links at end of each to the others.
As regards Taiwan, there is much focus on the current Taipei administration’s approaches. toying lightly with independence, playing with support in the US, especially among Republicans. But with the 24-hour news cycle and perhaps twenty-four-days-awareness of history, there is no mention that while the KMT (Kuomintang) lost the Taiwan presidency in elections in 2012, it won local government elections in a landslide in November 2018... and perhaps could win the 2020 presidential elections. The KMT sees Taiwan as part of China, has been central to China's political history from the 1911 revolution. The KMT is a member of the International Democratic Union, as is the Liberal Party of Australia; John Howard was chair of the IDU 2002-2014.
Decades ago my advice to defence staff colleges and other audiences in seeking to understand China and other issues was to avoid focusing on some point on the rim of a wheel of the bouncing vehicle and try to understand the vehicle and its movement as a whole.
With concern to broaden perspectives, my purpose here is to provide historical background to the status of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
China sees two hundred years of history leading up to 2049 as in two parts. First, a century of invasion and ‘unequal treaties’ in which China was wrecked by western imperial powers and Japan. The second century, from the 1949 revolution, a century (not without ruckus) of reordering and recovery of status… as the ‘Middle Kingdom’, literal translation of the Chinese word for China.
China in the 1700s had been an economic power comparable to Europe. But was closed to the enlightenment ripping through Europe and to the Industrial Revolution.
When Portuguese ships had entered the Indian Ocean from 1497, those ships were technologically comparable to the great number of Chinese, Malay, Javanese, Indian, Arab and African vessels they encountered. Later, larger Dutch ships with more advanced firepower defeated all, including for example Portuguese in the Moluccas in what is now Indonesia; on the island of Banda murdering the local population, custodians of all nutmeg trees, and replacing the locals with slaves.
The Portuguese had been raping and pillaging and trading at Canton (Guangzhou) in China from 1516, but more stable relations led to a 1554 treaty which eventually allowed Portuguese settlement and warehouses at Macau, but not fortifications. The uproar in Hong Kong won’t be followed in Macau. A story about Macau in the days of the end of Portuguese empire here; more history here.
The Qing dynasty 1644-1912 opened more readily to trade, after taking Taiwan from the Koxinga in 1683. The Koxinga were supporters of the Ming dynasty, which was defeated by the Qing in 1644, wise in the ensuing violence for the Koxinga to duck off to Taiwan, as Chiang Kai-shek would do in 1949. …Speaking of political violence in the mid-1600s I’m reminded of English history.
The Koxinga drove the Dutch out of Formosa (Taiwan) in 1662. The Dutch had taken Taiwan from the Spanish in 1642, an outcome of the Eighty Years War. Taiwan’s colonial history began with a Portuguese settlement in 1544, a settlement that became Spanish after 1580 when the Hapsburg kings of Spain became kings of Portugal. But New Spain, headquartered in Mexico City, was too busy coping with Dutch and British warships at Manila to defend Formosa.
Trading through Canton, the British had found themselves in the early 1800s in that very modern situation of having an adverse trade balance with China because Chinese products were very popular back in Britain. The remedy? — Grow opium in India and demand its use in China. When Chinese authorities said the British could not bring opium into China the British insisted and there followed the First Opium War [1839-1842] which set a pattern of European powers bringing pressure for concessions by Chinese rulers local and national, going to war when resisted… and then demanding concessions as reparation. The British dominated the opium business and thus had a particularly nasty role in China’s degradation, on a huge scale and more devastating than what the Dutch did to monopolise the nutmeg trade. The great trading houses of Hong Kong and Hong Kong's upper crust of wealth, arose from that. Current uproar reflects not just issues with Beijing but class struggle in Hong Kong and the tin ears of the mighty.
Towards the end of the Qing Dynasty, end of the 1800s, there was an uprising against the foreign– the Boxer Rebellion– a wild rejection of foreign things and beliefs, of foreign dominance and the presence of foreigners in China. Imperial powers came to the rescue, again with demands for reparation and predilection to pillage and loot. Portrayed in our world in such movies as these. The Australian War Memorial, an institution that does not have the courage to recognise punitive expeditions against indigenous people in Australia, says this about Australia’s role in the Boxer Rebellion.
The territory we know as Hong Kong had two parts in origin. Hong Kong Island was seized by Britain during the First Opium War in 1841, ceded to Britain in 1842, became a Crown Colony and expanded to include in the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 in the Second Opium War. Context here. The New Territories, beyond Kowloon, were a 99-year lease from 1898. It was in the years before that lease expired in 1997 that London and Beijing negotiated return of the whole to Beijing.
Lost from general sight is the role of China in World War I. The Qing had been overthrown in a revolution in 1911, led by Sun Yatsen, founder of the KMT. But the centre did not hold, warlords took power in various places. With Japan entering World War I on the side of the Triple Alliance against Germany, Japan took the Chinese province of Shandong from Germany, much as Australia seized New Guinea from Germany. China sent 100,000 workers to Europe, to support the military effort against Germany, offers of troops rejected. China hoped to get Shandong back in the peace settlement. But Japan kept Shandong. The curious role of Australian Prime Minister Hughes in this, revealed recently, reminds us of deep racist roots in Australia and of how statesmen may regard lesser places and peoples as toys, or proxies and fail to understand how things they do can have extensive and unintended, unacknowledged consequences.
Loss of Shandong thus to Japan in 1919 by the Versailles Treaty precipitated the ‘May Fourth Movement’. Whereas the 10 October 1911 nationalist uprising (still marked as National Day in Taipei) faltered, the May Fourth movement profoundly changed China and saw the founding of the Communist Party, which then worked with the Nationalist Party (KMT) in a United Front for some years. Central figure in the May Fourth Movement was the Dean of the Arts Faculty at Peking University Chen Duxiu, who was one of the founders of the Communist Party in 2021 and its first General Secretary. Whereas the Boxer Rebellion had rejected the foreign, the 2011 revolution and May Fourth Movement were led by modernisers looking abroad for ways to overturn the feudalism of the Qing. Gregor Benton has just published a book on Poets of the Chinese Revolution including Chen Duxiu and Mao. Deep historical traditions are embedded in Chinese political life.
May Fourth is a key date marked in the official calendar… and by dissidents. Like this dissident statement this year.
Within mainland China dissident statements have not been post-it sized as we see in Hong Kong now, in the founding of the communist party by poets and artists, the feuding among leaders or at the Democracy Wall in 1978-79. Hong Kong, long insulated from the intellectual as well as political turmoil of the mainland, is catching up in recent decades. Dissidents who based themselves in Hong Kong after Democracy Wall and Tiananmen are not marginal now. Meanwhile the Asia Times reports that leaders in Beijing, at their summer confab at the beach in Beidaihe have reportedly retreated to belief that what is happening in Hong Kong is a ‘colour revolution’ involving many foreign countries; the SCMP reports on the interdepartmental muddle of China’s efforts to understand and deal with Hong Kong contributing to incomprehension.
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Taiwan and other territory had been taken by Japan by the Treaty of Shimonoseki ending the first Sino-Japanese war 1894-5. During World War II, at the 1943 Cairo Conference, the UK, US and China (President Chiang Kai-shek leader of the KMT) issued a press release saying that at war’s end "all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, including Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China." The more formal Potsdam Declaration in 1945, the USSR now present, affirmed the intentions regarding those territories as expressed at Cairo.
During the period of Japanese invasion and occupation of China in that Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-45 the Nationalists (KMT) retreated their capital to Chongqing in Sichuan Province as Japan seized Beijing, Shanghai and more. Han Suyin’s memoirs provide a vivid account. The Communist Party was headquartered in Yan’an, mountainous country north of Xian. After 1945 the KMT came back down to Nanjing and in 1949, losing the civil war, fled with numbers and treasures to Taiwan, locating the capital of the Republic of China in Taipei, while the government of the People’s Republic of China took office in Peking (Beijing).
Australia pursued a Commonwealth initiative to seek a solution to the ‘China problem’ until the Offshore Islands Crisis of 1958 when Prime Minister Menzies announced that henceforward our China policy would be that of the US.
Nonetheless, while the Republic of China retained an embassy in Canberra we did not open an embassy in Taipei until 1966 (a one sentence cabinet decision without submission, after the very popular Chinese Ambassador buttonholed Prime Minister Holt at a party). The ROC had territorial claims larger than the PRC, including to the territory of the Mongolian People’s Republic. It has never sought recognition as ‘Taiwan’.
In 1971 the UN General Assembly by Resolution 2758 restored the seat of China in the UN to Beijing, including China’s permanent seat on the Security Council along with the Britain, France, the US and USSR (now Russia). In that period a number of governments shifted recognition of Government of China from Taipei to Beijing. Australia did so in December 1972, among the first actions of the Whitlam Government in a process of relating foreign policy to realities in Asia. Claimant to the title of Government of China, Taipei immediately withdrew recognition from governments shifting recognition to Beijing and expelled their embassies. Britain had never withdrawn its embassy from Beijing, recognising the People’s Republic of China. The shift of recognition to Beijing by France in 1964 disrupted NATO. Pakistan had recognised Beijing in 1951, nonetheless participating in SEATO and CENTO, elements of US ‘containment’ of China for many years, reminders of times past when Australia was participant in plans for war with China.
With a background of vicious fighting on the Korean peninsula (some of it currently being reviewed by the Moon administration in Seoul) North Korean forces invaded the south in June 1950. The Korean War 1950-53 is another subject but the US Seventh Fleet was promptly sent to the Taiwan Strait to inhibit conflict between the PRC and ROC.
In the period of China’s revolutionary war, with Nationalist and Communist headquarters far apart and at war after the United Front of the 1920s broke down, the United States maintained a mission in Yan’an, to the Communists, as well as an embassy to the ROC in Chongqing. The “loss of China” saw the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, Senator McCarthy’s first target being those State Department officers whose careers had directed them into contact with the Communists, rather than those assigned to Chongqing, to the Nationalists. The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chongqing government built its American connections from which to sustain conservative support in the US, through associates from that time such as General Chennault, who like other military leaders on other wars since, told the Congress that they would not have lost China is civilian government had given the military enough means to win. Without understanding broader contexts.
In Taiwan, in 1947, the Nationalists had violently suppressed a popular uprising. Chiang and his son as successive presidents of the Republic of China from 1949 did not permit political opposition in Taiwan until the ending of martial law in 1991. Wikipedia provides background to that period. A recent Brookings Institution paper sets out dilemmas now faced by Taiwan, of which China is just one. And notes that
Civil society activism reflects a growing disenchantment in some quarters with the performance of representative institutions. Even though the Taiwan public generally favors democracy as a political system, it does not necessarily approve the policy performance of their own democratic system.
There is some of that evident in public opinion polls in Australia. We advocate for democracy everywhere while democracy in too many places is in difficulty, unpopular, a weak instrument for addressing fast moving issues. We should be careful with our evangelisms, aware of shortcomings in our institutions and beliefs.
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