A final Republic of China/People's Republic of China Showdown? Part I.

Soviet made landing craft.  The People's Republic of China uses some of these.

That's what one of the panelist on This Week predicted last weekend, within five years.

I.e., he predicted that the People's Republic of China, that is "Red China", will launch an invasion of Taiwan, in about five years.

President Biden was flatly asked if we'd militarily defend Taiwan.  Biden said we would, which actually isn't the officially stated American policy.  Rather "strategic ambiguity" is.  Beijing isn't supposed to not know if we'd fight or not, and therefore its strategic options are always subject to doubt.

And frankly it also ties into our recognition of the PRC, which we had no choice but to do and in fact were rather late in doing, as the official government of China.  

And it has to do with how the Chinese Civil War ended . . . or didn't.

When Chiang Kai-Shek had to abandon mainland China in 1948, he of course had to maintain that the Red Chinese, whom he'd been fighting for decades, were usurpers, and he'd come back.  And he may actually have hoped to.  For that matter, he may have tried it, on some level, but for the fact that the US 7th Fleet blocked him from doing it, and the Red Chinese from getting at Taiwan.

But it also gave us a legacy in which the Chinese Nationalist continued to claim that they, and not the Chinese Communists, were the legitimate government, and they'd come back some day.  It wasn't until the early 1970s when we finally gave up on that.  Nationalist China accommodated itself to that over time, and over a very long time it opened up to democracy. That gave rise to competing political views and the current party in charge officially sanctions Taiwanese independence, but hasn't declared it.

It hasn't declared it as its so risky.  The Chinese Communists may have fought the Nationalist for years, but there were things that they agreed on, and a "one China" policy was one of them.  They're committed to reunifying the country.

Except that Taiwan should never have been part of China.

The Taiwanese, who are minority in their own land, are their own ethnicity.  Their island was annexed to the Qing Dynasty in China in 1683, which is a few years back, which held it until 1895, when the Japanese got it during the First Sino-Japanese War.  The Japanese held it until 1945, at which time China got it back.

A chance to grant it independence was therefore missed.

As it has happened, there are more Chinese in Taiwan that Taiwanese, and of course Red China wants it back.  And they've been demonstrating their military capacity to take it.

Which really doesn't encourage a reunification.

That's probably supposed to scare us, and the Chinese would have reason to believe that we scare easily.  The Taliban, after all, scared us out of Afghanistan and the NVA and VC scared us out of South Vietnam.  The Red Chinese no doubt are calculating whether we'd fight, but strategic ambiguity probably isn't something that has them quaking in their boots.

Frankly, right now, I don't know if I believe it.  I believe Biden probably would intervene in a Red Chinese invasion. Trump?  I doubt it.  

Of course a formal treaty with Taiwan would effectively accord it recognition as its own sovereign nation.  You don't enter into treaties with rebel provinces, after all

Which brings us back to an invasion.

Will the Red Chinese risk it?

And what all do those risks entail?

Monday October 25, 1971. The Recognition of the People's Republic of China, The Electric Company and The Rural Purge

On this day in 1971 the People's Republic of China replaced the Republic of China s the US recognized representative of the Chinese people.  A resolution to oust Taiwan, i.e., Nationalist China, failed, but the Taiwanese representative walked out in anticipation of the inevitable future results.  Taiwan also announced that it would not pay the over $30,000,000 it owed the UN, given this result.

Chiang Kai-Shek was still living at the time and officially the Republic of China sought reunification with the mainland with it as the Chinese government.  In reunification, they were aligned in principle with the People's Republic of China, but only on that point.  The PRC saw reunification under their banner, not the Nationalist one.  As a practical matter, the U.S. Navy had precluded that from occurring following the 1948 retreat of the Nationalist to Taiwan.

The US had been a major factor in the hold out in according the PRC recognition at the UN. While the US, tired of Chiang Kai-Shek following the Second World War, and despairing of his abilities to force a successful conclusion to the Chinese Civil War, had chosen to slowly decrease its involvement with the Nationalist Chinese efforts following the war, was nonetheless shocked by the sudden collapse of the Nationalist Army in 1948.  This had caused Congress, which hadn't been taking a huge interest in the Nationalist's plight, to suddenly focus on China with the "who lost China?" query becoming a tag line for conservatives.  Moreover, the Chinese Red Army's recovery from eons of civil war and World War Two was evident when it intervened in the Korean War (using some formations that had been Nationalist ones earlier).  A widespread assumption that the PRC danced to Moscow's tune ramped up the concern, although PRC government was plenty repressive and scary in its own right without, as it turned out, much influence from the Soviet Union.

Be that as it may, the relucatance of the US to recognize Red China as the Chinese government had reached the fairly absurd level by the mid 1960s. It was clear that the Nationalist were not capable of jumping the Straits of Taiwan and taking on the Chinese Red Army.  And as the most populous nation in the world, recognition of it was overdue.  This didn't, of course, accord it American recognition, but that would be on the near term horizon.

Taiwan since has developed into a parliamentary democracy and the current ruling party has an official policy of independence.  Taiwan functions as a putative state, although it still is not recognized as a sovereign by anyone anymore, and it has not declared independence, that being too risky given its massive aggressive neighbor that still claims Taiwan as its own.  It's now likely the longest running unrecognized state in the world, and its odd status is such that it functions as a country in everything but name.  Tensions with Red China, of course, have been very much in the news recently.

From the outstanding Uncle Mike's Musings, we also learned that this is the day when PBS's Electronic Company premiered.  As he states there:

October 25, 1971, 50 years ago: The Electric Company premieres on PBS. A companion piece to Sesame Street, it is geared toward kids a little older who were, by then, learning to read. As the closing tagline say, it is produced by the same production company: "The Electric Company gets its power from The Children's Television Workshop."

The show had a truly remarkable cast, which I had not realized until I read the entry.

The odd thing about this for me is to realize how little I participated in this sort of television from the era.  I was just a kid when this came out, but I don't recall ever watching it.  That might be because, like a lot of other television from the early 1970s, it seemed so very urban.  I suppose it was all part of the "Rural Purge" of television that took place in the early 1970s.