What nonsense western leaders and commentators are spreading about Taiwan.
If the western world is really willing to defend Taiwan against the arrogant aggression of mainland China, why not invite the last free piece of China to join NATO?
After all, NATO now operates all over the world, bombing Libya and sending troops to Afghanistan. It cannot say that China is outside its territory.
And Taiwan maintains very serious military forces, which would be an asset to the alliance.
If the western world is really willing to defend Taiwan against the arrogant aggression of mainland China, why not invite the last free piece of China to join NATO? After all, NATO now operates all over the world, bombing Libya and sending troops to Afghanistan. It cannot say that China is outside its territory. And Taiwan maintains very serious military forces that are an asset to the alliance (Pictured: Taiwanese fighter jets)
But such an invitation will not be offered because our defense of Taiwan is brutal, made a lot of noise to hide utter weakness.
Such a promise could face a real test of China, a real superpower, instead of a half-decrepit Russia. So we make no commitment.
The truth about Taiwan is that the West left it long ago, and is quietly hoping that the Taiwanese will make peace with Beijing (I refuse to call IT by its new name), as the people of Hong Kong eventually sank under the Chinese dictatorship, while we have done nothing to enforce the treaty we signed with the Beijing superpower.
This was not our first shameful retreat. At the end of 2008, Gordon Brown sought help from Beijing to contain the banking crisis. China saw our bankruptcy as its chance.
For decades it hated Britain’s long-standing and correct view that Tibet’s position was special and different from the rest of China.
This infuriated the Chinese leaders, who like to pretend that Tibet was always part of their empire.
We don’t know exactly what happened, but a few weeks after the IMF’s approach, then Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced on the Foreign Office website that Britain is finally – after 60 years of refusing to do this – had recognized Tibet as ‘part of the People’s Republic of China’.
Discovering this in 2010, I wrote, “This is a total and outright diplomatic defeat, and a warning that worse will come as we learn to work toward the new superpower.”
We have had two Chinese presidential visits to Britain since 2005, with our police working hard to ensure that the visiting tyrants are spared the sight of protesters against their rule.
Tibetan freedom activists have been dealt with particularly harshly. Can we really pretend to be staunch defenders of Taiwan if we (yes, that includes the mighty US, although the UK record is no better) are too afraid of China to recognize Taiwan as a country or have an embassy in the capital Taipei to keep?
It really is time we in the West began to understand that China’s danger is already far greater than any other country, and comes from China’s wealth and influence, as well as from its unquestionable military might. (File photo)
Or when we had Taiwan expelled from the United Nations on the orders of the Communist Chinese? Of course we can’t, and the Chinese dictatorship knows that. How they laugh at our attitude.
It really is time we in the West began to understand that China’s danger is already far greater than any other country, and comes from China’s wealth and influence, as well as from its unquestionable military might.
Cambridge University recently developed a surprising connection with China. It’s kind of bounced back from that, but many other British universities have lucrative and sycophantic ‘partnerships’ with China.
The problem is worse in free countries closer to the People’s Republic. Last year, Radio New Zealand reported academics’ suspicions that the Chinese Communist Party was infiltrating universities there.
Also in New Zealand, a leading China expert, Anne-Marie Brady, suffered mysterious break-ins and other harassment after publishing material that was distasteful to the Chinese state.
New Zealand’s political and academic establishment has done little, to put it politely, to support it.
If this can happen in an established Western parliamentary democracy, who is safe from that? At the height of its power, Stalin’s Soviet Union never managed to gain such influence in Western countries.
People sometimes ask me why I refuse to call the Chinese capital by its new name and call it ‘Beijing’.
It’s very easy. I do it because I know it irritates the Chinese Communist Party. And I consider it a personal duty to show my contempt for that awful organization.
I spent long periods in China in the early part of this century, reporting for The Mail on Sunday, helped greatly by the brilliant photographer Richard Jones, who at the time was living in Hong Kong and incessantly going in and out of the People’s Republic.
Together we investigated official cruelty, brutality and vandalism. We spoke to a woman whose house had been demolished because she refused to have an abortion (a woman’s right to choose, anyone?).
We saw terrible pollution. We were among the first Westerners to report fully on the oppression of the Uyghurs in far western China, now known but little noticed then, in December 2009.
Richard’s gorgeous photos revealed too much of the truth. At the end of our travels, especially as we slipped back into what was then the safe haven of Hong Kong, we breathed a sigh of relief and wondered why the world wasn’t paying more attention.
After my first visit to modern Shanghai, a gigantic monument to the new mixture of tyranny and prosperity, I told Richard that I found China exciting, amazing and terrifying. It seemed that a terrifying new power was emerging, writes Peter Hitchens
After my first visit to modern Shanghai, a gigantic monument to the new mixture of tyranny and prosperity, I told Richard that I found China exciting, amazing and terrifying.
It seemed that a terrifying new power was emerging. It was huge and had boundless potential, both as an economic force and as a military titan.
And it had shattered the fantasy that gripped the Western world at the end of the Cold War.
This fantasy was that despotism, like that of the old Soviet Union, made people both poor and unfree. So the idea spread that as people become more prosperous, they will want and get political freedom.
China has proven forever that tyranny can make people prosperous, and that they don’t automatically seek political freedom just because they are better off.
In contrast, the old Soviet Union has always been severely constrained by its failure to make its people prosperous.
Anyone who visited it with open eyes could see the grim conditions of its people. And for the same reason, Moscow had little power to buy friends and allies in free nations, relying instead on communist fanatics or pathetic loners for sale for a few hundred pounds.
What we are dealing with now is very different and much more dangerous. The leaders of the USSR so suspected that they were wrong that they eventually gave up power.
China’s power elite are confident they are right, and they are also fiercely patriotic. It’s not secretly jealous of us.
On the contrary, it despises our weakness. If we want to resist it, we need better, more subtle weapons than bombast.