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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Short of our own sabre-rattling, how can this be sensibly responded to, though? One hopes that cooler heads will prevail here.
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Cooler heads?
China is relying on bullying and bluff to ensure it gets what it wants and I dare say all the smaller nations that owe it money to stay onside at any UN vote.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Sure, but I presume you don’t actually want WW3, right?
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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No, I don't, but I also don't think China should be allowed to just to take over Taiwan. So do we do nothing or push back and risk war?
I read recently someone compared China's behaviour at the moment to Germany just prior to WWII.
Their bullying of us with trade penalties is purpose designed to send a message to other nations, "don't mess with us" and it's all good to talk about cool heads but if there isn't anyone in China you can have a conversation with.......
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Pi
Joined: 13 Feb 2006
Location: SA
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^
Whenever you two post consecutively I get a subliminal message of 'Free Beer"
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Pi = Infinite = Collingwood = Always
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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^
Thanks for the suggestion. 
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| David wrote: |
Short of our own sabre-rattling, how can this be sensibly responded to, though? One hopes that cooler heads will prevail here. |
There are only two ways to deal with this, David.
(1) Show your military strength and show that you are willing to use it if they step over the line in the sand. In this case. we make sure that they understand that if they attack Taiwan, they will be at war with Japan, the USA, Australia, India, and any other prepared to help.
(l) Let them have Taiwan. And Vietnam. And half of India. Then go to war, when you are much weaker and have already lost millions and millions of citizens and vast areas of land to the aggressor.
Appeasement was tried with the Nazis. You know how that worked out. Appeasing China is equally stupid. More stupid actually, as we have the Hitler example right there in front of us.
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Pi
Joined: 13 Feb 2006
Location: SA
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Tannin wrote: | | David wrote: |
Short of our own sabre-rattling, how can this be sensibly responded to, though? One hopes that cooler heads will prevail here. |
There are only two ways to deal with this, David.
(1) Show your military strength and show that you are willing to use it if they step over the line in the sand. In this case. we make sure that they understand that if they attack Taiwan, they will be at war with Japan, the USA, Australia, India, and any other prepared to help.
(l) Let them have Taiwan. And Vietnam. And half of India. Then go to war, when you are much weaker and have already lost millions and millions of citizens and vast areas of land to the aggressor.
Appeasement was tried with the Nazis. You know how that worked out. Appeasing China is equally stupid. More stupid actually, as we have the Hitler example right there in front of us. |
Well, I can quite agree that the first seems a better option than the second, particularly if it has a deterring effect*. But seeing as how both could potentially lead to the extinction of human life on this planet (and at best millions of deaths), perhaps it would be good to keep some other options on the table?
At any rate, any declaration of independence by Taiwan at this stage would be a fairly cosmetic change considering that they are functionally independent, and I don’t think most Taiwanese citizens would see provoking China as being in their interests. Even if we are inclined to support official Taiwanese independence and full membership of the international community as a matter of principle – and I certainly do – the phrase "picking one’s battles" comes to mind.
*I also don’t think we should necessarily presume that Chinese ambitions regarding Taiwan indicate a more general expansionist policy. China views Taiwan as part of its territory; it has no such claims over India or Vietnam. This is also why talk of Putin marching through Eastern Europe was always fanciful; the Russian perception of the ex-Soviet Republics, particularly Ukraine, is fundamentally different from how, say, Hitler or Napoleon viewed continental Europe. This doesn’t make any threat to Taiwan acceptable, but it does indicate that its invasion would be very unlikely to be the first in some kind of domino sequence, and that it would probably not pose an existential threat to Australia in the way that, say, Hitler’s invasion of Poland posed an existential threat to the rest of Europe. Such factors must be weighed carefully if – god help us – Chinese aggression directed at Taiwan does ever start to boil over, because a bad decision on our part could be nothing short of catastrophic.
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Ratcheting up dangerous military talk isn't the only 'tough' option. But because there is no proper coordination mechanism in place yet, such as a TPP-style agreement with agreed block-wide repercussions, all you will get for now is chest beating.
You cry to think at the years wasted by that moron who scuppered the TPP. The same moron who denied and dithered with the pandemic. The same moron who denied and dithered with climate change. The same moron who....
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| David wrote: | | *I also don’t think we should necessarily presume that Chinese ambitions regarding Taiwan indicate a more general expansionist policy. China views Taiwan as part of its territory; it has no such claims over India or Vietnam. |
Oh dear. Someone hasn't been paying attention.
Ever heard of those shallow drifts of shifting sand in the water many, many miles away from China and very close to Vietnam and the Philippines? At low tide, some of those shallow spots poke up through the waves.
China has spent the last ten years building artificial islands there, and has loaded them up with air strips and military hardware of all kinds. These are international waters, and China's illegal military bases are (and were always intended to be) direct and highly visible threats to these smaller countries.
Yes, and Hitler only wanted to reestablish the traditional German rule over Hong Kong ... sorry ... I mean the Rhineland. Oh, and the rightfully German territory of Taiwan of course. (Sorry, I meant to say Austria.) We won't count Hitler's border dispute and war with India ... um ... Czechoslovakia. After all, he will probably stop when he has occupied the Ganges Plain ... er .. I mean the Sudetenland, which is all he is asking for. As we know, that "final" concession by the many smaller nations close by to Germany brought peace in our time. Oh, apart from the invasion of the rest of India, of course. Err ... did I say "India went under the jackboots"? Slip of the tongue, I meant Czechoslovakia. And six months later, there is the historically important and rightfully Chinese territory of Vietnam, which was part of China a thousand years ago. Woops, that would be Poland.
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Maritime boundaries are by their nature ambiguous and liable to be interpreted opportunistically by stronger countries. Take our own famous screwing over of Timor-Leste two decades ago (thankfully since rectified, though it took us much longer to come to the table than it should have) as a case in point:
https://theconversation.com/after-a-border-dispute-and-spying-scandal-can-australia-and-timor-leste-be-good-neighbours-121553
This is not to say that China’s actions in the South China Sea aren’t alarming or shouldn’t be resisted. I also can’t say with 100% confidence that the scenario you lay out – i.e. China having a similar expansionist agenda to Nazi Germany – is wrong. But I also think it’s extraordinarily simplistic to assert that all totalitarian states that consider invading disputed territory will subsequently do the same to the rest of the region until they are stopped. There are several good reasons to think that this wouldn’t be the case here; firstly, as I’ve argued several times before in this very thread, global economic co-dependence means that the world is a very different place from how it was eighty years ago, and aggressive imperialism is much more likely to manifest in things like trade war, funding proxy conflicts (the preferred Russian and American method) and infiltration of foreign government than old-fashioned land battles.
All of this is not to say that the Chinese conquest of Taiwan, if it came to that, would not be an outrage or that China should be permitted to do so with impunity. Every effort available should be put in place from the international community to prevent it. But if that fails and the worst comes to pass, the situation will have to be dealt with rationally and carefully. It is a strange set of principles that sees the continuation of Taiwanese sovereignty as a matter of absolute moral principle worth staking everything on but not the question of whether millions of people in the region and beyond live or die.
Nobody is pretending that this scenario is an easy problem, least of all me – I’m honestly not remotely sure what the right answer is in this (thankfully unlikely) nightmare scenario. But I do know that war must be avoided in all cases unless absolutely necessary, and the notion that "appeasement" (or things that can be characterised as such) is always the wrong path because it backfired in 1938 suggests that all nation states, international dynamics, national ambitions, conflicts and historical outcomes can be mapped onto one another – and I’m pretty sure you don’t actually believe that. China is not Germany, Taiwan is not Austria and India is not Czechoslovakia.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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Maritime boundaries are not, repeat not, adjusted by building artificial islands and basing warplanes on them. Not now, not ever.
There is nothing remotely "ambiguous" about it: it is military aggression, plain and simple.
| David wrote: | | China is not Germany, Taiwan is not Austria and India is not Czechoslovakia. |
Nope. But exactly like Germany in 1938, China is an ambitious power, militarising rapidly, picking fights with everybody that doesn't knuckle under, and very keen to expand. It would be foolish in the extreme to repeat the same mistakes we made in 1938.
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Mutual annihilation changes the game dramatically from the world wars. There's no small-scale military intervention against China that would work, and no larger-scale intervention that doesn't risk WW3 and mutual annihilation.
Look what peasant nation North Korea can achieve with its rust bucket rockets. If North Korea can work a stalemate with rockets pointed at Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo, it's pretty obvious what China can achieve. Macho talk over North Korea has always been just that, and this will be little different.
There's plainly only one solution here, and it involves a large trading block incentivising China to maintain its growth through reform. (That's not to say military deterrence and defence isn't important, just that it has no hope in hell of ultimately solving this problem).
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Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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