July 20, 2005
CONQUER TAIWAN? THEY CAN'T EVEN HOLD CHINA:
Protesters in China get angrier and bolder (Howard W. French, JULY 20, 2005, The New York Times )
After three nights of increasingly heavy rioting, the police were taking no chances, deploying dozens of busloads of officers and blocking every road leading to the factory.
The police began deploying in large numbers before dusk Monday, but the angry villagers had already made their moves. They had learned their lessons after studying reports of riots that had swept rural China in recent months. Sneaking over mountain paths and wading through rice paddies, they made their way to a pharmaceuticals plant, they said, for a showdown over the environmental threat they say it poses.
As many as 15,000 people massed here on Sunday night and fought with the authorities, overturning police cars and throwing stones, undeterred by thick clouds of tear gas. [...]
The riots in Xinchang are part of a rising tide of discontent in China, with the number of mass protests like these reaching 74,000 last year from about 10,000 a decade earlier, according to government figures. The details have varied from incident to incident, but the recent wave of protests shares a foundation of accumulated anger over the failure of China's political system to respond to legitimate grievances and defiance of the local authorities, who are often seen as corrupt.
Nothing would more certainly topple an already unpopular tyranny than losing a war with Taiwan though. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2005 9:21 AM
In Sidney Rittenberg's first-person account of the Maoist revolution, The Man Who Stayed Behind, he noted that the revolt against Chiang Kai-shek's government was fueled by a desire to get rid of corruption.
Does this sound familiar? History is repeating itself.
Posted by: Scott Ferguson at July 20, 2005 9:54 AMGaltieri and co. thought that taking the Malvinas would be easy distraction from their problems at home, too.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at July 20, 2005 10:17 AMThey didn't count on Thatcher and the duplicitous behavior of the US.
Posted by: bart at July 20, 2005 10:20 AMExcept that China could inflict some heavy damage on Taiwan and would not hesitate, once in a war, to use any option. Don't underestimate the power of imagined-and-real grievances to unite the Chinese population around "keeping" Taiwan. How does China "lose" a war over Taiwan? Unless the United States is involved, they can win it. What if a best case scenario outcome of a war involving the US is scorched earth -- some of it in America? Don't forget there is a treasonous "sliver" of the Taiwan population, maybe as high as 15 or 20 percent, that would be allied with and assisting China. It's hard to see things going smoothly. If China crumbles into civil unrest, of course factions on both sides of the Strait will try to drag Taiwan into it. But how does Taiwan get out of it? I've been trying to talk people on Taiwan into a volunteer army and improving their military forces for years. Follow the US model, prepare for war, for war is coming. Plan to win it. Plan to out fly, out sail, and outshoot, and out-strategize. Pretend the US doesn't come. It might not.
Posted by: FZ at July 20, 2005 11:44 AMChina invading Taiwan will be a "teaching the pig to sing" measure, when the nomenklatura believe that their fall is otherwise inevitable and soon. The period of danger won't be while the central government is still in charge, but just before it collapses.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at July 20, 2005 11:44 AMFZ;
They can't cross the straits and we'd enter the war immediately.
Posted by: oj at July 20, 2005 11:52 AMAgree with AOG.
Scott, as I recall, that was also the reason for Chiang Kai-Shek's rise to power, taking the fight to the warlords.
Posted by: Genecis at July 20, 2005 2:04 PMAs China approaches this 'inevitable' struggle for (re-)conquest, the problems in the Muslim provinces and in the outlying cities are likely to become much more intense. AOG is right.
Posted by: jim hamlen at July 20, 2005 3:31 PMSidney Rittenberg was only half-right. Chiang Kai-shek didn't lose his civil war with the Communists only because his government was corrupt. He lost because his armies lost.
If Chiang had not moved his best American-trained troops into Manchuria to seize its cities with their industrial potential, they wouldn't have been surrounded and then destroyed by Mao's guerrilla armies as Hitler's Wehrmacht at Stalingrad had been by Stalin. If Chiang hadn't decided to launch a massive offensive against Mao's Yanan guerrilla base, he won't have exhausted his supplies and his armies.
In China, if your government is corrupt but your armies win, you'll probably be able to hold on to power. As with most people, Chinese love winners and hate losers. But if you're corrupt and your armies lose on the battlefield too, then all bets are off.
Guess which situation the Chinese Communists would be in if they launch attack on Taiwan and lose?
Posted by: X at July 21, 2005 7:58 AM