Asia's Cauldron (23 page)

“The coast guard runs the island,” the local commander told me, and is ready to expel Chinese and Vietnamese fishing boats from coastal waters. (The same holds for Itu Aba, the largest of the Spratlys, which Taiwan also occupies with 140 coast guard personnel.
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“But we have quite a few legislators in Taipei who want to deploy the marines and the navy here, to show that Taiwan means business.”

Indeed, it was because of the seriousness of Taiwan's claim to the Pratas—and consequently Taiwan's desire to communicate that fact to the outside world—that I was finally permitted on the island. It had taken two attempts and many emails between ministries in Taipei to get me here. In other words, while journalists flatter themselves that they bear witness to history, that is mainly true in the case of land wars, which the media can more easily get to. In the case of the South China Sea, should incidents or hostilities commence in deep water or on tiny spits of land in the midst of it, the media may be dependent on reports from ministries in the respective capitals as to what happened.

It also occurred to me that precisely because there was nothing here, these so-called features were really just that—microscopic bits of earth with little history behind them and basically no civilians living on them. Thus, they were free to become the ultimate patriotic symbols, more potent because of their very emptiness and henceforth their inherent abstraction: in effect, they had become logos of nationhood in a global media age. The primordial quest for status still determined the international system. Take the Spratlys, which were not ultimately strategic from the point of view of the Chinese, who were thus able to let the controversy over them fester. Meanwhile, a naked rock like Scarborough Shoal, for example, acquires totemic significance in the eyes of Filipinos. In May 2012, they staged demonstrations the world over in support of their claim to it, as vessels from the Philippines and China engaged in a tense standoff alongside the feature. The Pratas represented nothing in and of themselves, outside of Taiwan's occupation of them. The same for Itu Aba and Sand Cay in the Spratlys. Thus, did the Taiwanese beat their chests.

And so we come to Taiwan, that stubborn, inconvenient fact disturbing the peace of Asia. Unlike North Korea, Taiwan's vibrant democracy and civil society are completely in sync with the values of the
twenty-first century. Nobody expects Taiwan to collapse or go away like they do North Korea. Yet mainland China is adamant about incorporating Taiwan into the Chinese state, however long that may take. Thus we have the Western Pacific's most elemental conflict.

Taiwan is the cork in the bottle of the South China Sea, controlling access between Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, the two security and conflict systems of the Pacific Rim.
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But Northeast Asia is dependent upon the South China Sea because most of the former's energy comes from the latter's sea lines of communication. Former U.S. assistant secretary of state of East Asia and longtime Asia hand Paul Wolfowitz once told me that Taiwan is “Asia's Berlin.” Like the Cold War-era city, Taiwan represents both an outpost of freedom in comparison to mainland China, as well as the bellwether for the political and military situation throughout the Western Pacific. Were Taiwan's de facto independence ever to be seriously compromised by China, American allies from Japan to Australia—including all the countries around the South China Sea—would quietly reassess their security postures, and might well accommodate themselves to Chinese ascendancy. More hinges on Taiwan than the fate of the island itself and its 23 million inhabitants.

And Taiwan, like Cold War-era West Berlin, is undoubtedly feisty. The occupation of the Pratas and Itu Aba proved it.

Yet in the capital of Taipei, as in Singapore, I have a bout of cognitive dissonance. I stare at an antiseptic, angular cityscape—skyscrapers rising like bamboo shoots—from where I take a gleaming high-speed rail train to the south of the island, the engine's very power pressing at my back. Smart shops and liquid crystal screens flashing Chinese characters are everywhere, once again, consumerism and efficiency raised to the status of a foundational creed. Intellectually speaking, I know it has often been such wealth that fuels a weapons boom in the first place. But my instinct tells me that I am wrong: people this prosperous just don't go to war. They have too much to lose.

Nevertheless, the two realities I have encountered almost everywhere
in the region are shopping malls and submarines. The malls are packed with shoppers from Taipei to Kuala Lumpur, even though, as one analyst in Singapore had told me,
submarines are the new bling
as far as the area's defense ministries are concerned.

Complimentary coffee and cakes are served; such service is unknown on American trains. As soon as I finish, a hand removes the cup and wrapper. Asia's efficiency has often struck Westerners as extreme. Imagine such efficiency applied to war, I thought. Large-scale war here would be horrific because it would be an outgrowth of Confucian Asia's very dynamism as a whole.

I am headed south to see a Taiwanese historical landmark. The background is the following:

For hundreds of years, Taiwan was better known as Formosa, short for “Ilha Formosa,” which means “Beautiful Island” in Portuguese. In the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Portuguese navigators made numerous forays in the Indo-Pacific. Among the most notable was the voyage of the merchant Tomé Pires, dispatched by the viceroy of Malacca to open trade with China. On one of these expeditions, perhaps one led by Fernão Mendes Pinto, the Portuguese traveled along the island's lush western coast. The name “Taiwan” itself, spelled in various ways, is said to mean “foreigners” in the local aboriginal tongue, and Dutch colonists in the third decade of the seventeenth century picked it up as a constantly repeated word in the natives' conversation. Seventy percent of modern Taiwanese have aboriginal blood, which is ethnic Malay in origin. Taiwan, in addition to being an offshore extension of China and the southernmost extension of Japan's Ryuku Island chain, also represents the northernmost extension of Southeast Asia, hence the link to Malaysia.
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In geographical terms, to say nothing of political ones, Taiwan is the linchpin and organizing principle of the Western Pacific. Taiwan was central to the security of late-nineteenth-century French Indochina, even as its de facto independence is key to the integrity of the Taiwan Strait that guarantees Japan's trade routes, and even as its repossession by Beijing is necessary to end the century of humiliation that the mainland suffered at the hands of foreign powers. Taiwan impinges on every sub-theater in Asia.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages, mainland China's contacts with Taiwan were intermittent, with expeditions made during the Wu, Sui, and Tang dynasties. With the geographical drama of Chinese history playing out on land—in which the agricultural cradle of Chinese civilization was constantly in a struggle to subdue and manage the pastoral tablelands to the north, west, and southwest—national energies were in a comparative sense turned away from the sea. However, this did not prevent seaborne activity in the form of pirates and fishermen from plying the Taiwan Strait, or prevent the development of a blue-water fleet in the ninth century. The early Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He is best known for his voyages in the Indian Ocean, but some of Zheng He's ships may have visited Taiwan. A warlord-pirate, Cheng Chih-lung, whom the Ming emperor had dispatched to contain the Dutch in the Taiwan Strait region (so that the imperial armies could concentrate on fighting the Manchu invaders from the northern plains), settled many thousands of settlers from famine-stricken Fujian province in Taiwan. Thus began the mainland's organic connection with the island.

But it is Cheng's son, Cheng-kung, or Koxinga, who really is at the heart of the historical interaction between the mainland and Taiwan. Koxinga, educated in the Chinese classics and a patron of high culture, was a warlord general and admiral extraordinaire, able to fend off the political pressures of both the dying Ming and rising Manchu-Qing dynasties. He came to Taiwan from Fujian on the mainland with four hundred ships and 25,000 troops. It is Koxinga who, in 1662, after a successful siege of the Dutch fort of Zeelandia on Taiwan's southwestern coast, allowed the Dutch to leave for Batavia (Jakarta) in Indonesia with all their possessions, “with drums beating, their banners flying, their guns loaded, and the fuses lit.” Such was his wisdom and generosity. Koxinga, who died young at thirty-nine, before he might have become corrupted by absolute power, is “deified” both on the mainland and on Taiwan as the “ideal Chinese prince,” proof that a warlord could be more enlightened and better educated than a formal head of state. On the mainland, he is revered as a nationalist hero who expelled the Western colonialists and forged forevermore the mainland's claim to Taiwan, governing as he did on
both sides of the strait. On Taiwan itself, Koxinga is seen as the “original ancestor,” who forged an independent identity for the island. There are sixty temples dedicated to his worship. In light of the island's evolution as a democracy, and the half century of Japanese occupation from 1895 to 1945, the fact that Koxinga epitomizes progress and had a Japanese mother constitutes further proof here that he spiritually belongs to a free Taiwan.
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Koxinga was succeeded by his son, Cheng Ching, who ruled in the enlightened manner of his father, leading Taiwan to many prosperous years in commerce and agriculture. However, it all proved shortlived, as a succession battle was set off upon Cheng's death, and Taiwan became a backwater of the Qing Empire for the next two hundred years. “Taiwan is nothing but an isolated island on the sea far away from China, it has long since been a hideout of pirates, escaped convicts, deserters and ruffians, therefore, there is nothing to gain from retaining it,” said one report to the Qing emperor. But the emperor chose otherwise, annexing Taiwan to keep it from falling back into the hands of the Dutch. As historian Jonathan Manthorpe writes, Taiwan was brought into the empire in 1684 but treated as a place “of no consequence.”
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The Qing dynasty expanded and contracted, beginning a drawn-out decline in the mid-nineteenth century, much like Ottoman Turkey during the same period. In 1895, a dynamic Japan, internally powered by the Meiji Restoration, grabbed Taiwan, seeing it as a stepping-stone to Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, as well as key to the control of the Yellow and East China seas. Though the Japanese occupied Taiwan for fifty years, they were not subsequently hated on the island like they were elsewhere in East Asia, which fell under Japanese fascist rule in the 1930s and 1940s, for the regimentation and demonstrations of racial superiority were coupled with clean government and the development of institutions that fostered Taiwanese modern identity, as well as making the Taiwanese the most highly educated people in Asia. Compared with the decrepitude of the late Qing dynasty and the plunder and thuggery of Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang at least in its early years, the experience with the
Japanese was more than tolerable. The Japanese brought medicine, agriculture, roads, and railways: order and modernity, in other words.

Taiwan was the only place in Asia where the defeat of the Japanese fascists did not in the short run necessarily lead to better government. So repressive was Chiang Kai-shek's rule at first that the Americans might have deserted him had it not been for the Korean and Vietnam wars, a time when Washington was afraid of Taiwan falling into communist hands; Taiwan also proved to be a geographically convenient staging base for bombing North Vietnam as well as a rest and recreation center for U.S. troops. The result, starting in the 1950s, was massive U.S. economic aid, which, coupled with a successful land reform program, resulted in a light industrial revolution as farmers now had the money to invest in small factories. The high level of education that had been the fruit of Japanese occupation, combined with American money and a regime that while not democratic, was not communist or totalitarian either, was the vital mix that would eventually make for one of the Third World's most successful democracies beginning in the 1990s. Together with rapid development came Taiwanization: a distinctive flowering of island culture in the arts, media, and universities that featured the rise of a local dialect, Minnan, and the fading of Mandarin, which the Guomindang had brought from the mainland.

Taiwan's 1996 presidential election proved a coming-out party not only for democracy here, but for the naked assertion of American military power. In the run-up to that election, mainland China's regime resorted to missile tests and a mock invasion in the area of the Taiwan Strait as a way to show force—the Taiwanese, in the midst of the hurly-burly of a presidential campaign, should not get any ideas about declaring independence! President Bill Clinton responded by sending not one, but two aircraft carrier strike groups, the
Independence
and the
Nimitz
, into nearby waters. Suddenly Beijing looked impotent, and saw that a massive defense buildup on its part would be necessary if American air and naval hegemony were ever to be checked in the Western Pacific. So began China's rapid acquisition of submarines, fighter jets, and antiaircraft and antiship cruise missiles,
as well as electronic listening posts—thus would China impede the American Navy's access to coastal Asia without aircraft carriers of its own. America's response has been undeniable. Whereas in the past, 60 percent of its naval forces had been oriented toward the Atlantic, by 2005, 60 percent were oriented toward the Pacific.
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The confrontation will continue to have a long life span. For China simply will not budge. Leaders in Beijing know that Japan colonized Taiwan at the same time that Great Britain took Hong Kong, that Portugal took Macau, and other Western powers and Russia took Treaty Ports and other Chinese land. Later on, at the conclusion of the Chinese civil war, Chiang Kai-shek set up the Republic of China on Taiwan as a rival government for all of the Middle Kingdom, and was recognized as such by the United States and many other countries until Nixon and Kissinger's diplomacy in 1972. In Beijing's eyes, therefore, the return of Taiwan is essential in order to erase this entire humiliating history.
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