It may seem premature to assess the benefits for Taiwan that the US presidential candidates may offer after gaining office. Yet there are hints of things to come from the Democrats based on the written word.
An article by Jeffrey Bader and Richard Bush of the Brookings Institution released this week suggests that if Democratic Senator Barack Obama were president, then Taiwanese who value democracy have reason to be even more nervous than they are now.
Taiwan has long been a crucible for American think tank staffers and academics, whose fantasies of an enlightened Chinese state and theories of cultivatible goodwill among China’s leaders continue to astonish us with their naivete.
Bader and Richard Bush’s article may be the first signal that Taiwanese democrats will have no choice but to support Republican Senator John McCain’s presidential candidacy before he has even made a move on China policy.
The authors are reportedly awaiting senior positions in an Obama administration, which lends weight to these fears. In Richard Bush’s case, the article is particularly disappointing: As a former American Institute in Taiwan chairman, he was well placed to understand that the situation in China is far more complex than the article’s banal allusions to the Chinese psyche might admit.
Their argument is that China deserves to be treated with kid gloves because this achieves results. What those results are and who the recipients might be is not presented in a comprehensive fashion, leaving the reader to assume that — in China, at any rate — economic growth conquers all and that China’s “poor” rights record is defensible in a historical context.
“China’s human rights record is poor, but its people are much freer than were their parents under Mao [Zedong, 毛澤東],” the authors argue, a fatuous argument similar to that of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger in a hagiography of Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in Time magazine several months ago.
China’s beneficiaries are probably those who remind the authors of themselves: the elite, the wealthy, the urban, the eloquent, the successful, the educated and the upwardly mobile. Most Chinese, however, are none of these and never will be; what property rights the peasantry gained after Mao’s demise have proven worthless in the face of predatory local governments, Beijing’s grandiose infrastructural projects and colossal environmental ruin.
The suggestion that Washington’s dealings with China “should be offered in the spirit of trying to help them help themselves, not in order to judge them as morally deficient” is even harder to sustain given that the Chinese government is morally deficient. Such a government — with its litany of abuses of the weakest members of its society and its morally vacuous conduct in the international sphere, most recently seen in protecting Zimbabwe from UN sanctions and even in its humiliation of the International Olympic Committee — cannot be trusted to “help itself” when it already considers itself beyond Washington’s reproach, or anyone’s reproach, for that matter.
Worst of all is the authors’ argument that China should not be “condemned” on anything it does, no matter how atrocious, provocative or illegal.
If this kind of rationalization of Chinese misrule, aggression and disingenuousness fairly reflects an Obama administration’s take on US-China relations, there will be no “change we can believe in” as far as Taiwanese are concerned. Instead, there will only be cause for despair as the pro-China network settles in for yet another term, comfortable in the knowledge that Obama will have neither the incentive nor the intellectual support to help Taiwan recover the ground that it is losing.
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