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Dec. 23, 2021 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
25:45
HUMAN EVENTS DAILY EXCLUSIVE: THE TRUTH ABOUT TAIWAN

A riveting crash course on the tumultuous, near century long, history between Taiwan and China told by Human Events Daily host and CCP expert Jack Posobiec.Here is your daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiecSupport the Show.

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This is Jack Posobiec and you are listening to Human Events Daily.
Now one thing that I wanted to do as we're in this sort of Christmas break period was to record a couple of episodes of Human Events Daily where we're doing some conversations, we're doing some evergreen pieces, we're doing some stuff that just you really can listen to it at any time.
And one thing that a lot of people, even the producers here, were saying is Jack, one thing, you are always talking about this, we're always hearing about it, China and Taiwan, China and Taiwan.
Can you give us a quick and dirty deep dive on China and Taiwan?
Why is it the way that it is?
How did it get to the way that it is?
And why are we seeing potentially that China, which is controlled by the CCP, Wants to invade and take over Taiwan.
And I said, really, guys?
You don't know this?
Because sometimes I forget.
To me, I've been studying this problem set in East Asia for 15 years.
I've been traveling there.
I lived in Shanghai for about two years, traveled all throughout the region.
I've been to Taiwan multiple times.
I've actually sailed through the Taiwan Strait while aboard a Navy vessel in 2016.
So, yeah, this is something that to me is just kind of old hat, but I said, you know what, okay, yeah, we'll do a quick, you know, a quick explainer on the conflict between China and Taiwan, and how did it get to that way, and why exactly is it being That we consider it a conflict, you know, what do they consider?
What are the arguments variously?
So, you know, let's really talk about it.
So obviously, I think people realize right off the bat, the People's Republic of China is massively, massively bigger than Taiwan.
It's the scale is almost completely incomparable.
This is one tiny island off of the coast of the most populous country in the entire world.
So the population of China, 1.4 billion.
The population of Taiwan, 23 million.
So basically, you know, a couple of major U.S. cities, that's the population of Taiwan, or at least the, you know, the metro area of those cities.
Capital of Beijing is, capital of China is Beijing.
The capital of Taiwan is Taipei.
The largest city in China is, of course, Shanghai with 26 million people.
And the capital, or the largest city in Taiwan is New Taipei City.
So think about this, by the way.
Think about this.
The population of the largest city in mainland China, Shanghai, is larger than the entire population of Taiwan.
This is absolutely stunning in terms of comparison, right?
So when you're looking at this in terms of a military matchup, It's not actually going to be that much of a challenge, right?
In terms of the biggest issue is, of course, the strait itself, that Taiwan Strait, that strip of water that separates them, and the ability for the CCP and their military, the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, to be able to get across and to get their landers across.
Of course, Taiwan, we talked about this.
In a previous episode that you guys can go listen to, where it's the entire military briefing on what an invasion scenario would look like when we covered air, land, sea, and cyber.
And of course, for the sea situation, you're going to see submarines, you're going to see mines all throughout there, and then most likely you're going to see a blockade by the People's Liberation Army Navy, so the Chinese Navy.
But how did things get to the way they are now?
Taiwan originally was part of China.
If you go back to dynastic China, imperial China, Taiwan was just another province of imperial China.
But then imperial China was overthrown in 1911, and Sun Yat-sen and a number of other individuals were highly...
Instrumental in the overthrow of Imperial China.
That was the Qing Dynasty.
So the Qing Dynasty is overthrown.
They were the last dynasty, and then a new government is formed, and that's called the Republic of China.
So the Republic of China takes over all of China at that point.
They are able to essentially be in power all the way up until World War II, the Japanese invasion, and then following the Japanese invasion in 1949, you get the communist overthrow, right?
So I'm being very, very quick about this because again, wave tops, people.
We're just doing wave tops.
Taiwan, however, is the part where we see the switch.
So, During that time period, 1911 up until the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, there's essentially two Chinas, because you have the Republic of China, and that's led by who?
Chiang Kai-shek, and his group is called the Nationalists, also known as the Guomindang, or you'll see this stylized as KMT. Then, at the same time, you have the communists.
Who led the communists?
I think everybody knows this one, Mao Zedong.
And they really got their start in the 1920s, so not too long after the takeover and the establishment of the Republic of China.
Remember, at this point, the Republic of China is still in its infancy.
It's just getting started.
China has never seen a democratic government before.
They've never seen a kind of government.
I mean, they were literally imperialist until like five minutes before this.
So they never had seen a system of government, a republic that had that kind of stability before.
And of course, Chairman Mao looked to exploit this.
The USSR, the Soviets were looking to exploit this.
So keep in mind, the Soviet Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution took place just in the same exact time period.
So that revolutionary fervor that was spread throughout the East, really throughout Russia, throughout China.
So you have the China Revolution first, right?
They're called the February Revolution or the October Revolution.
Then you have this another revolution against Imperial Russia just a few years later, at least the one that was successful.
There were even some earlier in Russia that were unsuccessful, and then the murder of the Tsar in 1855.
So you have a lot of this revolutionary anti-Imperialist fervor that's going on throughout all of Europe, and then it extends into Asia in the early 1900s.
And so with this overthrow, the communists come in and they say, we want China to go communist.
We don't want the establishment of a democratic constitutional republic in China.
So the USSR comes in and starts funding Mao.
And the Soviet agents start funding Mao and working with the early precursors of the CCP. This is the origin story of the CCP. In the meanwhile, the nationalists are trying to set up their own government.
Now, when I said they've never been democratic, the early nationalist government was not democratic.
Chiang Kai-shek was essentially a military leader, and he was a military leader for that fledgling republic.
So you don't see the kind of, you know, you don't see a democracy like the United States, a republic like the United States originally founded there.
But then Japan invades.
And then Japan invades again.
And they're taking more land.
And they're taking more land.
And then all of World War II eventually breaks out.
So during this point, Chiang Kai-shek and his forces, they are stuck fighting Japan and trying to kick Japan out of where?
Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong.
These are the main areas, the main population centers, the main economic centers.
Meanwhile, the nationalists up to this point had been fighting a civil war with the CCP, with the communists.
So what did the communists do?
In the first iteration of the Chinese Civil War, which took place in the 1920s, the Nationalists won, they kicked the Communists out, and Chairman Mao conducted what's called the Long March.
And the Long March was the PLA, the People's Liberation Army precursor.
It was known at that point, of course, as the Red Army.
So the Red Army is sent all the way out to the provinces.
They're sent out to the western reaches, the rural areas, rural China.
And while they're out there in Yunnan province, Mao is at its redoubt and he says, look, this is where I'm going to reconstitute.
This is where I'm going to rebuild my armies.
This is where we're going to bring the fight back to the nationalists because he didn't want to give up.
He didn't want to quit.
And remember, of course, he's still getting his support from the Soviets at this time.
They did actually have some arguments about whether or not they should be hiring peasants because the Soviets wanted more of a vanguard, but that's a much longer story.
So at this time, though, Mao seized the Japanese invasion and seized the nationalists are now fighting the Japanese Imperial Army.
And he says to himself, this is perfect.
The enemy of my enemy, right?
So the Japanese are fighting the nationalists.
Mao sits back and says, we don't have to worry about this.
We can let them fight.
Chiang Kai-shek doesn't want to make a deal with Chairman Mao because this is his sworn enemy.
This is his sworn foe.
This is the leader of the communists.
He doesn't want to do a deal with them because he realizes what would happen.
He realizes that he, of course, would be stabbed in the back.
But at one point, the situation becomes completely untenable.
And so at that point...
Chiang Kai-shek is actually kidnapped, right?
He's kidnapped by his own people and brought up north, and he is forced essentially at gunpoint to sign a deal with the communists to say, we will work together to fight the Japanese.
They sign the deal, but guess what?
Mao doesn't commit forces in any serious levels to fighting the Japanese.
So all of World War II goes on.
We know how that ends.
Of course, we know Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the atomic bombs, nuclear bombs are dropped.
Japan surrenders.
The emperor surrenders.
USS Missouri happens.
So you get the treaty.
You get the end of the war.
So the war is over.
But that situation still exists.
So Chairman Mao is sitting back out there and says, What are we going to do?
What are we going to have?
We want our own country.
And we want to take over all of China.
So Mao at that point, almost immediately, We're good to go.
And this is something that's been a huge point of contention for many, many years.
People looking back at this say, why was it that Truman's government, when this was taking place, and FDR's government, which saw the early stages of this, and saw all of this going on, by the way, And you've got all the declassified diplomatic cables from this time, from the American diplomats who were there, that were seeing the communists reconstitute their strength, rebuild their armies, knew they were going to come for the nationalists, knew they were going to fight for the overthrow.
And the State Department sending this stuff back from the people in the field.
The OSS is sending this back from their people in the field.
They were the precursor to the CIA.
Why didn't Truman at that point give funding or aid to the nationalists when he knew that the Soviets and Chairman Mao were poised to take over the country?
Who allowed China to go red?
And that is an interesting question.
And there's a lot of people who don't like that question.
There's a lot of people who don't want to open that up because you get accused of McCarthyism and blacklisting and all of this other stuff.
But there is also a lot of evidence that there are people who at the time were at the highest levels of the United States government or had influence at the highest levels of the United States government that wanted to see China to fall to the communists, that they wanted it to happen.
And so, of course, without that support having been depleted by fighting Japan for so many years, they are easily, Chiang Kai-shek is easily routed by Japan or routed by the communists.
He is defeated.
He is kicked out of Beijing.
He's kicked out of entirely all of mainland China.
And then what happens?
The Kuomintang decamps and runs down to Taiwan.
So the entire former regime of all of China goes and makes their retreat to Taiwan, and that's where Chiang Kai-shek establishes himself.
At that point, although we're going up to 1949 now, Chairman Mao heads back, goes to Beijing, and declares himself the overall leader of China, and declares, of course, the PRC. The CCP is now the head of all China.
And so at the time, though, Chiang Kai-shek and his forces and his armaments and the Republic of China, the remnants of that government, have now all fled, along with, by the way, the Treasury, have fled to Taiwan.
So that's what sets up the stalemate that we're in right now.
The government of Taiwan does not officially declare themselves to be an independent country or an independent government just of the island of Taiwan.
To this day, as I am recording this here in Phoenix, Arizona, The Republic of China is the stated name for the government of Taiwan.
And they don't declare themselves to only be the government of Taiwan.
They declare themselves to be the legitimate leader of all of China.
But because of the insurrection and the revolution of the communists, they were kicked out.
Interestingly enough, if you go to Taiwan and you see the maps they have hanging up, because at that time, prior to the communist revolution, China, all of Mongolia was not yet independent.
And so if you look at a map of China in Taiwan, they also declare themselves to be the leaders of Taiwan.
And so you see that sort of like big A hump in the middle of where Mongolia would normally be on modern maps.
But in Taiwan, they actually still have that as part of China because at that time, remember, we're going back to the 1911 borders, that Mongolia was still part of China.
And so this has led to the stalemate that we're in today.
They declare themselves to be the leaders of all of China, but they have not declared themselves to be an independent state.
The CCP, on the other hand, does declare them to be part of the People's Republic of China, and it says that you are under our authority because we have sovereignty over all of China.
You are just a band of insurrectionists against our government.
It's kind of like...
I've said this to people before, but it's kind of like a situation where imagine if, for example, you had...
So look at the American Civil War, right?
And civil wars tend to have messy endings, right?
And so this was the result of the end of the Chinese Civil War, the second iteration of it.
Where you have essentially two countries that are now split because you have two governments.
So, of course, in the American Civil War, the Confederacy was completely defeated.
But imagine, if you will, that the Confederacy had, you know, just for purposes of analogy, had continued to exist and they had taken over like Puerto Rico or something, you know, some U.S. territory.
And they said, now we are the sole legitimate ruler of this.
We are the legitimate government here.
And you people up in Washington, D.C., you have no sovereignty over us.
And they would then go on to continue to declare that they also, by the way, are the same government over the entire South.
Where, of course, the Union would say, no, we are the government over the South.
And, you know, obviously they clearly are because that's how the war ended.
So that's the kind of situation that exists now.
And I know it's not exactly perfect one-to-one kind of situation, But just understand, you know, putting their civil war through the context of our civil war, it's, and when you have these two competing regimes, this is an example of a way to just, you know, to kind of try to explain it for people who have no idea what the difference is.
But so the question then becomes, what is the United States' policy?
What the United States has done over the years has been called or been dubbed the one China policy.
The United States generally plays this diplomatic game of saying they did switch recognition under Jimmy Carter, under President Carter.
They switched recognition from the leadership We're good to go.
Officially, the CCP is the rulers of China.
And this went on for about 30 years, all the way up until President Carter.
President Carter switches diplomatic representation.
What this also then does is trigger the switching of the seat on the United Nations Security Council from being controlled by the Republic of China, Taiwan, to the CCP. And it allows the CCP to have a powerful, extremely powerful seat on the United Nations Security Council.
This is a huge, huge, huge deal.
But what the United States has done to this point is now declare a status quo kind of thing where they say, well, we believe in the one China policy.
What's the one China policy?
Well, that Taiwan and China are part of the same country.
But they never quite say what country that is.
Well, is that the People's Republic or is that the Republic?
You go back to the 1960s, you can see pictures of President Dwight Eisenhower riding along with Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei during this time.
You can see Taiwan still receiving military funding from the United States and military material from the United States.
Even though there is no direct recognition of the government of Taiwan, there's all these sort of indirect, high-level ties, but again, they play these sort of diplomatic games with it.
So this has led to very interesting questions.
Should Taiwan then, in this situation, declare itself to be an independent country, and the CCP has been very clear about this, they then would take that as an act of aggression.
So if they declared themselves, essentially they dropped the claim, right?
Then they'd have to drop the claim that their legitimate government of all of China essentially concede that the CCP took over and won the war, which, you know, I mean, they did because they didn't get this.
They had support from the Soviets and the nationalists did not have the support of the United States in the Western world.
They were allowed to fall.
So the CCP wins.
They take over everything except for Taiwan.
So then Taiwan would become its own independent country.
Mainland China has said we will take that as an act of aggression and declaration of war.
And they would use that as the ability and the pretext to then go invade, or in their precepts, they would say there's an insurrectionist government that has taken over this rogue province and we are going now to bring them back into the fold, right?
Does that make sense?
Versus the other option, obviously, would be if you have your real patriotic restorationist view on anywhere that you would say, well, if the CCP were ever to fall, then there is a government That could exist, that could retake power over all of China.
And the Lao Ba Jing, and the Chinese House Christians, and the Uyghurs in concentration camps, the Tibetans, the Falun Gong, the dissidents, the freedom fighters of Hong Kong, would then be placed under, or really restored to, the Democratic Republic of China.
Which of course, Through Taiwan has actually evolved into a functional democracy.
And they do actually declare their leader to be the president of the Republic of China.
But of course, they claim, and Irene Manzai is the current president, and they again declare her to be the president of all of China.
Does that make sense?
So, the question for the United States now is, if something like that were to happen, what side would the United States take?
And for me, it's quite simple.
I think that the people of the United States would prefer to stand with the country that has fought for freedom, that has continued to stand for freedom in Asia, and that would be Taiwan, and stand with the Republic of China, and hope that the Republic of China would eventually take over all of mainland China.
However, The leaders of the United States, the ones who have been bought and sold, and we've seen the family ties, we've seen the extensive family financial ties through our government leaders, our academic leaders, of course our business leaders,
our entertainment leaders, are all in bed with the CCP. So I think you would actually see a situation where the people of America would say, hey, we stand with Taiwan, but the leaders of America say, You know, you know, I don't know.
Maybe the CCP isn't so bad.
Maybe we should go with them.
And if you think I'm just saying that, that's literally what the head of the Olympic Committee just stated when they asked why China is being given the 22 Olympics, even after everything they've done with the Uyghurs, even after everything they've done on and on and on with the Essentially, what's a genocide?
What amounts to ethnic and cultural genocide in Tibet and in Xinjiang?
And they said, well, you know, the Olympics are, they're bigger than any one government, so it doesn't really matter who's getting it.
And the CCP, oh, they're not that bad, right, is the head of the Olympics saying this.
So understand the situation we're in, ladies and gentlemen.
We're in a situation now where because of deep, deep financial ties of our leaders, their class, their leadership class, which has outsourced the jobs, outsourced the manufacturing of the deplorables to China and other parts of the world, Their wealth is not derived from the United States.
Their wealth is derived from their ties with China.
And so if their wealth is derived from their ties with China, Then are they going to act in the interests of the United States or are they going to act in the interests of China?
You know, I've been reading, and I mentioned this the other day on the podcast, that I've been reading this book about the partitions of Poland because Poland, you know, prior to 1795 was this massive state all throughout the 1700s called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
This huge, sprawling...
Grouping of various regions together between Poland, Lithuania, and Ruthenia, which is now known as Western Ukraine, was all together.
And the Baltic states, of course, with Lithuania were all together under this.
And it was a huge bulwark state in between Russia and Germany.
And so the question was, what happened to that state?
Why didn't that state still exist anymore?
This was an incredibly powerful state, and it's very simple.
Their nobles were bought off by foreign powers.
So surrounding the Commonwealth was the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire.
And they just started funding the nobles because they realized, hey, we can buy these people off, we can make them rich, we can make them powerful, and then if their wealth and power is predicated on foreign money, And foreign influence, then eventually we can weaken it, weaken it, weaken it, and weaken it to the point where eventually we just control it.
And then we can take it over, we can formally conquer it, or we can just run it by the nose.
Doesn't really matter because they are our tributary state at that point.
And this was done through the nobles.
It was not done through the people of Poland.
And to my mind, we see a very similar situation in the relationship between the West and China today.
So, thank you so much for listening.
This has been a quick, deep dive on the China-Taiwan relationship, the China-Taiwan conflict, why it exists, how we got to where we are.
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