Will these opposing sides step back from the brink?

What steps will we as a species take to peacefully unify Earth?

Isn’t national sovereignty a Twentieth Century anachronism as obsolete as the Divine Right of Kings?

Taiwan and its surrounding small islands constitute the last outpost of the Republic of China. This republic was declared on the 1st of January 1912 following the Revolution of 1911. The Revolution in turn set in motion a nearly continuous era of both internal and international warfare and massacres lasting well into the 1950s and later. 

After decades of civil war mixed with two world wars, the Communists proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on the 1st of October 1949. Although fighting still continued, the bulk of the civil war was considered over with the Communists victorious on the mainland. 

The Republic of China was declared over 38 and a half years before the People’s Republic of China was declared. Both republics still exist. It is ludicrous for the PRC in Beijing to declare Taiwan is a separatist region in rebellion against the central communist government. Are other nation-state regimes unable to see this fact? Most prefer to duck in fear or to focus on short-term financial profits. How in the world can the ROC, a national government existing nearly 40 years before another, the PRC, be considered in rebellion against the newer regime? Are not the Communists then the actual splittists engaged in separatism? They declared the civil war over in Red victory back in 1949, but wasn’t that premature? They conquered Hainan Island from ROC forces, invaded Tibet, and intervened in the Korean War all in the same year, 1950. They got pummeled in efforts to bombard and otherwise attack ROC forces on Taiwan and surrounding islands in battles and skirmishes that flared intermittently thru the 1950s into the mid-1990s. Meanwhile the PRC regime literally devoured the mainland as they sought to pacify their conquests, killing millions of fellow Chinese in the process. If anyone is in rebellion, isn’t it the revolutionary totalitarian dictatorship squatting astride the mainland in on-going revolt against the Nationalist forces held up in their island fortresses on Taiwan?

Remember the so-called “One country, two systems” declaration was declared by the PRC to paper over its slow digestion of former British and Portuguese imperial territories. The PRC kept declaring the same approach with Taiwan. The ROC, however, ignored this noise and continue trading with the mainland. After all, the PRC is itself an empire disguised as a communist people’s republic. As such the PRC behaves as all empires do even when they pretend they are not empires, even when they insist on believing they’re not empires. We’re all too familiar with other post-Second World War and post-Cold War nation-state regimes doing the same thing from America to Russia. Yes, both the United States and the Russian Federation constitute empires even if they do not resemble those of Rome, the Mongols, or Britain. When one makes the effort to strip away the political isms and cultural religiosities that so blur public perception, raw human realpolitik is revealed. We must rise above these limiting belief systems anchored in emotions and pride.

Historically the ROC is guilty of the massacre of millions as well as other war crimes from the revolution and civil war eras. The Kuomintang mutated from an embryonic democratic republic into a militaristic authoritarian dictatorship. In recent generations, however, the ROC evolved into a thriving capitalistic democratic republic. Bastioned upon Taiwan, the Republic of China serves as beacons for both successful economic development and advanced civil rights. 

This Long War within Greater China is not over. It ripples out into the numerous border disputes in the South and East China Seas and the border conflicts with nearly all of its southern neighbors but especially India. The questions of Tibet, the Uighurs of Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, Hong Kong, Macau, the Koreas, Kashmir, and even Myanmar and claims to what is now Russian territory vex those who dream of reestablishing the Empire of the world’s Middle Kingdom. Ironically, many in the ROC on Taiwan support similar claims altho also recognizing them as belonging to increasingly distant centuries.

At the same time, regardless of facts and interpretations of facts, the situation is two Chinese governments are spiraling towards a war few truly, truly want. What real, concrete, and pragmatic steps can the two sides, the ROC and the PRC, take to back off from war? Which side is committing aggression? It certainly isn’t Taiwan under the Republic of China government. Even the ROC does not want Taiwan to secede from “its” China. The irony is the aggression and military posturing of the People’s Republic of China on the mainland is driving the independence movement in Taiwan, which in turn if given full throttle will compel the PRC to invade even if it doesn’t feel fully ready to do so. Taiwan banks in turn on the United States, which is stuck in Taiwan’s corner with a most unpleasant Cold War hangover. This doesn’t include the endless squabbles over islets and their resources in the East and South China Seas. The United States in turn banks on a system of both official and informal global and regional economic and military alliances with a number of different countries. China has Russia as a defacto if thorny ally. Plus possibly North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and Myanmar, all of which possess ferocious military forces but whose nations are a train wreck of economic basketcases held together by frayed duct tape. 

Last and certainly not least in a planet of more stateless-nations than there are nation-states are the indigenous, non-Han Chinese peoples of this so-called Greater China. This includes the indigenous population of Taiwan with its multiple Formosan and other tribes. They certainly ought to have as much of a right to self-determination as the various Han factions. Besides, the very concept of national sovereignty is an anachronism in an age of planetary integration. Political borders and nationalism are as obsolete as the Divine Right of Kings, as obsolete as slavery and human trafficking even tho they bumble on with the bloody inertia of our global species blinded by our own world history. What would it look like to establish self-determination for the various stateless-nations and nation-states together within a planetary cooperative under a democratic socialist world parliament accountable to we the people of Planet Earth? We certainly have the intelligence and the technology to do so, but where is our will? Our courage?

We must learn to work together for peaceful unification of our species if we are to truly resolve our numerous and overlapping global challenges. For us to do so, however, we must respect the plethora of stateless-nations and the futility of transnational fusion by war and conquest. The only alternative to the peaceful, democratic integration of Earth, ultimately, is extinction, and, people, that’s pretty fucking stupid.

William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 7 April 2021
Thursday 8 April 2021
Revised 29 April 2021
Seattle, Washington
Cascadia
Earth
Sol

Copyright © 2021 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.