The Biden administration this week brazenly announced its intention to walk over China’s red line warning on Taiwan. The move by the US is a recklessly provocative step that dares an inevitable military response from Beijing. 

If that happens then all bets are off for a full-scale military confrontation between the United States, its allies, and China. It is not alarmist to say such a clash would escalate into World War III.

Australia and Britain are explicitly committed to a military alliance with the United States in the Asia-Pacific through the recently formed AUKUS pact. Russia will be obliged to defend China.

The date in question is December 9-10 when the Biden administration plays host to a so-called “Summit of Democracies”. This week the State Department announced a list of “participants” that include 110 countries. China and Russia are not invited, among other excluded nations.

Most provocatively, the separatist Chinese territory of Taiwan is invited to attend the video conference. The US is careful to refer to Taiwan as a “participant” not as a “nation”. Nevertheless, this semantical device aside, the invitation is a blatant violation of China’s sovereign claim of authority over Taiwan.

China’s claim to Taiwan as being a part of its integral territory is recognized by the United Nations and, at least in theory, by the United States with its One China Policy since 1979.

The island of Taiwan has existed as a self-governing territory since China’s civil war ended in 1949 with communist victory. The nationalist opponents fled to Taiwan. China retains the right to reunite Taiwan under governance from the mainland. Beijing has warned it will do so by military force if Taiwan ever declares independence.

Washington maintains a position of “strategic ambiguity” whereby it acknowledges a One China Policy while also simultaneously offering US commitments to help Taiwan with military defence.

Since Joe Biden took the White House in January, his administration has taken this ambiguity to dangerous levels. At one point, Biden has overstepped policy by explicitly stating the US would defend Taiwan in the event of a confrontation with China.

At a teleconference summit on November 16, China’s President Xi Jinping admonished US policy on Taiwan as “playing with fire”. Xi drew a red line that Washington must desist from inciting separatist ambitions of the Taiwanese government.

The announcement this week of the “Summit of Democracies” and specifically the invitation of Taiwan while excluding China is about as bold as it can get by the Biden administration in undermining China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That it comes only days after a verbal commitment from Biden to Xi that the US adheres to One China Policy and is not seeking Taiwan’s independence makes the provocation all the more contemptuous.

Biden’s ratcheting up of tensions with China is not out of the blue. For more than a decade, successive administrations under Obama, Trump and now Biden have been targeting Beijing as its top national security threat. Washington continually accuses China of aggression in the Asia-Pacific which is an inversion of reality. Taiwan has become a spearhead for Washington to antagonize China with. Under this administration, arms sales to Taiwan have increased as well as US naval and air force maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait under the cynical pretext of “freedom of navigation operations”.

President Biden has made “democracy versus authoritarianism” a theme of his White House. Calling a summit of 110 participating countries for the summit on December 9-10 is an arrogant attempt to demarcate the world into a false dichotomy whereby presumed virtuous nations are under the benign leadership of the United States.

China has slammed the summit as an artificial polarization of nations into so-called allies and enemies in what is a throwback to the Cold War decades. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said this divisive manipulation of international relations is simply a ploy by the United States to exert its hegemonic ambitions.

China says it is not up to the United States to define what is democracy and what is not. Beijing asserts that “democracy belongs to all humanity”. It’s not just about holding cycles of elections. In the case of the United States, its “democracy” is dominated by two parties bankrolled by Wall Street capitalists and plutocrats. Its record on poverty, inequality, racism and warmongering is plentiful to roundly negate pretentious claims of “democracy”.

In any case, back in August when the Biden administration first announced its plans for a “democracy summit” Beijing warnedWashington not to use the forum to incite Taiwanese tensions. If the US persisted, China said it would order military planes and warships to Taiwan.

There is an unmistakable sense that China has had it with US provocations. The mainland has been making military preparations for a showdown over Taiwan. This insane move by Washington to call a “summit of democracies” – how bitterly ironic – could well be the final act of American treachery. War is on the cards and we just got a date.

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In the face of an irrational Australia, shouldn’t China be prepared with an iron fist?

BY Hu Xijin

Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton on Thursday replied to my warning to his threat toward China. He said, "They're words of a bully, not an international player."

I would like to respond to him again: The US, which Australia is preparing to follow when a war breaks out in the Taiwan Straits, is the world's bully, and Australia's role is like a barking dog. 

Last weekend, Dutton said it would be "inconceivable" for Australia not to support the US in an action, if the latter decided to intervene militarily should a war breaks out in the Taiwan Straits. On Monday, I tweeted, "If Australian troops come to fight in the Taiwan Straits, it is unimaginable that China won't carry out a heavy attack on them and the Australian military facilities that support them. So Australia better be prepared to sacrifice for Taiwan island and the US."

Dutton is one of Australia's most radical anti-China politicians. He has been a member of parliament for 20 years and is also a well-known Australian big mouth. He has not only repeatedly attacked and smeared China, but also uttered vicious words against Australia's neighboring countries, such as Australia was "taking the trash out" by deporting criminals born in New Zealand, which caused public uproar. 

In China, I am one of the outspoken people. But almost all my critical voices refute severe provocations from the outside world toward China. Chinese people generally do not stir up trouble first. But whoever provokes us must be prepared to be hit back. Over the past two years, Australian officials constantly made public statements or hinted they will send troops to join the fight once a war breaks out in the Taiwan Straits. Some of them clamor that Australian soldiers should be prepared to fight. In the face of such an irrational Australia, shouldn't China be prepared with an iron fist and to punch it hard when needed, teaching it a thorough lesson? 

The author is editor-in-chief of the Global Times. [email protected]

US military experts say a war over Taiwan is desirable, because Asia’s growth to become world’s economic heartland has become unstoppable.

Yes, we want war. But just a small one, please, followed by a quick surrender. The United States is diligently working with Australia and the UK to goad China into what they hope will be a limited war over Taiwan, according to military strategists. By continually poking at the giant developing nation, the aim is to force it to fire the first bullet — and then use that to paint China as the protagonist, the bully that the rest of the world must unite against.

To prepare for this, the partners in the scheme are teaming up. Rather like the “coalition of the willing” in the Iraq War 2.0, the US is pushing for another misadventure, this time through a coalition of the coerced.

The Western media is playing a key role in this process.

1) The media is trivializing or turning a blind eye to an increasingly long series of clearly aggressive moves by the United States, including:

• Parking warships on China’s doorstep;
• Holding Naval sailing regattas in the Taiwan Straits;
• Landing senior US officials on Taiwanese soil in military planes;
• Creating an artificial “Taiwanese air space” zone and falsely alleging “incursions” or “violations” of it;
• Secretly providing military trainers on the island while lying about it;
• Inviting Taiwan to a summit on democracy as if it were a nation;
• And numerous other military and diplomatic departures from status quo agreements.

2) The media is painting China’s knee-jerk and entirely predictable responses that it “will not stand for attempts to promote Taiwan independence” as evidence of shocking new acts of “increasing aggression”, while the truth is that all China-watchers know they are the same statements they have issued for decades, often in virtually the same words.

3) The media is pushing exaggerations and misinformation about the “death of Hong Kong”, the “genocide of Xinjiang”, the “imminent invasion of Australia” and so on.

Asia as centre of the world

Why are the Western powers doing this? They certainly want to destabilise China and set the country’s development and positioning in the world back a few decades. But that’s just part of a larger goal. They feel the need to do this primarily because the Western powers have recognized that Asia will soon be the centre of global economic power.

Nothing will stop that happening.

This means that time is running out to ensure that Asia is dominated and controlled by America and its allies on the other side of the world, instead of by Asians themselves, working together as neighbours.

Furthermore, the outgoing world leaders need the incoming powers to know their place in the “International Rules-Based Order” under the stewardship of the drafters of these rules. Western liberal democracy must retain its primacy, and Asia’s consultative democracies dismissed as “autocracies”, or “authoritarian”/“totalitarian” regimes.

The media has been preparing the world for the conflict for years. America’s hawks put huge sums of time and money into financing dissent in Asia and partnering with the Western media to create the impression that the people of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, want independence from mainland China — although surveys overwhelmingly show that this is the opposite of the truth.

But these imaginary “cries for independence” are necessary for the next stage in the process: the pushing of China into what can only be described as a deluded and limited war over Taiwan; one aim being to attain the larger objectives of undermining both China and ASEAN.

The war or “coming conflict” with China has been discussed in multiple forums and publications, not least of which is a new book by Elbridge Colby, one of the writers of the US National Defense Strategy. It argues that escalating Taiwan tensions into a conflict gives America a chance at winning, unlike a Cold War arms race.

An arms race would eventually be won by China, which is on its way to being richer and stronger than America, Colby points out. And “the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the US economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength”.

Instead, the US can push China into a limited conflict over Taiwan, with the media painting China as the bully and the US as the white knight. Done right, the skirmish would unite the rest of the world’s countries against China and on to the American side.

Partners in the media have already accomplished a lot of this work by painting Xinjiang and Hong Kong as places wrecked by China, and suggesting they are filled with Betsy-waving populations desperate for a United States model of governance.

This strategy is receiving significant interest and or support from other US hawks.

“China must be provoked into initiating any escalation of the conflict, so that it will always appear the aggressor,” writes defence journalist Aris Roussinos, summarising the Colby strategy.

But won’t there be Taiwanese casualties? Yes. China “must be permitted to strike as indiscriminately as possible,” in this scenario. “Colby further urges the US not to provide potential civilian targets with air defences, reasoning that collateral damage will whip up the public anger against China necessary to winning a war,” Roussinos adds.

In other words, deaths of Taiwan citizens (the “collateral damage” he mentions) would be a public relations coup for the US side.

“Forcing China to escalate could be in our [US] interests,” Roussinos points out. (One wonders if this scenario has received attention from the walking elements of “collateral damage” in Taiwan.)

Although Colby’s book, The Strategy of Denial, has just been published, it’s clear that the thinking behind it has been circulating in US administration clusters for some years. Colby was a key writer of Donald Trump’s national defence strategy in 2018.

This approach, when originally written, recommended pulling American allies like Japan and India into the US team to contain China, and to sign up Australia too, as well as Vietnam and other neighbours.

Clearly we can see concerted action on all these fronts this year.

While the Western media portrays China as the aggressor, people with a deeper understanding of international affairs can see what’s really happening over Taiwan.

“The US has placed tripwires in the form of deployment of special forces, obfuscating the ‘red line’,” said commentator M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former Indian diplomat.

The long string of US provocations are a “salami slicing” strategy, some observers say. “Salami tactics are an appealing option for expansionist actors like NATO, which pursues limited and repetitive expansions to gradually create new realities on the ground,” argues Glenn Diesen, professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

“Such tactics avoid rapid escalation and mute opposition from adversaries and allies alike, as complaints can be ridiculed and the response from opponents denounced as disproportionate.”

One could easily argue that this type of strategy could be construed as a right-wing, warmongering plan.

That’s certainly true, and there are many echoes of the self-righteous militaristic strutting that led to lengthy disasters of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the surviving victims of which are still suffering today.

The frightening thing is that the present attempt to goad China into war has bi-partisan support in the world’s wealthiest, most powerful country.

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/strategists-admit-west-is-goading-china-into-war/

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The defence minister fails to acknowledge the superpowers’ efforts to calm tensions, or that the US has jumped in to claim some of our former markets.

By Brian Toohey

Defence Minister Peter Dutton should take time out from playing Winston Churchill and warning the world not to repeat the mistakes of appeasing a powerful country such as Germany in the 1930s. Never mind that there is a huge difference between then and now. The US is far and away the most military powerful country on earth but there are constant alarmist claims about the alleged threat from China.

Despite all his bluster, Dutton recently told the National Press Club in Canberra that in his judgment, “China does not wish to occupy other countries”. But he warns that China could invade Taiwan at any moment. He told the press club that “If Taiwan is taken, surely the Senkakus is next.”

There is nothing sure about that. The Senkakus, called the Diaoyu by China, is a group of uninhabited rocky islands located between Japan and China that neither country seems keen to go to war over. Nor is it obvious that China is desperate to invade Taiwan, as explained in the latest Pentagon report to Congress on Chinese military power.

The report says China’s most prominent conceptual military thinking is about an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. The Pentagon describes an amphibious invasion is one of the most difficult military operations to execute successfully. It says any attempt to invade Taiwan would “likely strain China’s armed forces and invite international intervention”. When combined with the attrition of China’s combat forces and the complexity of urban warfare and counter-insurgency, the report says this makes an amphibious invasion of Taiwan a “significant political and military risk for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party”.

Although the report says China’s forces are capable of invading small Taiwan-occupied islands, it says “this kind of operation involves significant and possibly prohibitive political risk because it would galvanise pro-independence sentiment on Taiwan and generate powerful international opposition”.

Reassuringly for those who don’t look forward to a war, the Pentagon says China has not acquired the large number of specialist transport ships and landing craft for an amphibious invasion — “suggesting a traditional large-scale direct beach operation requiring extensive lift remains aspirational”.

Australia’s former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, sees another obstacle to Beijing invading Taiwan, whose population is Han Chinese like most of the mainland. He says if China’s leaders kill large numbers of Taiwanese they will quickly become very unpopular at home.

Putting China’s territorial disputes in a context that eludes Dutton, the Pentagon report says that since 1998 China has settled 11 land-based territorial disputes with six of its neighbours, but has been more coercive in recent years in maritime territorial disputes. The report would have been more balanced if it had acknowledged that US military expenditure of about $US800 billion a year is more than the total for the next 11 biggest spending countries, including China.

Australia has no maritime or land territorial disputes with China. But Dutton told the press club that China “sees us as a tributary state” without providing any evidence of how or why it does. He loosely defines of a tributary state as one requiring the surrender of our “sovereignty and the abandonment of any adherence to international law which our country has fought against since Federation.” In fact, Australia violated international law when it helped invade Vietnam and Iraq with terrible consequences for the inhabitants. The Vietnamese people won that war and Vietnam is now a one-party communist state, like China, with a bad human rights record. But it now benefits from what Foreign Affairs calls a process of “deepening strategic, defence and security co-operation” with Australia.

One of the more disturbing aspects of Dutton’s approach is that he fails to support America and China’s efforts to calm tensions during the recent virtual summit between presidents Xi and Biden. Biden said he didn’t want any change to the status quo in which the US does not support Taiwan’s independence but would support its defence of the island. Xi said that China’s policy was still to incorporate Taiwan by peaceful means by 2050 but it would use force if Taiwan declared independence. Taiwan’s democratically elected leaders prudently refrain making make such a declaration when they already have a form of de-facto independence.  The main exception to this form of stability is that it excludes any right for Taiwan to invite the US to establish military bases so close to the Chinese mainland.

The US has invited China to begin much-needed negotiations on nuclear arms control. Although the Pentagon projects China’s arsenal to grow to around 1000 warheads by 2030, that’s only about one-fifth of the quantity held by the US and Russia each. The US warheads have become much more powerful with new fusing technology that make China and Russia’s land-based missiles more vulnerable to destruction in a first strike.

Progress been made on improving bilateral economic relations, partly achieved by China agreeing to buying more goods from the US that it had previously bought from Australia, such as large quantities of natural gas.  Unperturbed about this treatment from an ally, Dutton has agreed to let the US base more troops and weapons in Australia to defend it against a country he says does not want to occupy Australia.

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/relax-mr-dutton-china-is-not-an-invading-power-like-us-and-us/

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