The visit to Taiwan by the Democrat Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, on 2 August was a calculated provocation by US imperialism against the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In a show of military force the US deployed the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan along with cruisers and destroyers off the coast of Taiwan while Pelosi landed in a US military aircraft. It was a further step in the US’s growing confrontation with the PRC, driven by the escalating crisis of the capitalist system and the economic challenge that the PRC poses to the continuing domination of the world’s economy by the US. Taiwan both geographically and historically has always been accepted as being part of China. The United Nations, including the vast majority of countries in the world, accepts this, but the US supported by Britain is attempting to reverse this consensus, promoting the idea of Taiwanese independence as a weapon against the PRC.
Pelosi’s visit was designed to increase tension and push the PRC into a political corner, increasing the risk of military conflict. In the hypocritical language of imperialism, in a statement shortly after her plane landed Pelosi said her visit was meant to honour ‘America’s unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan’s vibrant democracy’.
Taiwan’s ‘vibrant democracy’ has a bloody history. From 1895, Imperial Japan colonised and occupied Taiwan for 50 years. In this period mainland China went through several civil wars. From 1927, led by Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist forces were the principal representatives of the nascent Chinese bourgeoisie, supported and financed by Britain and the US. They waged an intermittent civil war against Chinese Communist Party forces. In the process they massacred thousands of communist supporters, and following invasion of the mainland by Japan in 1937, often sided with occupying Japanese forces against the Communist resistance. After Japanese imperialism surrendered in 1945 following the US nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, control of Taiwan was handed back to China. The KMT fled to Taiwan after they were defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in the revolutionary war that ended in 1949 with the establishment of a socialist state.
KMT members pay tribute to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Beijing in 1928
The KMT regime in Taiwan was corrupt and repressive. Following the shooting of a protester in the capital Taipei on 27 February 1947 thousands of people came out onto the streets protesting against the regime. In the following days KMT forces massacred up to 28,000 people; this event is known as the February 28 massacre or 228 massacre. From 1949 to 1987, with Chiang Kai-shek President until his death in 1975, the KMT imposed martial law on Taiwan, a period known as the White Terror. During these years around 140,000 people were imprisoned and 3-4,000 executed for opposing the regime. Although martial law ended in 1987 it wasn’t until 1996 that a President took office following a popular vote.
For a large part of this period Taiwan, under the name Republic of China, sat on the Security Council in the UN as the representative of the whole of China. In 1950 Taiwan joined the US and Britain in voting for imperialist military intervention in Korea against the socialist forces in North Korea. The war lasted from 1950 to 1953 with approximately three million deaths, the majority civilians. Throughout all this bloody period Taiwan’s ‘vibrant democracy’ was indeed fully supported by both US and British imperialism.
More countries, particularly colonial countries gaining their independence in the 1950s and 60s began to recognise the PRC as the real representative of the Chinese people. In 1963 the political division between the PRC and the Soviet Union, which centred on relations with the imperialist countries, became public knowledge. The US saw this division as a weak point to be exploited and began secret diplomatic talks with the PRC emphasising the fact that their common enemy was the Soviet Union. In July 1971 it became public that the then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had visited Beijing and in October the UN General Assembly, supported by the US, voted to recognise the PRC as the sole representative of the whole of China. The PRC then replaced the Taiwan regime on the UN Security Council. In 1972 US President Nixon visited the PRC and diplomatic links were established. At the conclusion of his trip the US and the PRC issued the Shanghai Communiqué, which, as well as carrying a veiled attack on the Soviet Union, accepted that there is one China and that Taiwan is part of China. A political consequence of this was that the US agreed not to support calls for Taiwanese independence. In 1979 the US and the PRC established full diplomatic relations, with the US officially ending its diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
In 1992 after unofficial talks between representatives of the PRC and the regime in Taiwan an agreement was reached which became known as the ‘1992 Consensus’. This confirmed the ‘One China’ position that had evolved in the 1970s and has been the basis of relations between the PRC, the Western imperialist states and Taiwan ever since. It is this ‘Consensus’ which the US and Britain are now straining to break.
Following Pelosi’s visit there has been a string of delegations of US politicians to Taiwan with other countries also sending or planning to send delegations. Britain is planning to send a delegation from the Foreign Affairs Select Committee at the end of the year. The US and Taiwan have agreed to draw up a new trade pact known as the ‘US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade’. Following the PRC the US is Taiwan’s second largest trading partner. Taiwan has become a strategic trading partner for the US, Britain and the EU, as it produces more than half of the world’s computer chips and over 90% of the most advanced semiconductors.
The US has supplied Taiwan with over $6bn worth of military hardware over the past two years with the US Congress about to agree to a further $1.1bn in arms sales. The US has called on Britain to ‘step up’ and supply more arms. The logic of the build-up of arms in Taiwan and the US’s growing provocations against the PRC is a potential devastating military conflict, a consequence of the growing inter-imperialist rivalries that are driving politics across the world.
Bob Shepherd
