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SPEAKING
FREELY
US Civil War 'secession' and rebel
Taiwan
By Mark Johnson
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here if you are
interested in contributing.
I once
believed, during a more idealistic stage in my
life, that the great blight on America's
contemporary foreign policy was the double
standard that we used for dealing with small rogue
nations such as Cuba, and larger ones, such as
China. Then I had an epiphany of sorts: do not try
to understand policy in terms of right and wrong,
but in terms of power. Since that initially
troubling discovery, I have come to some more
strange conclusions, most of them after developing
a keener understanding of US history during the
dawn of the 20th century. You may vaguely remember
the stories about how Sanford Dole, the
pineapple/sugarcane mogul, overthrew the queen of
Hawaii because she opposed the influence of
foreign nations (the United States), and how the
US created the country of Panama out of Colombia
because we did not want to pay the Colombians what
they were asking for our "rights" to complete the
Panama Canal. The list of stains on our reputation
was surprisingly long.
The textbooks
generally begin the discussion of US imperialism
with the year 1898, and the Spanish-American War,
but recently my studies have led me to place a
much earlier date for the advent of US
militaristic imperialism. That date is around
March of 1861, when US president Abraham Lincoln
decided to use force against states that had
freely joined the Union, and that now hoped and
expected to be able to freely leave that same
Union. After all, the very first line of the
Declaration of Independence clearly states the
right to do just that. Lincoln himself said in
1848 that the most valuable and sacred right of a
people is to rise up and shake off a government
that does not suit them well, and to form one that
suits them better.
It is remarkable that
so many people believe that the Civil War began
because of slavery. Lincoln time and again said
that the war was not for abolition of slavery but
for the preservation of the Union, and early
attempts to frame it as a war for abolition met
with stern resistance in the North. Few in the
North at the time would have fought a war over
slavery. Plus, there were states in the Union that
continued to have slaves after the war began, and
Union General Ulysses S Grant's wife had slaves
apparently for the duration of the war. Grant was
later the 18th president of the United States. As
we all know, Lincoln used the issue of abolition
to keep the European powers out of the war that
the South was handily winning in the east up to
that point. The war was fought to force Union upon
the South. The question of why then becomes
relevant.
While reading the reports of the
new Chinese Anti-Secession Law, I immediately
began to wonder how Americans, who generally have
such a naive understanding of their own history,
would take the idea. After reading a while, I saw
that the Chinese themselves made mention of our
Civil War in justification of the law, and that
further whetted my appetite. On the message boards
was unfortunately exactly what was expected:
well-meaning but ignorant patriotism as regards
the question of Chinese-Taiwanese union and its
relationship to the American Civil War.
In
1860, the British along with some European allies
defeated the Chinese in what was known as the
second of the Opium Wars. To make a long story
short, the British were importing opium into
China. The Chinese government decided that this
was bad for its people and demanded that the
British stop importing the opium. The Europeans
refused, and fighting broke out. It was during
these wars that the British took control of Hong
Kong and other places. The US became involved a
little later, trying to have our Open Door Policy
enacted. It was argued that it would be best for
China (and the US) if the United States were able
to trade with a China that was already
economically locked up by foreign countries. At
the turn of the century, however, when the Chinese
decided once again to try to oust the foreign
exploiters, the United States sided with the
Europeans. By that time it was called a
"rebellion", because the recognized authorities
were the capitalist Europeans and their newly rich
Chinese supporters. The long and complex story
goes on, and by May of 1949, Chiang Kai-shek
(Jiang Jieshi), and the remnants of the ruling
parties that were supported by the outsiders, were
forced to flee to Taiwan. The story of our
relationship with the "two nations" continues
today.
So stop for a moment and look at it
from this perspective.
The story of Taiwan
is the story of a group of people who by working
with colonial powers made themselves rich. The
people of the country had had enough and fought
against the corrupt government, forcing the
discredited leaders to abdicate sovereignty. Now,
after many years, the renegades have still not
been reincorporated into the mainland population,
and the Chinese government has decided that it is
time to change that. They would have done it
earlier if not for US economic - and thus military
- investment in the country. Now, however, we are
spread thin, we have chilled relations with our
allies, our economy has a couple of fast-growing
cancers ... and so on.
I wonder what this
possible war of the Taiwan Strait, assuming it
occurs, will be called. If the Taiwanese win, it
will surely have a different name than if the
mainland wins. Will it be called a rebellion, a
revolution, or a war for independence? Will the
cause be Chinese imperialism, or will it happen
that a couple of years into the war, the Chinese
decide that the war is not about forced union for
economic motives, but rather about something else
that is more palatable to the Chinese workers and
other allies in the region? Perhaps the war will
not be about Chinese imperialism, but about US
imperialism, a selling point that will keep
interested foreign parties on the side of the
fence that China wants them? Or who knows?
In review, with the American Civil War, it
was the industrial-capital powers that were
stronger, and that won the war, due in the end
only to supremacy in number. They subjugated the
southern states, and imposed the
industrial-capitalism on the unobliging section of
the country. In the case of China and Mao Zedong's
revolution, the overwhelming numbers rested not
with the capitalists, but with the people. As a
result, they won the war. The American Southerners
were tied to the land, and could not leave, but
such was not the case for the Chinese merchants,
and so the question of unification lingers.
The difference between an unsuccessful
rebellion and a successful revolution is almost
always the interference or lack thereof of an
outside party. I find it interesting, though
understandable, that the United States would not,
in this case, favor the forced unification of a
rebel province. After all, the southern states
were members of a republic, while Taiwan is a
member of a communist dictatorship.
Mark Johnson is a teacher of
philosophy and history at Monroe Academy, Forsyth,
Georgia.
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click here if you are
interested in contributing.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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