In this episode, we talk about China's reaction to Rep. Nancy Pelosi's recent visit to Taiwan, and what it means for relations with Beijing. We are joined by Gordon Chang, an author, newspaper columnist, and lawyer who has been cautioning the West about the need to deal with an overbearing China.
00:07:44.420You know, as you know, the Chinese have now said in the last couple of days, well, there are a lot of Chinese restaurants on Taiwan that obviously makes it Chinese.
00:07:52.020Well, Morgan Ortegas, the former State Department spokeswoman, said, well, that means Kentucky must rule China because there are a lot of KFCs on mainland China.
00:08:02.460And so Beijing's arguments are ridiculous.
00:08:04.860Roger Waters should stick to what he's doing well and not make statements which are historically inaccurate.
00:08:11.140I went on a media tour of Taiwan in 2018 and toured the beautiful country and we saw different facilities and we talked with different experts and politicians.
00:08:20.420And you really get a clear sense of a country and a people who are quite happy with their way of life, proud of who they are, proud of having a democratically elected president.
00:08:29.860And they're also prepared to fight if there's any sort of attack, invasion, amphibious invasions are very difficult historically to pull off.
00:08:38.800I guess a lot of questions of to what degree the U.S. will defend them.
00:08:42.040And one thinks, why is this really worth it for China in terms of a small landmass of, I guess, 25 million people or so, which is significantly smaller than, of course, the population of China.
00:09:45.120They've got a more advanced society than China.
00:09:47.100And they don't need a one-party state.
00:09:52.540Matter of fact, what they've got is a vibrant democracy.
00:09:56.160Now, Chiang Kai-shek, when he came over, was, you know, a Leninist, a totalitarian.
00:10:01.660But this place has evolved to being a vibrant, self-governing island.
00:10:07.180And that proves the Communist Party's main propaganda line to be utterly false.
00:10:13.040How did we get to this point right now where there's such misperceptions, where Taiwan is not really acknowledged as a country by the UN?
00:10:24.020Other countries, Canada and the US, for example, do not have formal diplomatic relations with them.
00:10:28.720I know something happened in the 70s where, I guess, Henry Kissinger and others maneuvered a bit of a switchover of which one of these pieces of land and which government was acknowledged as more formal.
00:10:41.260I think that Beijing has been relentless in its propaganda.
00:10:45.880And Americans have generally been, well, you know, this is not a big deal.
00:10:50.860But also, you know, the American policy establishment has worked very hard to engage China, quote unquote, to integrate China into the international system on the belief that a stronger China would be a supporter of the liberal international order.
00:11:09.380And so we have accepted a lot of crap from Beijing over a number of issues, including Taiwan.
00:11:16.680I think that people are now starting to see that engagement was an historic mistake, perhaps the biggest mistake in American foreign policy from the beginning of our republic.
00:11:26.540But now they're starting to see Beijing as a stronger state is a belligerent, provocative, extremely dangerous.
00:11:38.220And people are now starting to question their own assumptions about Taiwan and other things.
00:11:56.140It's not changing fast enough, but it is changing.
00:12:01.180I mean, I know a lot of people talk about Taiwan having good relations with the U.S.
00:12:05.300and vice versa as being something not just good for Taiwan, but good for the U.S.
00:12:08.820in terms of having a presence so close to China in that part of the world.
00:12:13.760Taiwan, based on just the basic shape of the country, has been described as, I guess, a bit of an immovable aircraft carrier just kind of sitting there.
00:12:22.540Just far off, not far off of China's shore.
00:12:26.260And it's also been considered the cork in the bottle.
00:12:28.460But there are a number of reasons why Taiwan is absolutely critical to the defense of the United States.
00:12:35.200First of all, there is one business on the island that makes 92 percent of the world's made to order computer chips.
00:12:42.780In other words, the most important ones, that's TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
00:12:48.900But let's put aside trade and semiconductors.
00:12:54.400For more than a century, going back into the 1800s, the United States has drawn its western defense perimeter, not off the coast of Hawaii or even Guam, but off the coast of East Asia.
00:13:07.820And Taiwan sits in the center of that critical perimeter where the South China and East China seas meet, hence the phrase cork in the bottle.
00:13:20.420But there's something even more important than that.
00:13:23.140Beijing is attacking not only our democracy, it's attacking the whole concept of democracy.
00:13:31.460And the United States cannot afford to allow Beijing to absorb any democracy, especially one as important as Taiwan.
00:13:41.620Due to this calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, due to the failure to deter Russia from invading Ukraine, Taiwan has become the test of American credibility.
00:13:54.620And if we don't defend Taiwan, then we're not only going to have problems in East Asia, we're going to have problems around the world.
00:14:01.960Because who would want to be a friend of the United States?
00:14:29.540What are these obvious war signs that you're seeing?
00:14:33.040Well, for instance, just what Beijing says and has consistently been saying.
00:14:37.020As our great ambassador, great American ambassador to China, James Lilly, said, China always telegraphs its punches.
00:14:47.620Well, China's been telegraphing that it's going to punch Taiwan and the United States and everybody else, for that matter, regarding the issue of Taiwan.
00:14:55.200But we've also seen the rapid buildup of its military, the fastest buildup of any military in peacetime.
00:15:04.680And of course, these drills that we just saw last week, you know, where they declared first six and then seven live fire exclusion zones.
00:15:17.840And one of those zones, the one that was southwest of the island, was so close to Taiwan that it actually infringed on sovereign Chinese, sovereign Taiwanese airspace and water.
00:15:31.400These are incredibly aggressive moves.
00:15:34.460Oh, and one other thing, of course, on February 5, China actually flew a plane over China's, over Taiwan's sovereign airspace.
00:15:42.240So this is, these are provocative things.
00:15:46.520China has been pushing out and it's not just Taiwan, it's India, the Philippines, Japan.
00:15:52.460And China looks like it wants to fight a war.
00:15:55.500I'm sure they don't, but they are engaging in activities that history tells us lead to war.
00:16:01.940We talk about miscalculations as being what leads to war.
00:16:07.020Are there any particular miscalculations you're concerned about?
00:16:10.800I'll take the one on May 26th of this year, where China, a Chinese jet crossed the nose of a Royal Australian Air Force P-8 reconnaissance craft in international airspace in the South China Sea.
00:16:26.260Now, crossing the nose of another plane is very dangerous.
00:16:32.140But China then did something that perhaps no military has ever done in the history of the world.
00:16:39.800It fired flares and released chaff in the vicinity of the P-8.
00:16:46.040We can put the flares off to the side for a moment, but the chaff, you know, chaff is like aluminum foil.
00:16:52.240It is meant to confuse radar. It's released by planes.
00:16:56.720Well, the Chinese plane released the chaff so close to the P-8 that the chaff was ingested into one of the P-8's two engines, which means that if circumstances had been just slightly different, they could have lost the plane.
00:17:13.840Now, fortunately, the crew was able to bring that plane back to base, but you can imagine what would have happened if they had killed the crew.
00:17:22.240So these are the types of things that Beijing is doing and is just tempting the world.
00:17:29.660And one of these, the law of averages says that one of these dangerous intercepts is going to go horribly wrong.
00:17:35.180And then the world will have to take steps because Beijing is making it very clear that they want the world.
00:17:45.600And by the way, we're not just talking about Taiwan or parts of India or Second Thomas Scholl or the Philippines or the Senkakus in the East China Sea that are governed by Japan.
00:17:59.340We're talking about the entire world. Xi Jinping has been pressing this notion that China is the world's only sovereign state.
00:18:05.640And since 2018, the Chinese officials have been publicly talking about the moon and Mars as sovereign Chinese territory.
00:18:12.780So unless you want to be ruled by China to become a colony, we're going to have to take a stand someplace.
00:18:20.760Do we not do a good job of listening to what China is actually saying?
00:18:25.880You know, one thing that I find interesting...
00:18:27.640Anthony, we do an excellent job of purposefully not paying attention to what China is saying.
00:18:33.920We are not only oblivious, but we're determined not to listen.
00:18:37.560I mean, there are those speeches where Xi Jinping has said, and I know there's that missive on the nine no's or however many no's it is, where they're like, oh, the human rights thing.
00:18:59.780They've said, we don't do these things.
00:19:01.060Well, they've been very clear about what they want, about things that they don't do, which they obviously do do, and the things that they do.
00:19:11.580And we're not, we are purposefully ignoring it or going out of our way not to see it, even though it threatens our critical national security interests, threatens our sovereignty.
00:19:26.200We have a political class in the United States, and you do in Canada as well, that is not defending my country or your country.
00:19:38.040We'll be back with more full comment after these quick messages.
00:19:43.760Do you see glimmers of hope that we're moving in a slightly positive direction?
00:19:52.180Here in Canada, we have started rejecting some Chinese state-owned enterprises, attempted takeovers of some businesses we have here, and it was positive to see that.
00:20:03.280I saw that, I'm sure you know John Cena, the movie star wrestler.
00:20:06.640He gave a groveling apology for referring to Taiwan as a country.
00:20:09.900But then, I understand they wanted to, China didn't like the fact that in Top Gun 2, they showed decals on their flight jackets of the Taiwanese flag.
00:20:20.360And then, I guess, Paramount or whoever, Tom Cruise was like, well, too bad, deal with it.
00:20:24.320And it's the top, top grossing film of the year, and Tom Cruise's best grossing film of his entire career.
00:20:55.040But, I mean, it's not like 9-11, where it was unmistakable.
00:21:00.700So this is, that will change American opinion on a dime.
00:21:06.320But, you know, going back to this, China, we don't know 100% where SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, came from.
00:21:15.160But, Anthony, we do know some things 100%.
00:21:18.000And that is that for about five weeks, you can argue four or maybe even longer, but for weeks, Chinese leaders deliberately told the world that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmissible human to human when they knew it was highly contagious.
00:21:36.320And at the same time, while they were locking down their own country, lockdowns are controversial, but by locking down their own country, they were saying, this is what we think works.
00:21:46.000While they were locking down their own country, they were pressuring other countries not to impose travel restrictions and quarantines on arrivals from China.
00:21:54.480You put those two things together, and it's unmistakable that China deliberately spread this disease beyond its borders.
00:22:01.360That's 6.4 million people have been killed by COVID-19.
00:22:06.320When none of them should have contracted it.
00:22:10.080That's the maliciousness of this regime.
00:22:13.160And yet the American political system has yet to acknowledge that.
00:22:16.260Matter of fact, Biden has never, in his five conversations with Xi Jinping as president, has never raised the issue of the origins of COVID-19.
00:23:27.360The Chinese people in general, and it's hard to generalize over 1.41 billion people, but a lot of Chinese people are really unhappy for a lot of reasons.
00:23:37.800And it's not just because of the, quote, dynamic zero COVID policy of Xi Jinping, which, by the way, they're now, you know, we're still seeing that the regime is still imposing these draconian lockdowns across the country, especially in Hainan, in the western part of the country, and in selected areas in Beijing and Shanghai.
00:23:58.280But it's more than that, and that is the Chinese economy is in distress.
00:24:07.240We know this because the property sector looks like it's almost in free fall.
00:24:12.380And property is really important for China, somewhere between 25 to 30 percent of gross domestic product.
00:24:19.040This is the store of value for many middle class Chinese.
00:24:22.620They don't buy stocks, or they don't buy gold coins, or if they do, they still put a lot of their investment wealth into unoccupied apartments.
00:24:34.660And those unoccupied apartments have fallen precipitously in value in the first half of this year, down 30 percent by some measures, maybe more in reality.
00:24:46.080And that has really hit the middle class Chinese where it hurts.
00:24:51.420We've seen these mortgage boycotts where people who have bought these flats from property developers, but they're not going to be, you know, they're not, they're unbuilt.
00:25:04.080But people are paying mortgages to the banks on those unbuilt apartments.
00:25:07.840Well, we got the mortgage boycotts across the country.
00:25:12.720And we see the bank runs, people protesting in front of banks, which can't pay back depositors.
00:25:18.820This is, this is throughout, this is systemic.
00:25:22.980And Beijing has been able, through its coercive means, its tools to control people.
00:25:28.180But the people, to answer your question, just are not happy.
00:25:32.040They may not, they may not demonstrate every day, but you can tell from social media and from other means that the Chinese people are not happy right now.
00:25:43.020What are the general responses and reception right now of the increasing digitization of their lives that sees them tracked more and more by their government?
00:25:53.200I understand there's the social credit system that rewards and punishes the behaviors that the state approves or disapproves of.
00:26:00.740How is that, is that going smoothly for the government?
00:26:03.100Well, people are not protesting, largely because they don't have a choice.
00:26:11.000In China right now, people call it authoritarian.
00:26:15.520China may have been authoritarian during the Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao years.
00:26:44.920People don't really have a choice, though.
00:26:47.740Beijing is going to, is making progress in eliminating paper money and coins.
00:26:53.140And China actually, apart from what Beijing is doing, got to remember that Tencent and Ant Group have developed, like, the world's most sophisticated payment platforms.
00:27:07.960And the Chinese people were used to this well before the central bank started talking about the digital UN, which means that people there were happy to use these extremely efficient payment platforms.
00:27:22.980Well, then the central bank comes along and now is competing with Ant and Tencent with its digital currency, which is basically another story about how China is attacking its most successful private companies.
00:27:45.740And to a certain extent, we see that in North America as well.
00:27:49.140Not like it's being pushed by the government, but just there's a general convenience factor with carrying money around on your phone.
00:27:55.880And it's happening despite, for instance, the Federal Reserve and, you know, the Treasury Department, which are not pushing a digital currency in our country, but we're seeing the same phenomenon.
00:28:18.300My actions are actually propelling us in that direction.
00:28:20.260I like cash because, and it's not a question of surveillance, it's just, you know, suppose you're, you know, you run out of, in the middle of the night, your car breaks down and, you know, there's a small garage and the guy doesn't, you know, take, you know, whatever.
00:28:45.740So, we had an interesting debate happen here in Canada when the two Michaels, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, were arbitrarily illegally detained for well over two years.
00:28:58.520And there's a lot of talk simultaneously about how we must ban Huawei because, of course, there was the detaining of Huawei CFO, Menwang Zhu, here in Vancouver at the request of the U.S. Justice Department.
00:29:13.360It seemed like definitely something of a trade.
00:29:16.300And then finally in May, Justin Trudeau did say Huawei has been banned.
00:29:20.280We never thought he'd do it, but he did it.
00:29:23.400Is this a sign, and the other 5G nations have all done the same to varying degrees, is this a sign that we're going to make more of the right choices to, I don't know if decouple is the right term, but to insulate ourselves from this sort of stuff?
00:29:38.840Or are there still a gazillion battles ahead?
00:29:44.700And yes, there are a gazillion battles ahead.
00:29:48.120I mean, if Canada wanted to stay a five eyes country within the intelligence sharing consortium, it had to ban Huawei because otherwise, you know, the most sensitive intelligence could not be shared over Huawei networks.
00:30:05.500The thing about Trudeau was that it took him a very long time to make the only reasonable choice in these circumstances.
00:30:14.500So that shows you how powerful China is.
00:30:18.200But yeah, we are moving in the right direction.
00:30:20.100But the problem, Anthony, is that we're not moving fast enough.
00:30:23.580We are, we sort of understand the danger that China is now posing.
00:30:29.340It started to percolate through, but Beijing could, could do something in the very near term, and we would still be unprepared by we I mean, not only America, but the rest of the rest of the world.
00:30:45.380We had a couple proposals and discussions that were front and center here in Canada, in previous elections, and particularly when the two Michaels were being detained, there's a lot of public interest in this, politicians were proposing a broader ban of state owned enterprises, Chinese state owned enterprises making purchases here, I thought it just flat out ban made sense.
00:31:04.340But I guess they were going to narrow it to more sensitive industries.
00:31:09.000Another one was Canada withdrawing from the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank, which is like China's attempts to basically supplant the IMF and the World Bank is, as you know, what other things would you put on the table?
00:31:21.060Because we're kind of at a lull period where those ideas were really being sent around, but they're not really anymore.
00:31:25.540And I worry we've kind of lost interest in that.
00:31:27.420Yeah, China uses every point of contact with our country, for instance, to take down our society.
00:31:35.800So that means until we get a handle on this, we need to eliminate those points of contact.
00:31:58.960But unfortunately, China is using its position in trade to move our country in directions where it shouldn't be going and to actually destroy our country.
00:32:10.960How do we deal with the fact, though, like how we're addicted to cheap debt, we're also addicted to cheap products from China?
00:32:16.280It's kind of what's fueling our lower middle classes.
00:32:20.120And we have to make a decision whether we want to remain a free society or whether we want to buy crap at Walmart.
00:32:29.200But things are changing in that regard, though not fast enough.
00:32:59.540I'm not saying it's politically practical right now.
00:33:02.820But I'm saying that if we want to remain a free society, we're going to have to do those things which are considered to be impractical.
00:33:11.260I mean, if China kills American service people, then, yeah, people will get on board.
00:33:17.380We are seeing, as you point out, attitudes changing about China.
00:33:23.240And what was considered to be impossible before is now actually being done.
00:33:28.760But we're not moving, as I said, fast enough in that direction.
00:33:33.800There's been a lot of discussion about the ways Xi Jinping is or is not watching how Vladimir Putin's incursions into Ukraine are unfolding.
00:33:40.360What do you think China is taking away from that right now?
00:33:44.640They saw the failure of the West to stop a far weaker Russia.
00:33:50.380Last year, the United States, the 27 nations of the European Union and Great Britain had an economy 25.1 times larger than Russia's.
00:34:01.940And yet this coalition with overwhelming power couldn't stop Putin.
00:35:13.720Gordon, to bring it back full circle, talking about Taiwan, whether it's Nancy Pelosi's trip there, future trips, future discussions and relations we have with that country.
00:35:23.720What would you recommend policymakers in Canada and America or just regular Canadians who are curious about the issue?
00:35:32.100What do they need to do next and keep front of mind when it comes to Taiwan?
00:35:37.340The president of the United States needs to go into the Oval Office before the cameras.
00:35:42.280Prime Minister of Canada needs to go behind his desk in Ottawa in front of the cameras and say to Beijing, we will defend Taiwan.
00:35:50.940I think they also need to say that we will offer mutual defense treaties to Taiwan if Taiwan wants it.
00:35:58.000We should offer to recognize Taiwan as Taiwan, not as the Republic of China, if Taipei wants it.
00:36:04.580We should pre-position munitions and supplies on the island.
00:36:08.740And we should be putting troops on the island as a tripwire.
00:36:13.120We know that because a small American force sitting in South Korea has stopped a far superior North Korean military from crossing the demilitarized zone in force.
00:36:25.540We do it with 28,500 Americans, which would be wiped out in the first hour of a general war on the Korean Peninsula.
00:36:33.960But they stop the North Koreans from thinking that they can do this.
00:36:38.320We need to do the same thing with Taiwan.