WAR AND THE OLYMPICS

Last week was Europe. This week it’s Asia. I’ve been giving speeches and meeting with folks in Hong Kong, Singapore, and now here in Taiwan about how to democratize China.

The text of one of these speeches, delivered at Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, is a companion article following this, entitled, Freedom and Peace in China.

The meetings with democracy activists discussed the extraordinary urgency in transforming dictatorship in China to democracy within the next 15 to 18 months. For that may be all the time Taiwan has before China attacks, and the US is drawn into a full scale war that could go all-out nuclear.

The Beijing Olympics are to be held in the summer of 2008. That’s 32 months from now. For all the saber-rattling China has indulged in over Taiwan, most Taiwanese figure they’ve got until after 2008 before the Chicoms will consider a military assault upon them. It really startles them to hear they may have only months and not years to go.

Both the Chinese economy and government are built on sand. There are now an average of well over one thousand, approaching two thousand, anti-government riots and protests throughout China every week.

Just imagine if there were a thousand or more riots and protests, often violent, in the US every week. How confident would you feel about the government’s stability?

The banks are the mainstay of the Chinese economy, primarily the “Big Four” government banks, and they are broke. The government has pumped in close to half a trillion dollars in the last year or so to try and keep them afloat, and is desperately trying to sucker foreign investors into buying small percentages of their shares.

But the bottom line is that the banks have far more “NPLs” (non-performing loans) on their books – money the government forced them to hand out to “SOEs” (state-owned enterprises) which will never be paid back – than they have assets.

Imagine if all the major American banks had more uncollectable liabilities than they had assets. How confident would you be regarding the stability of the US economy?

The ruination of the Chinese environment, the scope of ecological damage to China, is almost beyond description. So many mountain ranges have been so denuded of forests that disastrous floods in the south are commonplace, while in the north, water riots are commonplace because the water table in most cities including Beijing is dropping.

What water there is incredibly polluted. The benzene spill caused by a chemical plant explosion into the Songhua River in far northern China last month caused the city of Harbin to shut down its water supply for several days, and now, as the river flows into the Amur, the Russian city of Khabarovsk has to do the same.

This week, a state-owned smelter in southern China dumped so much cadmium in the Bei River that the city of Shaoguan had to shut its water supply.

But countless millions of rural Chinese are not so lucky as city-dwellers who are forewarned. Polluted water from factories and mines for them are a regular occurrence – and their health is suffering drastically.

The costs of ecological damage, the costs of pollution to people’s health, are not factored in to calculations of China’s GDP – which was just revised upward by the Beijing government this week in a blaze of publicity. If the costs of ecological damage and pollution were accounted for, China’s GDP would have to be revised downward, and dramatically so.

Put all of this together, and add the growing corruption at every level of Chinese society, and there emerges the very large possibility that Beijing cannot wait until 2008.

The Olympics is Communist China’s coming-out party where the Chicoms get to be accepted into the world as a full-fledged social and political power. They cannot afford to have their country collapsing into chaos during the party. The amount of prestige and “face” they have invested in a successful Olympics is astronomical.

The traditional way for dictatorships to forestall chaos and collapse is war – and the obvious target is the “renegade province” of de facto independent Taiwan.

When the Chicoms conducted their massacre of the democracy demonstrators at Tienanmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the world was aghast, and said it would not tolerate such brutality. So the Chicoms washed the bloodstains off the stones of Tienanmen and said nothing happened – the videos of the massacre everyone on the planet outside of China saw on television were all a lie – and sure enough, within a year or so, the world went back to business with China.

The Chicoms figure they will need at least 12-15 months to recover from a war with Taiwan (and possibly the US, in defending Taiwan) before the Olympics. Subtract that from 32, and subtract another 3 months for conducting the war (mostly consisting of a rain of missile strikes upon Taiwan), and you get that war less than a year and a half from now.

That is why I said in all my speeches this week that the democratization of China is the most important cause for peace in the world today.

The world cannot tolerate China being a global bully, and China cannot tolerate being a dictatorship for very much longer. Ending the Chicoms’ monopoly of power is the only way to have peace in Asia. The strategies to do this is what’s being talked about here in Taipei.