SHARANSKY IN TAIWAN

The ripples don’t stop. The stones hurled into the world’s political lake by the people of Ukraine and Iraq keep generating ripples washing up on the borders of ever-more countries benighted by dictatorship. Now they are about to hit the shores of China. This is thanks to a Taiwanese named Frank Hsieh who has read a book by a diminutive bald ex-Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky.

This is the book – The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror – that President Bush has absorbed and is giving out to his friends. It is destined to become the most influential book of our day. If you haven’t read it yet, you simply must.

Sharansky explains the mechanics of democracy and tyranny that drive the former towards peace and freedom and the latter towards repression and the creation of external enemies. He issues a clarion call for “moral clarity” to distinguish between Free Societies and Fear Societies – an either/or with no society in between. The way to so distinguish is simple – the Town Square Test:

Can a person walk into the town square [of the society in question] and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm?

If yes, that society is free, if not, it isn’t, period. Moral clarity.

Does America (excluding PC university campuses) pass the town square test? Yes. Does Taiwan? Yes. Does China? No. No matter how much economic development China has experienced since Tienanmen in 1989, it remains a Fear Society. And Frank Hsieh knows it.

Late last month, Frank was appointed Premier of the Taiwan Government by President Chen Shui-bian. Prior to that, he was the mayor of Taiwan’s second largest city, Kaohsiung, and remains head of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which advocates Taiwan independence from China. This week, he announced his government would pursue a “one country, one system” policy, denouncing the famous “one country, two systems” hypocrisy pushed by both the Chicoms and the US State Department. The “one system” must be for Frank, not communism but democracy: China must become like Taiwan and not vice versa.

“Promoting unification with present-day China is an impossible and impractical political fantasy,” Hsieh explained to the Taipei Times on February 21. “A more sensible approach would be to help China become a more democratic society. ‘One country, one system’ means everybody is free: Free to have their own opinions, free to hold religious belief, free to elect their political representatives and free to make a decent living in whatever way they choose. If China becomes freer and democratic, it will naturally be less hostile toward Taiwan,” Hsieh said, “and problems between us will start solving themselves.”

The brilliance of this is breathtaking. It means that Taiwan is at last no longer playing defense, but taking the offense against Beijing at its most vulnerable point. Right now, everyone in Taiwan is freaked out over the “Anti-Secession Law” that the National People’s Congress, the Chicoms pretend parliament, is threatening to pass next month. The law will give Beijing the “legal” right to invade Taiwan if the latter declares independence.

Here in Washington, Congressmen like Tom Tancredo are up in arms over the ASL, demanding Congress pass a resolution to diplomatically recognize Taiwan. The Heritage Foundation held a seminar about the ASL this week, and it was packed with hundreds of worried folks. All this froth and panic – then along comes Frank Hsieh with a quick aikido move of four words, and the ASL crisis is OBE (Foggy Bottom-speak for “overtaken by events”).

How can Beijing rant and saber-rattle now when the Taiwan Government says to it gently, “Let’s forget about Taiwan independence. We want re-unification just like you. All that you need to do to reunify China and Taiwan is become democratic like us.”

This message puts Beijing on the defensive. The Chicoms now have to argue why they can’t have more democracy in China just yet. It will be much, much harder for them to ramp up a jingoistic nationalism against the traitorous-to-the-Chinese-people “splittists” of Taiwan. They will have to look elsewhere for an external enemy should a Three No’s (no water, no wives, no banks) economic crisis require one.

Premier Hsieh’s strategy will work, however, only if he is backed up by the Bush White House. Its response to Beijing’s announcement last December 17 regarding a proposed Anti-Secession Law was to have Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Japan Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura meet in Washington on February 19 and jointly declare US-Japanese cooperation to defend Taiwan.

This is an excellent start. A Japan-US alliance (predicted in To The Point, see Chicoms and Chaos ) will expand to include South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. Yet it is only defensive. As one Congressman explained to me, “Taiwan must understand that we will defend it from attack by China – but we will never retaliate. We’re not going to be landing any Marines on Chinese beaches.”

Frank Hsieh understands this all too well, that you cannot win a football game if all you do is try and prevent the other team from scoring a touchdown. He has given Bush and Condi a springboard to advance their democracy agenda inside China and better protect Taiwan at the same time. It’s a masterstroke of what I call aikido politics. All other martial arts involve blocking your opponent’s energy then counter-striking. Aikido accepts your opponent’s energy and redirects it to his disadvantage.

Premier Hsieh’s “aikido democracy” may make him the savior of Taiwan. Yet as Natan Sharansky says, fear societies require external enemies to stay in power. Deprive them of one enemy, they need to create another. Beijing won’t look too far. Right across their northeast border is a lot of sparsely-inhabited territory that used to be Chinese. Beijing’s eyes gazing hungrily upon Siberia should be making Vladimir Putin very nervous.