I meant to write this much earlier in the semester ... but ... I've been a little busy this semester.
Anyway, it's been a long time since the world has seen a war as big as the one between Russia and Ukraine. In Europe, it's the biggest in 75 years.
In America, we tend to view the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (and the Gulf War too) as pretty big. But not really ... the wars were the easy parts of those, and largely foregone conclusions ... it was the long occupations that were problematic. The same thing with the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; or even the full-blown war between the UK and Argentina. No, we probably need to go back two generations to the 1970's to the Vietnam War for magnitude, and the fourth Arab-Israeli War for hotness, to get something that matches the last two years in Ukraine.
Even so, while the macroeconomic consequences for the U.S. have not been huge this time around, they are definitely an omnipresent concern. Witness the political ramblings over Ukraine aid that have taken place over the last few months.
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Given all this, it is useful to put in perspective than a conflict between China and Taiwan would be a much bigger deal. The scuttlebutt this week, on both the left and right, is that Iran's hugely unsuccessful attack on Israel has got the Chinese rethinking their contingency plans regarding Taiwan.
First off, just using Chapter VI in the Handbook, China is macroeconomically 6 to 10 times as big as Russia. Taiwan's economy is 3 to 4 times the size of Ukraine. So this is a much bigger deal for the whole world.
In addition, the Taiwan Strait is over a hundred miles wide. It's not exactly open ocean, but it's definitely deep enough for sinking capital ships with major loss of life (it's been 40 years, but the world was pretty shocked when the Argentinians found out the hard way that the British were fighting for keeps in the open ocean).
Secondly, both countries are richer than Russia and Ukraine. Taiwan has legitimately been considered by outsiders to be a fully-developed economy for a generation. But the conditions are reversed. Russians are about 3 times as rich as the Ukrainians. The Chinese have about 1/3 of the real GDP per capital of the Taiwanese.
The last time the world witnessed an economically poorer, but numerically superior country attacking a developed countries forces head on was ... probably China's surprise attack on the U.S. forces mopping up North Korea in 1950. It's worse than that: an economically poorer but numerically superior force arguably hasn't attacked the homeland of a richer country since the initial Arab Moslem invasions of the Persian and Byzantine empires in the 7th century.
Third, the situation for China is probably extra tempting. China has a much larger population, putting its whole economy as about 20 times larger than that of Taiwan. Russia is more like 10 to 1 over Ukraine.
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That last point is especially concerning given the 50 year international campaign of othering Taiwan.
Economically, this is right there in the PPP tables in Chapter VI of the Handbook. The World Bank doesn't provide economic data about Taiwan because it does not recognize Taiwan as existing as an independent country.
The UN does a little better by publishing some data about Taiwan, but it has excluded Taiwan from the UN itself since 1971. Yeah, it's a little laughable that it calls itself the United Nations when it excludes one of the largest economies in the world.
The backstory here is that China was coming apart at the seams for the first third of the 20th century. Eventually, a government that came to be known as Nationalist to us in the west asserted control over much of the country. Even so, there was an ongoing and significant communist rebellion (that's not really the right word for it, but there may not be a good one). They put aside their differences while fighting the Japanese, but turned on each other again in 1945 in full civil war. By 1949, the Nationalists had fled to the island of Taiwan (taking most of the ships with them).
China has successfully sold the argument that Taiwan is thus just a rebellious province, and therefore there is only one China. That position was laughed at through the 50s and 60s, but gained ascendancy in the 1970s, mostly by portraying itself as a non-aligned, Third World, country (see Chapter VI in the Handbook again). One can easily imagine that justifying a "Round 2" with the descendants of the Nationalists.
Taiwan begs to differ. The island's indigenous minority peoples aren't Chinese at all; they're closely related to Filipinos and Indonesians. The history of the Chinese in Taiwan only goes back several hundred years, and the interest of Chinese emperors in the island was tenuous at best. Then the Japanese were awarded Taiwan after a war with China, and it became part of Japan for 50 years. At the time that the Nationalists went there it was still considered to be part of occupied Japan. And in the 1952 treaty that settled World War II in Asia, the Japanese gave up title to the island, but it was not awarded back to China. It wasn't given to the Nationalists either, which probably doesn't help the situation. Really, the only way to read that is they were working under the adage that possession is 9/10 of the law.
In sum, Russia has a much better claim to some or all of Ukraine than China does to Taiwan. Russia has at least included Ukraine for 2-3 centuries, and its only been 33 years since their (at the time) amicable split.
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It is probably not wise to underestimate the stupidity of the current regime in China. They have squandered a lot of hard won international goodwill over the last ten years. Could that include invading Taiwan someday? I didn't used to think so. Now I'm not so sure.
It's also useful to keep in mind that while the world was distracted with CoVid and lockdowns that China unilaterally abrogated its treaty obligations to honor Hong Kong's distinct a pro-western developmental path. So it's definitely on the move.
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OK. Enough about how economics influences politics. Sometimes the economics works in mysterious ways.
In particular, I would be incomplete without noting that a lot of the financing that's allowed southern China to thrive comes from ... Taiwanese investors. But like many foreign investors, they've been backing away the last 10-15 years as well.
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Full reveal. It's been hard to assess this since the lockdowns, but historically China's Great Firewall has blocked this blog for expressing what I regard as realistic data and viewpoints. This was problematic for Chinese students attempting to complete my course remotely in 2020 and 2021.
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