treaty – Symphony

Cadence of Conflict: Asia, March 15, 2021

SymphonyMarch 15, 2021

More pressure on China over the games and Hong Kong. According to the Chinese, treaties with China don’t obligate China. That’s how the West views it anyway. This is the war-causing confusion between the West and the Chinese…

China believes democracy and religion will destroy the Chinese. Their solution is to remove religion, free speech, and non-Chinese governments. China claims to respect these three, but thinks that they are exploited to China’s misfortune. So, China makes new laws, hoping to protect itself, then tells the West to back off.

But, the West is concerned about trusting promises. People won’t build skyscrapers on land they believe will collapse after ten years. Nor will countries and companies invest in another country if they believe the government might take over the company or arrest the officers. So, the West is concerned about “rule of law”, that laws are made, then don’t suddenly change in a way that breaks trust. As much as some old laws can be inconvenient for a government, losing trust from the world is proving much more inconvenient, as we are seeing with calls to boycott the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

This is where the contradiction comes into play. China believed that Huawei could ignore Western law while their CFO travels to Western countries. When the Huawei CFO was arrested in Canada, China was genuinely surprised. To the Chinese, “rule of law” is a mythical concept, like using English to tell a dolphin what it’s like to walk on land. So, the Chinese were surprised.

With everything happening, China is utterly and genuinely surprised. This is not what Beijing expected.

In Cadence

Cadence of Conflict: Asia, November 23, 2020

SymphonyNovember 23, 2020

“Prematurely shredded”—that’s how the “Five Eyes” alliance described the treaty allowing Hong Kong to be ruled by China. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States have decided that China broke the deal, referring to the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. The danger is in how much China can’t understand what this means.

Accusing Confucian-Communists of breaking a promise is like accusing a pig of rooting in its own feces; it doesn’t know, it doesn’t understand, it can’t do differently, and it only feels insulted. The Chinese don’t know what a promise is because they never keep them—ever. They only know what they want and that they want it now. They were never going to keep their end of the deal, and Britain knew that, and China played right along.

Broken treaties are no small matter. In a sense, Western nations see it as a blaring stain on a nation’s permanent record. Far worse than financial bankruptcy is moral bankruptcy. The West played its hand well, waiting until China overreached time and again, to a point where the evidence was overwhelming, past the point where the people had come to the same conclusion long ago. Western governments can’t operate without the will of their people, which is another thing China doesn’t understand.

In its attempt at a hostile takeover of the world, China needed the goodwill of the masses. It’s action in Hong Kong over the past year stirred anything but goodwill. Western governments will be in trouble with their taxpayers if they don’t take action against China.

So, one more stone falls into the arch of Western action against China. With a declared-broken treaty on record, once the Chinese gets their ass handed to them, permanent surrender of Hong Kong—including the New Territories—will be in the growing list of the West’s unconditional terms. And, China made it all possible.

In Cadence

Cadence of Conflict: Asia, June 1, 2020

SymphonyJune 1, 2020June 1, 2020

China says every effort will be made for peaceful reunification with Taiwan as long as there remains hope; force is the last resort. But, Taiwan wants peaceful freedom from tyranny; force is the last resort. There is no hope for China to find any reunification with Taiwan of any kind. China has removed any desire for peaceful reunification with it’s pressured propaganda campaigns around the world and in Taiwan, not to mention terrible handling of Hong Kong. Taiwan has prevented any hope of forceful reunification by arming to the teeth in response to China’s backfired PR campaigns.

Taking Taiwan would hurt and cost both lives and resources. And, Russia knows this. With steep cliffs on the east coast, complex deltas plains on the west coast, and a capital city inside a mountain bowl at the north, any beach landing would make Normandy Beach look like a walk in the park. With mountains peaking even higher than Fuji, China faces a jungle battle like halted America in Vietnam, except this battle would only be uphill.

If China prioritized such a venture, using either or both of its two copied aircraft carriers with its copied fighter jets and its copied missiles and copied drones, China’s neighbors would see an opportunity even if the US didn’t respond with any of its forty-four home-made carriers.

India, with one billion people, is no forced-friend of China, especially in recent months. A Taiwan distraction would be the perfect chance to free Tibet. Two thousand years of anti-friendship relations between Vietnam and China would require enormous numbers of soldiers to keep the Vietnamese from taking Nanjing as a pathway to the island of Hainan. Vietnam has a motive anyway, keep China at a safer distance for its history of aggression. With China occupied at the west and east while squandering enormous forces at Taiwan, Japan—a larger economy than India—has its own grudge and would love the chance for target practice near Beijing. None of the other countries small enough to be bought off and bullied would bring much help nor will to China’s aid.

Then, there’s the US after China would be in enough trouble. Russia doesn’t want more trouble, for all Moscow’s effort to seduce Europe by appearing pacifist. If China ever did manage to reach a Pyrrhic victory over Taiwan, China would have no defenses left, Tibet might be gone, then Japan and Vietnam would have taken their own bits out of the map. China would be clean pickings between the US and China’s frenemy Russia.

Russia is no friend of China. Who do you think gave China the idea of this wasted pursuit? All of that assumes things go well with the one billion Chinese who hate their government more than ever before in history.

So, why did Taiwan request a lower-grade missile—because it comes with a vehicle Taiwan already has? It’s not because Taiwan actually needs it. No. Talking about arming again to the teeth already armed to puts a kind of social pressure on Beijing, a sense of urgency. Taiwan sees what China is up against. Taiwan knows that Confucian culture can’t pass up the opportunity to self-destruct in order to save face. Taiwan’s policy is clear: Bring it.

In Cadence

Cadence of Conflict, Asia, July 8, 2019

SymphonyJuly 8, 2019July 8, 2019

China has been had. It has been had by Western freedom. It has been had by its own culture’s psychopathology. It has been had by the concept of a promise—something the Chinese can’t understand, let alone keep. It has been had by Marxist propaganda. And, it is still being had by its obsession with power.

British officials are turning their eyes toward Hong Kong. This is a move of revival in the English-speaking world. The English have a conscience. It is more than political smoke-blowing. Britain fully intends to protect the people of Hong Kong. And, they can do it because China has already reneged on a treaty registered with the United Nations.

China has difficulty understanding the concept of a promise. Living fully and wholly by the psychopathology of Gorgias—that all statements are lies and only rhetoric matters—the Chinese truly believe that their promise to not interfere with Hong Kong until 2047 is irrelevant trivia. They truly believe that if the world distrusts China for breaking treaty, it would be the world just looking for ways to be mean to poor, suffering, victimized China. They truly believe that any “distrust” from the West, citing broken promises, would be pure propaganda from any and all, everywhere on Earth.

The British dealt with China for centuries. They must have at least suspected that China would break treaty. In fair honesty, by allowing a fifty year window, they showed high hopes that China would at least be capable of pretending to have a conscience for half a century. If China could lie to the world for fifty years and conceal its spite for any race lacking Han blood—if China could at least pretend to be nice for fifty years—then perhaps Hong Kong would be safe long after 2047. Britain gave China the benefit of the doubt.

But, China didn’t make it fifty years, not even half that.

Call it temptation. Call it the “Tienanmen fix”. China can’t not oppress and boss and dominate. From Beijing, Hong Kong calls, begging, “Oppress me! Oppress me!”

From Xi Jinping’s perspective is one of power. He believes that the Russian Communist downfall of 1989 happened because the Communists didn’t oppress enough. It never occurs to him that people do not overthrow governments that they trust—but to a psychopath, all statements are lies and all protests are propaganda. People would only hate an oppressive government, so they think, because someone told them to.

Hong Kong knows differently. Though they do not have complete self-rule, they do have free speech, free markets, free press, and free religion. To them, China stinks, and not only from the pollution of mismanagement.

Still, China wants to force its embrace upon the free people of Hong Kong. The legal justice system has a term for criminals who force their love on unwilling victims. In that scenario, everyone knows who everyone is.

Like an alcoholic claiming that alcohol is the medicine, China sees voluntary support as a threat—as a lack of power—and that power is the cure for power resisted. China has been had by everyone, its own vices above all else.