One China policy, tourism, commodity exchange and the new meaning of sovereignty


The one China policy has rested on an ambiguous unwillingness to acknowledge the truth. In recent years the unwillingness resided mostly within official U.S. policy as both China and Taiwan were beginning to make public statements that revealed their own disbelief in the myth of one China, although in different ways and to different ends. Taiwan began to speak of independence meaning that they acknowledged that they were not really the head of all of China in exile. China on the other hand reacts not with the threat of a police action to bring in a wayward province but rather that any forceful attempt to prevent Taiwan's independence would in fact be a military action within the international arena. Now the US in its diplomatic language is moving away from the ambiguous formulation of one China to assert that neither side should disturb the balance. The question why interests me. Certainly the United States has not avoided bellicose language in other equally or more sensitive situations. Why not say to both Taiwan and China that military engagement between them is unacceptable and that should it begin the U.S. would intervene to maintain the current situation of de facto sovereignty of each.

The answer has to do with the changing understanding of sovereignty in a world where commercial forms of exchange distribute power and authority along an economic rather than a political axis. In the eyes of the U.S, China is powerful because it is both a vast market and a growing producer of goods. China currently is a market for both goods and services but the day is soon upon us when there will be very little of either that is essential to China's well being. As China's universities and other knowledge industries grow the U.S. will no longer be in the enviable position of controlling desired technology. What we will be able to transfer will be only those commodities and services that are perceived as desirable rather than practically useful. Thus the power relationship between nations becomes a matter of the manipulation of the desires of the buying masses. Diplomatic relations themselves will be a matter fully subordinated to satisfying the expectations of the people.

The United States as the agent of the American buying public needs to export desired items (such as entertainment) in order to permit that buying public to purchase what it needs from the world's productive economies. Currently, in the case of China, in addition to such items as clothing and increasingly high-tech items, are the items of cultural exchange as transfered through tourism. In short we need to sustain exchange between the U.S. and both China and Taiwan. To do this our products must be desired by the buying masses. For this to be possible the United States cannot risk disturbing the political ecology of the China-Taiwan relationship.

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Posted: Thu - December 11, 2003 at 09:13 PM      

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