The author repeats a ridiculous fallacy that is common and one that tries to lull us into inaction when we think about the possibility that China will be a threat to us:
The other fact is that, if, by chance, China were to choose this awful moment to seek to do with Taiwan what it has done with Hong Kong and Macao -- eliminating them as a separate entity -- there would be virtually nothing the United States could do about it, stretched as we are militarily in Iraq. Fortunately, it is unlikely that China will do what it could do in that domain because it knows that eventually, for a combination of economic and political reasons, Taiwan will drop like a ripe fruit into its hands. Why raise a terrible fuss by grabbing by force what is going to come to you in any case? The Chinese also have a much longer sense of time than Americans do: 50 or 100 years is virtually nothing when your country has a history 7,000 years long and considers itself "the center of the world." [emphasis added]
I'll ignore the ridiculous notion that we couldn't do anything about a Chinese attack on Taiwan because of Iraq. Iraq is an Army and Marine fight. Taiwan would be a naval and aerial battle with limited US ground forces required. Our Navy and Air Force combat units are not tied down in Iraq so we could fight the Chinese if we had to. What the author says after that is what I want to address.
What is with this notion that the Chinese don't think in the same terms of time as we do? So what if their civilization is 7,000 years old? Are China's leaders in their early three thousands and looking forward to another thousand years of life? Why on earth would people who will die after lives as short as ours think in terms of a century when they contemplate their policies?
Look, the people that brought us the Great Leap Forward are not people who think that time is virtually irrelevant. They were clearly in a hurry under Mao. And today the Chinese are on a crash program to create the military power to invade Taiwan. I see no assumptions of grabbing Taiwan like a ripe fruit at some far future point of time. I see a country that knows that time is not on its side and that they need to do something soon if they are to do anything at all.
I've said it before, were I God of the Chinese I'd invade Taiwan on the eve of the 2008 Peking Olympics. Nobody would ever suspect the Chinese would mess up that pageant by grabbing Taiwan.
But if you were in Peking and believed that Taiwan was yours and had made recovering the island your justification for power, stated nothing was more important, and saw Taiwan building up forces that by the end of the decade might make Taiwan too tough to crack, wouldn't you sacrifice a mere Olympics game to capture Taiwan?
Heck, the Chinese might just figure that the West's outrage would wear out in a few decades. Because if you think in centuries, the summer Olympics of 2058 or 2108 are really just around the corner. Peking would think nothing of waiting until then, right?
Don't let some mythical longer sense of time lull us into thinking the Chinese aren't trying very hard to get Taiwan by the end of the decade.
