By Dexter Liu
Editor’s note: Mr. Liu is a naturalized American citizen of Chinese descent, whose parents escaped China in 1949 as the Communists took control. His father was prominent in the Nationalist Chinese Navy, and was actively involved in the Nationalists’ retreat to Taiwan where the free and democratic government remains today. Mr. Liu is a regular contributor to this newspaper and now lives in Oriental.
While Americans relaxed after enjoying leftovers from Thanksgiving to cheer for their favorite football teams, our friends on the island state of Taiwan were forced to scramble jet fighters to fend off warplanes from Communist China.
Ever since the Biden administration entered the White House the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ramped up its aggression against its neighbors in Asia and the Indo Pacific Region. Biden’s Afghanistan debacle signaled to the world a weak American leadership emboldening the CCP to increase their belligerence towards Japan, South Korea, and in Southeast Asia. They violated their treaty with Great Britain toughening restrictions on freedoms in Hong Kong and now openly threaten Taiwan, the island state they claim is a rogue province belonging to them.
For 72 years the United States has been a strong ally and supporter of Taiwan’s right to be free and independent of communist rule. Despite the formal diplomatic recognition of Communist China in 1979, we defended our friend who shares our American values and we led the world in the defense of human rights, democratic self-governance, and free market systems. But under recent Democratic Administrations, commitments to those principles have waned as America has gotten closer with the CCP diplomatically and economically.
Perhaps the Wuhan Virus Pandemic is a wake-up call that our dependency on the Communist Chinese has put America in a most precarious position unable to supply our own nation with basic necessities without relying heavily on a critical Chinese supply chain, one which a potentially hostile regime has the ability to hold hostage and extort demands to our detriment.
Why is it important for the United States to support Taiwan as a free and independently governed state? To answer that question, one must first consider the historical context of how modern China became a totalitarian Communist state and why Taiwan remains a free democratic republic independently governed by the island’s own duly elected government.
Chinese Communism was actually the product of a foreign invasion of China and not of a home-grown grassroots movement. In fact, it was the direct result of covert activities orchestrated by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks that began as early as 1918. Right on the heels of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin founded the Communist International or the Comintern, a spy agency with a mandate of exporting Communist Revolution worldwide. It was through this agency an army of spies were sent to China to infiltrate, recruit, propagandize and create a Communist insurgency that would ultimately take over China but be subservient to Soviet Russia. Although the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, the CCP remains in power well past their founders’ demise and has continued to occupy China for more than seven decades.
Part Two (in Dec. 30 issue) – Communism/Marxism remains antithetical to Chinese traditions and values.
Dexter is a frequent contributor to the County Compass.
