Taiwan, Ukraine, and the English-Speaking World’s Open Secret

“Governments . . . deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed[.]” — one of five “self-evident” truths enumerated in our Declaration of Independence.

One surprising thing about our world today is the extraordinary influence of English speakers. It’s well known that the US has only about 4.2% of the world’s population. But add in all the population of other notable English-speaking lands, and the total is not much more. All together, the populations of the US, Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand amount to less than 478 million people, or about 6% of our species’ estimated current population.

That’s less than one in sixteen people. Only when you add nations in which English is a “lingua franca,” but hardly the dominant day-to-day tongue, such as India and South Africa, does English begin to look like a globally significant language. And yet English has in fact become the dominant language globally in commerce, trade, air travel, science, diplomacy and arguably even entertainment. It’s the world’s favorite second language, by far.

Why is this so?

You can argue, as I have done, that the English language has intrinsic advantages of compactness, brevity, and precision (if not ease of spelling!), which facilitate abstract thought. Its version of the Roman alphabet is the world’s simplest writing system, with the possible exception of Korean Hangul. All who have studied instructions for using appliances, written in several alphabetic languages, know that the English version is invariably the shortest.

But are simplicity and efficiency alone enough to explain the global predominance of English? I think not. The culture, values and humanity behind the language seem to have made more of a difference.

To see the point, consider Britain’s global position at the time of our American independence, 1776. This tiny island nation bestrode the world like a colossus. The great fleets of Chinese Admiral Cheng He (sometimes transliterated “Cheng Ho”), which had explored most of the world first, had faded into history. China had turned inward upon itself. The great Mongol empire, crippled by the Black Plague and dissipated by distance, was only a memory. Britain’s rival European powers—France, Holland, Portugal and Spain—did some colonizing, too. But they had nothing like Britain’s fleet. Some 400 British ships fought us Americans in our Revolutionary War alone. No rival power could match that fleet, the greatest ever assembled since ancient China’s heyday.

Britain lost that war, and we won our independence. But our win was something of a miracle, by dint of distance, the help of France, and sheer dogged perseverance. The great historian David McCollough outlined the improbability of our victory in his book 1776. Until the late twentieth century, that was the longest war (six years) that we Americans had ever fought. The mighty British Empire, which had fought it to squeeze us financially (remember “taxation without representation”?), had had to chalk up a big, costly loss.

But the Brits learned their lesson. Never again did they squeeze their colonies as hard as they had squeezed us. Even Australia, which had started out as a penal colony, eventually had its own elected government, ruled loosely by an appointed governor, whose actual power faded gradually over the centuries like the British monarch’s own.

The end result came last year, when Queen Elizabeth II died. She died a “monarch” in name only, with no political power at all. Her only “power” came from the example of own intelligence, caring, devotion to duty, and Reason. Yet she died the most widely revered monarch in human history. Even some former colonies, whose non-white people had been subjected to racism and disdain, paid her respect.

The reason: Britain had ruled with a little delicacy and finesse. It had preferred loyal subjects to restive and sullen slaves. It had squeezed just a little more softly and ruled just a little more humanely than the other colonial powers. And that made all the difference.

I saw an example of this with my own eyes on visiting New Zealand in 1996. The native people there, the Māori, were protesting the government’s failure to observe the Treaty of Waitangi, which the British had made with 540 Māori chiefs in 1840. At stake were rights to land and commerce on the more populous North Island worth billions of dollars. By 2018, there had been settlements under the Treaty, in the Māori’s favor, amounting in total to $2.24 billion..

Other examples of English-speaking people’s concessions and compromises are now the stuff of history. In 1947, Britain agreed to India and Pakistan becoming independent after a long civil struggle, but with little open warfare. In the mid-1960s, the US passed legislation abolishing the Jim Crow era of apartheid in the American South for descendants of slaves. In the period 1990-1994, South Africa abolished its own stricter Apartheid and eventually established a democratic government.

All these transformations took place without major warfare, or anything like our own War of Independence. To be sure, all required brilliant leadership on the part of extraordinary people of color, respectively, Mahatma Gandhi, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Our own American transformation is still a work in progress nearly sixty years later. But, so far, as tentative and partial as they all may be, these transformations all occurred without the destruction of entire cities, massacres of civilians by militaries, the horrible, bloody battles, the confinement of prisoners of war, and the sorts of massive extrajudicial murders, rapes and other war crimes that we see now in Ukraine.

And so we come to the nub of this essay: will Taiwan meet the same fate as Ukraine?

We need not dwell on Ukraine’s sad fate. Russia’s unprovoked invasion cited no law, let alone a negotiated treaty. Putin rationalized it with unilateral fantasies of a common “race” and culture, citing the forced “unity” under the Soviet Union but eliding the great Stalin-caused famine, which Ukrainians call the “Holodomor.” Those rationalizations were, and are, nothing more than transparent excuses for imperialism.

The result, so far, has been horrific, and the war has months or years to run. Almost one-third of Ukraine’s vast population has fled, whether abroad or internally. Eurasia’s “breadbasket” is sowed with land mines that will take decades to clear. Innocent civilians have been starved, murdered, tortured and raped. Beautiful cities and quiet towns are now little more than rubble, with hospitals, theaters, libraries, monuments, and apartment blocks obliterated. It would be hard to imagine a course of action more brutal, stupid and cruel.

So as Xi Jinping turns his lustful eyes toward Taiwan, what will it be? Will the end result look more like Ukraine today, or more like New Zealand under the Treaty of Waitangi?

There is reason to hope. The last time China mounted a major, unprovoked external invasion was under Mongol leadership, in the thirteenth century, against Japan. Great tropical cyclones destroyed the Chinese fleet, twice. (The Japanese named these saving cyclones “kami kaze or “divine wind,” the same name they later applied to their own suicide bombers in World War II.) In all the intervening time, China has foregone unilateral, unprovoked military expansion, preferring to deal with its neighbors by means of diplomacy, commerce and the sheer pressure of its size.

Will Xi forsake this near-millennial tradition of peace and trade for brutal and destructive expansion? Will he risk destroying TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company—the world’s most advanced chip-making plant, which now dominates global supply? Will he risk maiming the industrial and commercial infrastructure that supports it, without which no such sophisticated enterprise can thrive? Will he, like our own infamous Lieutenant Calley, the convicted author of the Mi Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, think he has to destroy the village in order to save it?

Men age more like eggs than wine. They tend to stink as they get older. This is especially true of tyrants, who have few restraints on their dark, senile whims. So it’s certainly possible that Taiwan could end up like Ukraine. But it hardly seems likely. Xi seems far less brutal, stupid and cruel than Putin, and China’s history as a great civilization cautions against him assuming that role.

There is a middle ground. Xi could isolate Taiwan with a naval and air blockade and so bring it to its knees without massive destruction. Most or all of the fighting would occur in the air or at sea, with most or all of the human casualties confined to military personnel. China has the advantages of propinquity, its huge population, and distance from the United States. With patience, skill, and a bit of luck, Xi might “take” Taiwan by isolating it by military means and bringing it to its knees without destroying it.

But then, what would he have? He would, I think, have another Hong Kong.

Mere years ago, Hong Kong was Asia’s undisputed financial center, the place where people with money went to make deals. Now it’s a mere shell of its former self. With literally decades of warning under the 1997 “one country, two systems” treaty, Hong Kongers having money and ideas exploited their British citizenship to emigrate to, or buy second homes in, London, Melbourne, Vancouver, Sydney, or Toronto. Some went to America: Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco. Now, after the pandemic has shown the world how easy it is to work remotely (let alone in an abstract “hands off” field like finance), there is no reason for bankers or brokers to live as sullen, restive slaves.

So Hong Kong’s days as a global financial center are over. It can’t compete as a manufacturing center with Guangzhou, right next door, because China’s great factories are already there. Of all the great business movers and shakers that once inhabited Hong Kong, only the courageous media billionaire Jimmy Lai stayed long enough to go to jail.

Xi Jinping has ample intelligence to understand that his political “victory” over Hong Kong was pyrrhic. He “won” the city by squeezing the life and commerce out of it. But it will never be the same again. Henceforth it will be just another coastal Chinese city, never again a subject of foreigners’ envy or dreams.

Will Xi apply that lesson to Taiwan? There are differences, to be sure. Chip-making is not like banking; it requires massive, extremely expensive factories, with huge, delicate and ponderous machines. Its work can’t be done remotely. And Taiwanese do not, as a birthright, have the international citizenship of once-British Hong Kongers.

But necessity would make a way. Already, the US and Europe are ramping up their domestic chip-making capacity, despite the difficulty of doing so and the greater costs of production there. That, in fact, is the entire purpose of President Biden’s recent Chips and Science Act, with its $280 billion of funding and subsidies for domestic research and chip production.

As for people, skilled chip-makers now have globally recognized value, much as Hong Kong’s bankers once did. Most of them already read or speak English because that’s the language of the engineers and scientists who created and designed chips in the first place. Xi would have to shoot down civilian aircraft and patrol all of Taiwan’s coasts, day and night, to keep Taiwan’s skilled chip-makers in. If he didn’t, they would flee, just as have Hong Kong’s bankers and brokers.

Xi is one of the world’s most intelligent leaders, period. Among autocrats, he is by far the smartest. Surely he understands these realities. And he can change his mind. His dime-turnabout on Covid appears to have resurrected China’s industry and commerce, albeit at the estimated cost of over a million Chinese lives. His abandonment of China’s one-child policy, although a potential disaster for our planet, also shows flexibility.

As befits their long history, the Chinese, as a culture, value patience. From modern China’s founding in 1949, China’s leaders have yearned to incorporate Taiwan. But so far, they have understood that a truly successful reuniting requires the “consent of the governed.” Force will, if it doesn’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, make the goose sterile, as Hong Kong now has become.

China’s top governing committee, its Plenum, used to have nine members. Two were effective apprentices, waiting in the wings to assume China’s top posts after a ten-year period. If the Plenum were still that way, and not crippled at Xi’s whim, I think China might stay the course as a patient suitor. But Xi is only one man, and there’s the rub. China might have to wait beyond his lifetime to attract Taiwan into the fold without force. And Xi, as he ages, might morph into Putin light, without the stamina to wait for economic growth, prosperity, ties of culture and language, and social change to produce the results he seeks.

So an old man’s impatience might yet reproduce another Ukraine in the East. And that, dear readers, is what makes democracy, as Churchill said, the worst system in the world, except for all the others. Unlike an aging tyrant, a whole people can wait for change to occur naturally, as long as it takes, without seeking to speed it by counterproductive, brutal force. Let us all hope that the debacle of Xi’s “zero-Covid” policy has taught Xi a lesson, just as our own Revolutionary War once taught the British Crown.



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