The West has responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by imposing sanctions on Moscow and providing financial aid, intelligence and weaponry to Kyiv.
However, it has stopped short of dispatching troops.
On the surface, financial sanctions and countermeasures focused on trade might not seem to be a strong deterrent for Russia, but China is watching these events unfold with serious concerns.
The Russian economy is heavily dependent on raw materials. Due to a lack of competitiveness in its industrial and commercial sectors — an important factor in creating global trade value — Russia’s gross national product is much lower than that of China’s.
However, it is another story during wartime. Depriving citizens of brand-name clothing or video games does not impede Russia’s ability to fight, which requires food and fuel to run its steel industry.
Russia is a food-and-oil-producing country. Even if international trade is blocked, causing the value of the ruble to collapse, its military can continue operating to a high degree with the domestic redistribution of materials.
Russia is also able to bypass sanctions by relying on China, since the scale of the Chinese economy is much larger than its own. This is also why the sanctions are not biting as much as they otherwise would have. No wonder the West is frustrated by Beijing’s complicity with Moscow.
What scares China is that its situation is completely different from Russia’s. The Chinese economy, which is highly integrated with global markets, would be devastated by the kind of trade and financial sanctions that the West has imposed on Russia. China is a food-and-oil-importing country, and it would immediately face shortages should international trade be cut off. The size of the Chinese economy is also so large that it can hardly rely on any other economy to overcome the effects of sanctions.
Since food and fuel supplies are stable in Russia, anti-war demonstrations there pose little threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime. Should China face such severe trade and financial sanctions, many factories would close, resulting in massive unemployment. Serious food and fuel shortages following an unemployment crisis could lead to revolts across the country, possibly causing the kind of descent into chaos that accompanied the collapse of Chinese dynasties throughout the China’s history.
More fundamentally, Taiwan’s strategic position is quite different from Ukraine’s. Some “surrenderists” claim that the West would abandon Taiwan if it fails to defend itself, in a repeat of the US giving up on South Vietnam. Such beliefs betray a basic understanding of strategy.
Kuwait was defenseless before Iraq’s invasion in 1990, but just two days after the the country’s fall, the US quickly restored its defenses, leading to the first Gulf War. The US in 2003 again invaded Iraq, resulting in the capture and execution of then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
In terms of Kuwait’s strategic importance, it had the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves and was rescued. In comparison, Taiwan is the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing country, and its strategic position geographically is too significant to be abandoned.
Still, as the defenseless Kuwait relied primarily on the US, the country was severely damaged by the wars. Thus, Taiwan should enhance its military defenses to deter China’s aggressive ambitions with complete war preparedness.
Tommy Lin is director of Wu Fu Eye Clinic and president of the Formosa Republican Association.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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