Crawling from the Wreckage (24 page)

In many parts of the world it is politically unacceptable to suggest that the sheer number of people can be a problem. Population control is startlingly absent, for example, from discussions about how to minimize climate change. This is partly due to concerns about the religious sensibilities of some people, and partly because of the human-rights issues that it raises.

In addition to the human-rights abuses implicit in the one-child policy, there are grave demographic implications. One is the shrinking number of people in the working-age population who have to provide for a relatively large aged and retired population. Another, specific to societies where sons are seen as far more desirable than daughters, is a wave of selective abortions and female infanticide.

There have been relaxations in the one-child policy over the years—ethnic minorities are largely exempt from the rules, and rural families whose first child is female are allowed a second try—but almost two-thirds of Chinese families really do have only one child. And the fact that the government is determined to retain the policy suggests that it intends to bring the population down in the longer run, whatever the collateral social damage.

Most ecologists would say that China is well beyond its long-term “carrying capacity,” even with its present population. Maybe the government is actually listening to them. Maybe it also knows that climate change will not be kind to China. There are things worse than a one-child policy. Famine, social disintegration and civil war, for example.

It’s not entirely true that the price of this achievement was paid only by girls who were never born. There were also a great many boys who were not born. I don’t belong to the “every sperm is sacred” brigade, so I don’t know how to calculate what kind of loss this is. Should we mourn the five or ten million Canadian babies who were not born in the past fifty years because the birth rate fell precipitously after the 1950s? Just the same, there was a particular burden borne by the girls, especially in rural areas in the early years of the one-child policy, when the female babies were often born and then killed. And now there is another kind of price to be paid
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We all know about the problem of China’s missing girls: the tens of millions of female babies who were selectively aborted after their sex was determined by ultrasound, or were born and then just allowed to die, as families seeking sons took drastic measures to cope with the one-child-per-family rule. We pay less attention to the problem of the surplus boys, but it is very real.

By 2020, China will have about forty million more men of marriageable age than it has women for them to marry, and this is not just a social problem. It is a potentially catastrophic political problem as well. No sane government would want to rule over a country where there are forty million unattached males between the ages of twenty and forty rattling around with nobody to go home to in the evenings. This is a recipe for riots, even revolution. The solution? If China has not made enough girls, it will have to import them.

China is not a country that welcomes immigration for obvious demographic reasons but also for deeply rooted cultural reasons. There is great pride in the long history and the cultural and even racial homogeneity of the Han Chinese population, which often verges on a polite form of racism. Foreign brides often have a hard time fitting into Chinese families who are less than delighted by their son’s choice. But China as a whole no longer has a choice in the matter.

There are already tens of millions of Chinese men condemned to lives of loneliness and celibacy, or at best furtive visits to prostitutes. They live in an economy that is rapidly growing richer, and out there, in the poorer countries of Asia, are millions of young women who would be happy to ease their loneliness and share their prosperity. The solution is obvious, and no government could stop it. No sane government would want to.

The implications of this impending huge influx of foreign brides are very large. China has never seen immigration on this scale before, and it is bound to resist the big cultural changes that come with it. Tens of millions of the next generation of children born in China will have foreign mothers and relatives abroad who expect to be visited or to come and visit once in a while. There will be some personal tragedies and a great deal of happiness, and, at the end of it all, China will be a changed place.

Changed for the better, for the most part. It’s just a pity about all those Chinese girls, aborted, killed as infants or allowed to die of neglect, who won’t be around to see it.

Here’s an encouraging note, though. After eight years of really worrisome confrontation, relations between the People’s Republic and Taiwan are on the mend
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Mating is a notoriously tricky business for porcupines, but the first date is an especially awkward transaction. Likewise for prickly customers like China and Taiwan: when a high-level Chinese delegation arrived in Taiwan on Monday for landmark talks on closer relations, the Taiwan police prevented people on the roads into Taipei from waving Taiwan flags in order not to hurt the visitors’ feelings.

The two countries (or one country, if you prefer) broke apart almost sixty years ago, and until this week, it was not even possible to travel directly between them: Taiwan-China flights had to go through Hong Kong, and ships had to stop off at the Japanese island of Okinawa. The 180-kilometre-wide Taiwan Strait remains one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world, with an estimated 1,300 Chinese missiles pointing at the island of Taiwan.

Even under the new government of President Ma Ying-jeou, which is committed to improving relations with the mainland, Taiwan keeps its defences up. Taipei recently signed its largest-ever arms deal with the U.S., agreeing on a $6.5 billion package of guided missiles, attack helicopters and other advanced weaponry. Beijing retaliated by cancelling a series of scheduled meetings between Chinese and U.S. generals—but it did not cancel the visit of Chen Yunlin, the most senior Communist official ever to set foot in Taiwan.

The first results of the encounter are already known: in future, cargo ships will be allowed to sail directly between Taiwanese and Chinese ports, and there will be over a hundred direct flights a week between cities in Taiwan and China. There are hopes, especially in Taiwan, that
this will lead to greatly increased trade between the two states, and the next round of talks (which will be held every six months) will focus on closer financial ties as well.

But where is all this leading? Reunification? The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (
DPP
) in Taiwan fears so, and a million of its supporters across Taiwan demonstrated against the meeting last week. For his part, President Ma swears that he will make no moves that compromise Taiwan’s sovereignty.

Well, then, could there be a permanent two-state solution in which Beijing and Taipei recognize each other as legitimate governments of independent countries? Beijing’s leaders would rather die in a ditch, and so would many ordinary Chinese for whom the unity of the motherland is sacred. The truth is that neither side really knows the destination of this voyage, but they are nevertheless setting out on it together.

There have been great changes in China, where prosperity has soared and the ruling Communist Party has scrapped most of its ideology over the past quarter-century, but Taiwan has changed even more. Sixty years ago, after all, the Nationalist Party that ruled the island for so long was almost identical to the Communist Party in its structure, nationalism, and authoritarian style. Both parties were formed in the wave of nationalist fervour that swept China after the 1911 revolution overthrew the monarchy, and Chiang Kai-shek, who led the Nationalist Party for fifty years until his death in 1975, was just as autocratic as his great rival Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party. But the Nationalists lost the civil war in 1949 and withdrew to Taiwan, where American sea power prevented the Communists from following, and so Taipei became the seat of the government-in-exile of the Republic of China.

That, at least, was how Chiang saw it, and he harshly suppressed any expressions of Taiwan separatism. His dream was to return to Beijing in triumph as the leader of a reunited China. But in the quarter-century after Chiang’s death, the Nationalist Party in Taiwan, while remaining dedicated to a united China in principle, gradually moved towards a fully democratic system—and so lost power in 2000 to the
DPP
, a separatist party that wanted to declare an independent Taiwan.

There was genuine support for that goal in Taiwan, especially in the south, but it was never a real possibility: Beijing made it clear that a declaration of independence would trigger an invasion. So, after eight
years of economic stagnation and growing corruption, the separatist
DPP
lost power in last March’s elections, and the Nationalists returned to power under Ma. They remain committed in principle to the reunification of China, but not under a Communist dictatorship.

Improving trade with China is very important to Taiwan, which has not done well economically in recent years: the average Taiwanese still earns about five times as much as the average mainland Chinese, but the gap is narrowing. However, closer political ties are more problematic, and the military still stand ready on both sides of the straits. The two governments may be setting off on a voyage to nowhere, but at least it has started well.

What follows is a more detailed examination of a single event than you’ll find anywhere else in the book, and there’s a reason for that. To paraphrase George W. Bush, a lot more shit goes on in a war than ever comes out in most of the media coverage, and I don’t mean the atrocities. I mean the real motives of the players, and the way they measure success or failure, and just how much, or how little, people’s lives count in those calculations. (Civilians generally don’t count for very much.)

This is about the war that Israel and Hezbollah, the Shiite guerrilla fighters based in southern Lebanon, fought in the summer of 2006. It was obviously one-sided in the sense that Hezbollah has no air force, no navy and no tanks, but it did have rockets that could be fired from almost anywhere in southern Lebanon and reach somewhere in northern Israel. They were not very big or very accurate rockets, but the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) could not ignore them
.

The trigger for the war was a Hezbollah snatch operation: two IDF
armoured Humvees patrolling the border were ambushed by anti-tank missiles while other Hezbollah militants fired rockets at an Israeli border town as a diversion. Three Israeli soldiers in the vehicles were killed and the other two were taken as captives. Five more Israeli soldiers were killed in a failed rescue attempt, while Israel launched a massive air and naval bombardment across Lebanon, striking not just Hezbollah but targets across the whole of Lebanon. After some delay, Hezbollah responded by launching hundreds of rockets at towns and cities across northern Israel. Nothing was quite as it seemed, however, for both Israel and Hezbollah (though not the Lebanese government) had been planning and preparing for this war for several years. War is the continuation of politics by other means, as Karl von Clausewitz, the great military philosopher, almost said, and political strategies in the Middle East are particularly subtle, intricate and cynical. The wars, of course, have the same character
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“What they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over,” said President George W. Bush over an unnoticed open microphone at the St. Petersburg summit on Sunday, but it isn’t really that simple. There are two sides in every fight, and Israel is doing some shit, too.

Hezbollah certainly started the fight (by crossing Israel’s border and taking two soldiers hostage), but it is not clear that either Syria or Iran is the mastermind behind the operation. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is perfectly capable of taking this initiative on his own.

True, the rockets that have been raining down on northern Israel (two thousand so far, leaving sixteen Israeli civilians dead) were made in Iran. But then the F-16s and Apache gunships that are pounding Lebanon (130 Lebanese civilians dead so far) were made in the United States, and that doesn’t mean that Washington ordered the Israeli offensive against Lebanon.

Nasrallah knew that the Israeli retaliation for the kidnapping would fall mainly on innocent Lebanese (because they are much easier targets than his elusive guerrillas), but he doesn’t care. He had a few surprises
up his sleeve, like longer-range rockets that could strike deep into Israel and radar-guided Silkworm anti-ship missiles to attack the Israeli warships that used to shell the Lebanese coast with impunity. And if he manages to fight Israel to a draw, he will come out of this the most popular Arab leader since Gamal Abdel Nasser.

General Dan Halutz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was also spoiling for a fight. His major concern has been that Israel’s “deterrent power” has gone into decline, and he wanted to re-establish it. Some Israeli defence analysts, like Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University, believe that the plan for the massive strikes against Lebanon has been sitting on the shelf for several years, awaiting a provocation that would justify putting it into effect. But what does “deterrent power” actually mean?

Understand that, and you understand the remarkable savagery of the Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Of course
they are a “disproportionate use of force,” as French President Jacques Chirac called them the other day. That is the whole point. Israel’s “deterrent power” lies in its demonstrated will and ability to kill and destroy on a vastly greater scale than anybody attacking it can manage. Its enemies must know that if one Israeli is killed, a dozen or even a hundred Arabs will die.