Brookings
Date: August 20, 2020
By: Robert Kagan

Editor's Note: 

That Chinese President Xi Jinping has now decided to end the Hong Kong charade once and for all has ominous implications for Taiwan, writes Robert Kagan. Is the United States prepared to go beyond statements and sanctions? This piece was originally published in the Washington Post.

When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, and the United States and the League of Nations began peppering them with public notes and statements calling on them to desist, humorist Will Rogers observed that, “every time they get another note they take another town.” “We had better quit writing notes,” he suggested, or soon they “will have all China.” Six years later, the Japanese did try to take all of China, and more. A major reason was that Japanese leaders believed, and the Manchurian crisis offered the first clear evidence, that the United States was ultimately not prepared to back up its denunciations with force.

Today, we hurl condemnations and warnings at China for extinguishing freedom in Hong Kong, brutally oppressing the Uighur Muslim minority and making aggressive military moves along the Indian border, in the South China Sea and the East China Sea. We ban Chinese companies, engage in tariff wars and excoriate the Chinese for their role in spreading the novel coronavirus. Our political parties compete to outdo each other in anti-Chinese rhetoric and policy proposals. And so far, our words and sanctions have been cost-free. But if this confrontation were to move to the next level, would we be ready, materially and psychologically?

We may soon find out. There has never been any mystery about what Chinese President Xi Jinping wants, because it is what Beijing has wanted for decades: to make the Chinese nation whole again, to subdue opposition in Xinjiang and Tibet, to control the South China Sea and certain strategically located islands in the East China Sea, to regain Hong Kong, taken by the British in the 1840s, and to “reunite” Taiwan with the mainland under the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. These are fixed goals, much as it was Japan’s fixed goal in the 1930s to expand control of the Asian mainland. The only questions have been about means and timing.
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