“I know it will, but thanks for the offer. There’s a chance, depending on how long this patrol is, that Danny may be home before my due date…” The Captain immediately shook his head, and she knew with sudden certainty that he would not.
“We’re going to take care of you Angi,” he said. “You and your baby.”
To Angi’s complete and utter surprise, she began to cry.
At home that night, Angi got on their computer and studied Taiwan and China. She had been avoiding the news up to that point, afraid to learn what was going on, but she suddenly wanted to know as much as she could, no matter how unsettling. It had seemed odd to her all along that the tensions between these two distant countries would so urgently involve the United States. And it seemed downright bizarre that it might affect her, and her nascent family. Now she wanted to know why.
She had to scan several historical overviews before she found one that seemed relatively untainted by politics. She learned that that China had been fighting for the island of Taiwan for five centuries, and that this tortured history was impossible to separate from the current crisis.
In 1662, the Chinese went to Taiwan and expelled the Dutch, its first European colonial masters. The Dutch treasured the island they named Formosa, for its rice, its large native deer population, but mostly for its commanding position on the Asian sea lanes it contested with Spain and Portugal. Not only Europeans coveted Taiwan, however, and in 1895 the Japanese defeated the Great Qin in the first Sino-Japanese war, leading to a long Japanese occupation. Japanese rule of the island lasted until their 1945 defeat in World War II, when the victorious allies deeded the island back to the Chinese.
Clarity was avoided, however, by the Chinese Civil War. That conflict pitted the Communist Peoples Republic of China, led by Mao Zedong, against the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-Shek. The war had raged since 1927, stalling briefly during World War II. As soon as World War II ended the Civil War resumed, until the 1949 defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek. With about two million of his supporters, he retreated to Taiwan, where the ROC declared itself to be the sole, legitimate government of China.
This declaration put the United States in an awkward position. For one thing, it was so obviously untrue. And no one really believed that the ROC, with its corrupt leaders and inept military, would ever pose a legitimate threat to the ruthlessly effective communists of Mao and the PRC. On the other hand, the ROC were fierce-anticommunists, and some of the US’s only allies in Asia at a time when the US badly needed allies in that part of the world. So the US began a long, awkward advocacy of the status quo. The unstable arrangement resulted in periodic, predictable crises, many of which metastasized into military action, sometimes on a massive scale. In 1958, China fired so much artillery at the ROC controlled island of Quemoy that the high-quality steel shells became an un-natural resource for more than a generation of island blacksmiths, who became renowned for the meat cleavers they could fashion from the shells that had been intended to kill them. A skillful blacksmith could to this day, Angi learned, make sixty cleavers from a single shell.
After spending an hour on Taiwan’s history, Angi began to get into Taiwan’s recent past and its unique relationship to the US…from Wikipedia she linked to the Taiwan section of globalsecurity.org. She learned that the US policy had evolved into this: if the Republic of China was not actually China, neither was it a “rebel province” as declared by the real Chinese government, one that could be crushed by a PRC police action. The US, under Richard Nixon, finally acknowledged the obvious when it recognized the PRC as the legitimate government of China in 1979. The US embassy in Taipei, Taiwan was closed, renamed the American Institute in Taiwan. (The Taiwanese equivalent in Washington is the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.) The US, through a series of presidents, maintained the deliberately ambiguous “One China” policy, without ever specifying what that one China consisted of, or who was in charge of it. The US tacitly agreed to never hint that Taiwan was entitled to the independence that it actually had — by 1990 it was a thriving, prosperous democracy. In return, China tacitly agreed not to invade Taiwan and enforce the sovereignty that it insisted it had over the island.
The current crisis began less than six months before, when Qian Chen, the President of Taiwan, was granted a visa to speak at the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater. This visa represented a reversal of US policy, which had for forty years not allowed top Taiwanese officials to visit the United States — in 1994, Lee Teng-Hui, then president of Taiwan, was not even allowed off his plane in Hawaii while it refueled, lest his presence on American soil antagonize the Chinese. At Notre Dame, President Chen barely deviated from the carefully evolved phrases that characterized Taiwan’s odd status, but his mere presence there was enough to aggravate Beijing. In response, they immediately announced a series of surface-to-surface missile tests in waters less than twenty miles from Taiwan’s northern port city of Keelung — a distance that an M-9 Dongfeng missile travels in 9.5 seconds. Commercial air traffic was diverted and the Taiwanese stock market crashed as the latest crisis unfolded.
Angi learned what happened next on sinodefence.org, a British website operated by volunteers that called itself, “the most comprehensive and trusted online source of information on the Chinese military.” On a beautiful Fall morning, a specially trained brigade of the Peoples Liberation Army drove an 8 x 8 launching vehicle from the province of Jiangxi to a position about sixty miles away in the Fujian Province. Two missiles were fired and landed in the ocean, a vivid but harmless assertion of China’s anger and their national sovereignty.
A third missile was launched twenty-two minutes later from the same vehicle: China had announced this in advance, as a demonstration of their rapid reloading capability. This missile followed the same course as the first two initially, and then veered north approximately eight degrees. The missile traveled 576 nautical miles, close to its maximum range, and then slammed into a 170,000 ton cargo ship, the Ever Able. The ship was flagged in Panama, but owned by a Taiwanese company, and was bound for Shanghai. The reasons for the missile strike were immediately and hotly debated, the conversation inevitably colored by the politics of the speaker. China claimed the Ever Able had sailed into the publicized target area, and, in any case, the Dongfeng missile was not a heat-seeking anti-ship missile: it was a ballistic missile fired to a specific geographic coordinate, one that would be almost impossible to use deliberately against a moving vessel. China’s opponents in Taiwan and the United States argued that it was naked act of aggression, and that the time had come at last to defend America’s democratic ally against the Godless Communists of the PRC. The president of the United States, a liberal recently elected, was under enormous pressure to act, having just been seen as weak while negotiating trade regulations with China, who made thinly veiled threats about what havoc they could wreak on the US economy should they decide to divest themselves of their vast holdings of US government debt.
While the world nervously waited to see what the long-term consequences would be, there was no doubt about the immediate effects of that errant missile. While it carried no warhead, the sheer weight and kinetic energy of a 13,000 pound object flying at ten times the speed of sound broke Ever Able in half. It sunk almost instantly, along with its crew of twenty-two men.