“Very well, sir. But you’ll forgive my reminding you that all these matters are very closely connected.”
“I’ll forgive you. Taiwan.”
“Okay,” said Admiral Morgan, declining to mention what he actually thought about the conversation—Some cheek, this fucking ignoramus trying to keep ME on track.
But he rose above it, more or less effortlessly, and continued on: “Sir, this attack on Taiwan has been very carefully planned. And we thus find ourselves watching a rather ungainly giant swatting and whacking his way to victory. But he is well prepared, he’s in his own waters, he doesn’t give a damn about the attrition of ships, aircraft or people and he wants the prize of Taiwan more than any Chinaman has ever wanted anything.
“We cannot intervene, mainly because we don’t have anything to intervene with. And even if we did, I’d be inclined to advise against. Because we would find ourselves in a very serious sea battle, and the upshot might be that we could lose three or four major ships, and a couple of thousand American crewmen. They on the other hand might lose twenty ships and ten thousand crewmen. The difference being that they wouldn’t care a fuck, and would just go on fighting. We, on the other hand, could not put up with that.
“We’d have riot conditions at home, you’d be swept from office along with the rest of us and we’d all be accused of deliberately starting a new Vietnam on account of some goddamned no-account Chinese island, which is about a mile and a half from Shanghai anyway. That’s how the public and the press would react.
“It’s all very well our patrolling the waters, as we’ve been doing for years, and frightening everyone to death whenever we had to. But it’s quite another to be prepared to go to war, to send our young men to fight and die, thousands of miles from home. Sir, if we took this country into armed conflict with China over a bunch of fucking pottery makers in this goddamned island right off their coast, you could wind up with another civil war in this country, and I’m not joking.”
“But we always were able to drive the Chinese off before….”
“Yeah, but they were only goofing around then. This is entirely different. This is a nation on a war footing, perfectly happy to fight and die for their belief that Taiwan is a part of China, an offshore province that needs to be brought back into the motherland. On the other hand, we are really prepared only to posture over Taiwan. No president of the USA is going into a real shooting war with China over their goddamned island.
“We’d fight ’em over Middle Eastern oil, if we had to, because that’s in our national interest and the public would understand that. But they would not understand American sailors being blown to pieces over the territorial claim of one Chinaman over another.”
“I guess you can understand the Chinese wanting this offshore island back,” said the President. “Same as they wanted Hong Kong, which was even farther inside their own backyard. I just never understand this obsession. Never understand what they really want.”
“What they really want, sir,” replied Admiral Morgan, “is the National Palace Museum of Taipei.”
“The museum?”
“Correct. Because it contains the most priceless collection of Chinese art and history. It is without question the greatest museum in the world, the greatest museum there has ever been.”
“Is that right?”
“That, sir, is right.”
“Well I thought the Chinese regime hated culture. Didn’t Chairman Mao and his wife try to destroy every vestige of their country’s culture, burning books, destroying university libraries and all that?”
“They sure did. And that was a big part of it. The entire heart of China, every ancient book, manuscript, tapestry, sculpture, painting, porcelain, silver, jade, gold, whatever, dating right back to the ancient Shang Kingdom, thousands of years ago, was contained in one collection. About ten thousand cases of it. Held for five hundred years in the Forbidden City in Beijing.”
“Well, how did it get to Taiwan?”
“Basically Chiang Kai-shek took it.”
“Christ! All of it?”
“Nearly. It was just about the last major act he undertook before he and the Kuomintang were exiled to Formosa. He just felt that Mr. and Mrs. Mao might destroy the entire thing, so he packed it all up and somehow shipped fourteen trainloads of Chinese tradition across the water to his new home.”
“Did anyone care? I mean back on the mainland?”
“Not for a while. But then Formosa had its name changed to Taiwan, and its capital, Taipei, became a world financial power. So Chiang Kai-shek decided to build this fabulous museum in a park to the north of the city…kinda showcase to display this colossal record of the cultural history of China.”
“Don’t tell me, Arnie. Right then the Chinks wanted it all back?”
“That’s right. The museum opened sometime in the mid-sixties, and the Chinese Communists almost immediately started to lay claim to the entire collection, ranting on about the cultural tapestry of China being displayed in this offshore island that somehow claimed to have nothing to do with the mainland.”
“And what did Chiang Kai-shek say to that?”
“Plenty, sir. He said plenty. He told them that in his view they were nothing more than a murderous communist rabble who would probably have burned the history of China and never given it another thought. He told them he, Chiang, was the rightful ruler of China, that Taiwan was the rightful cradle of the Chinese nation, and that one day he and his armies would return and reclaim the mainland, and he’d see ’em all in hell before he’d submit to their barbarism.”
“And the collection of Chinese history?”
“That was even easier to deal with. Old Chiang Kai-shek told ’em to go fuck themselves.”
“And the stuff’s been there in the museum ever since?”
“Right. They even called it the National Palace Museum, after the original in the Forbidden City.”
“And did the stuff survive all this turmoil?”
“By some miracle, not one piece was ever broken. Which, in the opinion of the Taiwanese people, proves that the collection is precisely where it’s supposed to be. And they do have the unanswerable argument that Mao and his wife would most certainly have destroyed it.”
“And what does the modern Chinese regime have to say about that?”
“Nothing. Except to stamp their feet and shout, WANT TREASURES BACK! WANT TREASURES BACK!”
Everyone in the room chuckled. They would have laughed out loud if the situation had not been quite so serious.
“Jeez. There must be literally thousands of pieces,” said Bob MacPherson.
“I think there’re more than seven hundred thousand,” said Admiral Morgan. “I went to see it once a few years back. But they can only display fifteen thousand pieces at a time. They rotate every three months. So if you lived in Taiwan and went there four times in a year, you’d still only see sixty thousand pieces, which is less than ten percent of the collection. It’d take twelve years to see everything.”
“But where do they keep all the stuff that’s not on display?”
“No one really knows,” Arnold continued. “But it’s supposed to be hidden in some vast network of vaults in the mountains behind the museum. They say it’s all connected by tunnels.”
“You’d think with all that stuff they could do some kind of a deal, wouldn’t you? Display half of it in Beijing or something.” The President slipped automatically into the politician’s instinct for compromise.
“The Chinese mind-set does not work like that,” said Arnold. “Mainland China wants this irritating little rebel island to hand over the culture of China, which, they say, Chiang Kai-shek stole from the people.”