Collapse Depth by Todd Tucker Read Free Book Online

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