ZERO POINT TAIWAN

AND

The Great Wall of Words

UN Building New York City

[My interview with the Manchurian ambassador in the Starbucks of the UN building lobby]

I first time I meet them was here at the UN building in New York City. It was during the reception your State Department was giving after your president’s final speech to the United Nations. It was September and the American election had yet to happen. We still trying to deal with the implications of President Obama's Asia strategy at the time. That and The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest regional trade accord in history, it would have set new terms for trade and business investment for 12 of the Pacific Rim nations. At the time we at the then “Chinese Embassy” thought that these were part of the US China containment policy'. We believed that the United States needed a weak, divided China to continue its hegemony in Asia. To accomplish this, the United States had been establishing military, economic, and diplomatic ties with countries adjacent to China's borders.

            The reception that night was pretty lively. What can I say, you Americans know how to throw a party. The younger diplomats, the kids that thought the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was just an easy way up the party ladder, they were all there, along with their counter parts from all the Pacific Rim Nations. At first glance the two young men from the Vietnamese delegation seemed no different than the others. They wanted to talk to me in private about Xisha Islands. Both young men appeared to be smirking as if over some private some private joke they had just heard. I remember thinking, ‘What a snickering pair of idiots’. In retrospect I realize I was the fool for not taking them seriously.

[A little back ground is needed here: The Xisha Islands, known as the Paracel Islands, as named by the French, and Hoàng Sa in Vietnamese, is a group of islands, reefs, banks and other maritime features in the South China Sea. It was then occupied by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but also claimed by Taiwan (Republic of China or RoC) and Vietnam. It’s about equidistant from the coastlines of China (PRC) and Vietnam; approximately 250 kilometers to shore.]

The Xisha Islands has been the home of small Chinese fishing settlements on and off since 618. The French colonial government of Vietnam set up a weather station there in the 1930s, claiming the islands. The Japanese had a base there in world war two and Chinese forces of the Republic of China (RoC) occupied the islands after the war in 1946 but abandoned it when French and South Vietnamese forces returned in 1947. The PRC, as the rightful owners of the islands and the entire South China Sea, expelled the South Vietnamese form the islands in 1974.

            I understood these young men were Vietnamese patriots that wanted to discuss an issue they believed their country had been wronged in. South Vietnam's claim to the islands was inherited by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam when they had unified their country in 1976. I politely listened to their thoughts on their country’s rights to share in the archipelago and the surrounding productive fishing grounds and sea beds with potential, but as yet unexplored, oil and gas reserves. What surprised me was when they asked if the Chinese government would consider granting Vietnam access rights to the islands as a concession to keep Vietnam from joining the “Free Islands Chain Coalition” being formed to challenge China’s claims to the South China Sea.

As I remember, I laughed. So that’s the joke these ‘Snicker Boys’ were smirking about, I thought. Now sitting here talking to you about my first meeting with them, looking back in retrospect, I suppose you could say the joke was on me.