Page 21 - Rethinking China Policy

Rethinking China Policy

BEIJING’S MANY “ONE CHINA POLICIES”
By Danny Lam

President Xi Jinping of People’s Republic of China will be promoting “free trade” at Davos later this
month. If it is the case that Chinese President is acting in good faith and has the capacity to deliver, it
represents an incredible opportunity for the world to reap the benefits of free trade since the original
“opening” of China by Deng Xiaoping.

“One China Policy” is the rallying cry of the Beijing based PRC regime and their western “China expert”
priesthood. By that, they mean that Beijing should be the sole channel through which foreign relations
between the Chinese civilization and the rest of the world should be conducted to the exclusion of other
authorities irrespective of whether Beijing have the capacity to contract.

Imagine being able to negotiate with President Xi’s Beijing and gain access to a market of 1.3 billion people
in one stop!

For centuries, the West uncritically accepted such “One China” policies, dealing with the Republic of China,
and before that, the Ching Dynasty and its predecessor the Yuan Dynasty, as if the regime had the legitimacy
and authority to conduct business for “China” regardless of the facts on the ground.

Unfortunately, this ended badly when the West discovered, ex post facto, that Chinese regimes they are
dealing with in fact, do not possess the Western attributes of a legitimate regime: “monopoly on the
legitimate use of violence over a defined territory” (Gewaltmonopol des Staates) that is central to the
definition of a legitimate regime in the West from Bodin, Hobbes to Weber.

The PRC regime based in Beijing is no different. Beijing had a tenuous hold on power that for much of its
history, and today, does not enjoy a monopoly on violence in territories Beijing claims as its own.

Today, the PRC does not exercise jurisdiction in any Western sense in territories held by Taiwan (ROC), or in
territories it claims like Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, over and above maritime
territories claimed by PRC that including the South China Sea, East China Sea, Japan, etc.
The PRC Regime tacitly acknowledge that territories that Beijing regard as exercising “indisputable
sovereignty” like the South China Sea can, in fact, be both in name and in fact under the dejure and defacto

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