The 1992 Consensus That Never Was; Some Say Russia Can Help With Nork Nukes; Brexit's China Angles, Russian as the Lingua Franca of Central Asia

Xi Dada testing one of the rides at the soon-to-be-open United Magic Kingdom

Peter Lee really struggles to find Brexit's silver lining for Asia:

One element of Brexit that, I imagine, especially occupies the mind of the PRC leadership is the rather unnerving specter of regional political and economic disintegration, with indications that Brexit may spark EU-friendly secession movements by Scotland and Northern Ireland and even trigger a rush to the exits by disgruntled EU member states on the Continent. 

Things falling apart obsesses the CCP, because the People’s Republic of China is something of an anomaly in a world of largely nationalist and ethnic identity politics: an avowedly multi-national empire. 

The main bits are Han, Manchurian, Mongolian, Uyghur, Zhuang, Yi, Tujia, & Hui.  

Everybody’s favorite aggrieved PRC minority, the Tibetans, are around 9^th on the list, with a population of about 5 million. 

One of the most furious and reliable sources of scholastic spittle on the Internet is official PRC academic invective against “New Qing History.” The “NQH controversy” embodies CCP fear and indignation at the skepticism of modern social science toward the objective, enduring existence of something called “China” (including the Tibetan and western holdings, to which the PRC positions itself as the “rightful heir”), as opposed to viewing East Asia as the parade ground for an irregular march of multi-ethnic kingdoms and ill-defined territorial ambitions through history, and “China” as little more than a self-serving post-modern backward projection by the current rulers. 

The passion is understandable because denying “China” and exploiting China’s local divisions to seize the more useful and profitable bits has been a preoccupation of adversaries and competitors ever since nationalism became the driving principle of geopolitics.

(Asia Times)

Thoughts on the relationship between stability and ambiguity in Taiwan-China relations:

“I think everyone in China knows, the term ‘1992 consensus’ was not used by anyone until 2001, no, 2000; Su Chi, [former] president Ma Jing-jeou’s [馬英九] first National Security Council adviser, was the first person to use that term to describe the understanding that had been reached in 1992. Before that, I mean, in all the time I met with [then-Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) chairman] Wang Daohan (汪道涵) or with [then-Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) chairman] Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫), they never called it that, never called it the ‘1992 consensus,’ because the name didn’t exist. Koo would sometimes just call it the ‘1992 understanding,’” he said. 

The “1992 consensus” refers to a tacit understanding between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait that there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means. 

In 2006, Su, then a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, admitted he made up the term “1992 consensus” in 2000, before the KMT handed power to the Democratic Progressive Party. 

Meanwhile, responding to the question of whether President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) was muddying the water when she did not explicitly recognize or deny the “1992 consensus” or the “one China” principle in her inauguration address, Burghardt said Tsai has displayed flexibility in dealing with cross-strait relations and it is important for both China and Taiwan to continue to communicate.

(Taipei Times)


Douglas Green on the rediscovery of Russian as the Rosetta Stone of Understanding in Central Asia:

Curiously but not entirely unexpectedly, the solution to the dilemma has come from third parties. Attempts by anti-Soviet movements to jump in and “replace” the old all-Russian linguistic supremacy by a new supranational conductor have mainly come from Turkey, where its controversial retired imam Fethullah Gülen, a longstanding ally of now President Recep Erdogan turned into a rival first and bitter foe at present in their common attempts to capture the minds of the bulk of Turkey’s conservative Islamic voters, poured fortunes into hundreds of schools and other education institutes into the Caucasus and Central Asia with the aim to bring Turkish as an awareness tool for both nationalistic and religious purposes. After Gülen fled to the USA, most of his schools in Central Asia were closed down and traces of renewed “panturkism” treated with suspicion. 

This triggered a reconciliation with the familiar Russian language and the culture it represents. “The Russian language plays an important role in the formation of not only highly skilled, but also socially active, fully developed personality, since it has a significant educational and developmental potential,” in the opinion of Pavel Galkin of the Tashkent State University speaking at the Bishkek conference. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of all the republics of the USSR, new independent countries faced different challenges in the educational system, due to the fact that each one tried to create a new concept of national identity mostly with the popularisation of the native titular language.” 

(timesca.com)


Finally, Some Say that Russia might be the best instrument with which to blunt DPRK nuclear ambitions:

Russian cooperation is essential for the North’s ability to communicate with the world. With the exception of China, Russia is the only country that maintains overland transportation communications with North Korea, with the traffic going through a railway bridge across the Tumen River. Aside from China, Russia is also the only country maintaining regular permanent scheduled air service to Pyongyang. North Korean national flag carrier Air Koryo’s fleet entirely consists of Russian-made aircraft. This means dependence on spare parts and maintenance services imported from Russia.Given its favorable location, Russia could offer significant inducements to the North, notably in the form of Trans-Korea natural gas pipeline, railway and electricity projects linking the Russian Far East to South Korea and transiting via the North. Income from these projects would greatly boost the economic fortunes of the North, but of course Pyongyang would have to agree to major concessions in its weapons programs, at a minimum to freeze nuclear and missile testing.

(Huffington Post)