Maybe being leashed to the People’s Republic of China isn’t such a bad idea after all, the Taiwanese may soon be concluding, according to Zhou Bo, a retired colonel of the People’s Liberation Army (“ ‘America is going down’: China can capitalise on damage caused by Trump, former PLA colonel says,” The Guardian, March 2, 2025).
To inform his perceptions of the Trump administration, the colonel may be relying a touch too much on the yodeling of U.S. socialist-leaning mainstream media, which pounces to denounce President Trump no matter what he’s doing—whether restoring sanity to energy policy or trying to make a dent in the multi-trillion-dollar spending and debt load of the federal government.
Tarnished image
“By the end of his second term, I believe America’s global image will simply become more tarnished, its international standing will just go down further,” according to the retired PLA potentate. And since the Taiwanese “know that America is going down,” this may encourage them to be better disposed toward the mainland.
“Maybe the Taiwanese will one day consider, ‘Well, we cannot move away anyway. We will have to stay here. Maybe it’s not bad for us to be a member of the strongest nation on earth.’ ”
The U.S. is going down. In consequence of which the people of the Republic of China may well embrace CCP rule however much they have resisted doing so for three quarters of a century.
“For those who know China’s modern history,” Zhou opines elsewhere, the early days of the Trump Two administration look like “the American version of the catastrophic Cultural Revolution,” suggesting a not very close study of that era of China’s history.
Sharp thinking like this is what has enabled Zhou to cap his forty years of soldiering for the PLA with the jobs of academic and commentator on foreign affairs. For more Zhou-caliber ruminations, we can consult a collection of essays entitled Should the World Fear China?
Possibilities
Let’s agree that people respond to totalitarian rule differently.
If Taiwan were ever coercively absorbed, some former citizens of the Republic of China—the Zhou types—would indeed probably reconcile themselves to CCP domination, especially if they do not belong to any of the ethnic, religious, or “separatist” groups especially persecuted by China. Others would hurry to escape to Europe or the United States. Others would be unable to leave but would writhe under the yoke.
