From Kiev to Beijing … and Taipei

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-02-180314.html



From Kiev to Beijing … and Taipei
By Peter Lee
Mar 18, '14

A certain amount of attention, and rightly so, has been paid to the discomfiture of the People's Republic of China (PRC) with Crimea unilaterally declaring independence from Ukraine. The PRC abstained on the UN Security Council condemnation of the vote, instead of supporting Russia with a "nay". The PRC possesses or covets several significant territories whose inhabitants, if given the opportunity, might eagerly defy the One China policy to announce, organize, and pass a referendum of independence: Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, Macau, and Taiwan.

Certainly, the PRC would have preferred that Russia persisted in its relatively principled and consistent opposition to the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo (which the West engineered at the expense of Serbian sovereignty and in order to get around footdragging by Russia on the adoption of a Kosovo constitution that would have led to independence anyway in pretty short order). Instead, Russian diplomats cited that instance of unilateral Western high-handedness to excuse the shenanigans of Crimea's parliament.

However, the PRC regime has more reason to worry about what happened in Kiev, not Sevastopol.

In Kiev, the United States took another bite out of the regime change apple, openly abetting the overthrow of a democratically elected president, the hapless and hopelessly corrupt Viktor Yanukovych.