China and Taiwan Become One Briefly – It Happened Today, February 1 2017

On this date in history, Feb. 1 Taiwan was conquered by China. Which is worth noting because the current regime in Beijing dreams of a replay.

It’s also therefore worth noting that it happened as recently, historically speaking, as 1662. And that it required a nine-month siege and was followed by a far from smooth process of filling the island with mainlanders and driving the original inhabitants into the hills or assimilating them.

Some Chinese might nevertheless take pride in the successful 1662 invasion since it took Taiwan back from the Dutch East India Company which could hardly claim to be indigenous and which was unpopular in part at least for suppressing local traditions like head-hunting. But it does not establish as an incontrovertible tenet of international law or morality that China and Taiwan must always be one country.

Now it is also true that since the Chinese conquest, the island was essentially taken over by mainlanders, the aboriginals now being about 2% of the population. But the key point is that the claim that Taiwan has always been part of China is untrue.

It was not part of China before 1662, nor after 1895 when Japan took it. Which I’m not excusing, especially given the aggressive intolerance of Imperial Japan. But I am pointing out that only for 333 years from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and a further four between the defeat of Japan in the Second World War and the ousting of the Chinese Nationalists from the mainland in 1949, was Taiwan part of China.

If you take the semi-Wilsonian view that nations must be ethnically pure to avoid war, and that all members of a given ethnicity ought to be members of a single nation, then it makes sense that Taiwan and China should be reunited. Ideally, I would say, under the democratic free enterprise government of the former rather than the Communist tyrants in Beijing. And they might legitimately be unified it if is the will of the inhabitants of both established in successful referendums. But otherwise the desire of one big country to swallow another smaller one is aggression even if the people of the bigger country are generally for it. And if you do not subscribe to the ethnic purity theory of nationhood, there is no real logic to the argument that Taiwan and China must be one country so it’s OK to do it by force.

That Communists falsify history to justify military adventurism does not qualify as such logic should go without saying. These days apparently it has to be said anyway.

Constitution, Government, History, International, It happened today, MilitaryJohn Robson
Here Come the Judge – It Happened Today, January 31, 2017

On January 31 of 1801, lame-duck U.S. President John Adams appointed John Marshall Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Such appointments often backfire; Eisenhower would later bitterly regret elevating Earl Warren to Marshall’s old job. And at the time it was largely seen through the partisan lens of Adams’ effort to stack the judiciary against his hated rival Thomas Jefferson. But it turned out to be one of the greatest appointments in American history.

Adams had originally offered the job to another leading member of what was fast becoming the Federalist party, John Jay. But Jay turned it down partly on the grounds that the Supreme Court had insufficient "energy, weight, and dignity." Which might sound like a weird thing to say given the importance of the judiciary in the American system of checks and balances. But it was in fact not clear in 1801 that the Court was an equal branch or that it could, in fact, invalidate statutes as unconstitutional.

It was Marshall himself, whose skilful and congenial guidance included changing the practice of each judge issuing his own opinion to the presentation of a majority or even unanimous consensus, who made the Court what it has been since. And the critical turning point was Marbury v Madison in 1803 in which a unanimous Court struck down portions of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as unconstitutional.

It was, interestingly, the only time in his 35 years as Chief Justice that the Marshall Court declared an Act of Congress unconstitutional. And it was one whose practical impact pleased the incumbent President and Congress even though they were Jeffersonian Republican foes of the Federalist Party, which probably helped it avoid becoming a focus for partisan wrangling. But however that may be, it was a crucial step in the evolution of the American system to the point that one prominent constitutional scholar declared that only when Marshall finished reading the court’s opinion in Marbury v Madison was the Grand Convention that wrote the Constitutional entirely adjourned.

As for John Adams, who spent a long and productive life in service of his country, he later said "My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life." It may also have been his most effective.

Constitution, Crime, Government, History, It happened today, Politics, United StatesJohn Robson