Mick Hartley

Claudia Rosett on Taiwan (via Solomonia):

While the U.N. reserves one of five permanent seats on its Security Council for the despotic “People’s Republic” of China, plays along with the nuclear bomb program of the Islamic “Republic” of Iran and routinely clears its schedule to entertain the opinions of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, the U.N. does not even offer Taiwan observer status, let alone a seat.

Taiwan, meanwhile, has been a world leader in embodying the ideals of the U.N.’s own charter–meant to promote peace, freedom and prosperity. Since the late 1980s, the Chinese government in Taipei has gone from martial law to free-wheeling elections, as the 23 million people on Taiwan have created China’s first full democracy. In recent decades, they have also leapt from deep poverty to the ranks of the world’s wealthier polities. The usual U.N. databases do not include Taiwan, but according to the CIA World Factbook, Taiwan’s per capita income these days is about $25,000–which in U.N. rankings would place it in the neighborhood of such highly developed nations as Italy and New Zealand, with almost 20 times the per capita income of Red China.

Taiwan has achieved this despite being evicted from the U.N. in the 1970s, to be replaced by the communist government. For Taiwan, there has been no place at the perennial U.N. conferencing on “sustainable development.” Taiwan was cut out of the U.N. picture years before the U.N. began its drumbeat for global taxation to support U.N. “millennium development goals.” And lo! Taiwan has blossomed beyond the wildest dreams of the U.N. aidocrats who, bereft of the defunct Oil for Food program, now hope to lavish yet more attention, and earn themselves many more U.N. per diems, in Africa. It’s enough to suggest the real secret of success might be to ignore the U.N.