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First, no matter what my experience and political beliefs, nor anyone else's, let me give a prediction. Within ten years, Taiwan will become a province of mainland China. It won't be by the historic sword-rattling threats Red China has always rattled at Taiwan. It won't be by sabotage and infiltration, other Communist Chinese tactics of the past sixty years. It won't be by military invasion. The joining will be simply the only tactics the mainland Chinese government had never thought of before: cooperation and mutual prosperity.

The key is the take-over of the former British crown colony of Hong Kong ten years ago. Although it was voluntary, when the infamous Red Army marched in, there were widespread fears of mass murder, imprisonment, long re-education prison terms of all the major political and business figures. Although the transition has not been one of opponents having a love feast, no drastic measures were taken. Instead, the leaders of Red China, then a generation younger, more worldy and much more practical than the old totalitarian Mao regime, decided that the dirty word ... capitalism ... might be a good idea.

Since then, mainland China and Hong Kong, its somewhat independent eye on the outside world, have experienced a miraculous spurt of growth that has been unmatched in world history. In September 1945, at the end of World War II, my Navy troop ship sailed into Shangai harbor to rescue just-released US, British, Aussie and Dutch military POWs. I had a chance to go ashore and stroll around. The once-beautiful city had been reduced to rubble by bombings and street fighting in the final months of bloody combat.

At the time, the Chinese people had just survived a brutal occupation by the Japanese army, and were grateful for the billions of dollars in aid and the blood shed by GIs in defeating the enemy during four tough years of combat in China. However, within five years, the Communists had kicked the corrupt and useless Nationalist regime out, where they sought refuge on Formosa ... now Taiwan.

Within another two years, as a recalled Navy reservist serving aboard a carrier during the Korean War, I was part of the American forces that suffered more than 50,000 dead, because of Communist China's massive military aid to the North Koreans, and by sending thousands of Chinese "volunteers" to help turn the war into the stalemate it still is today.

Both current Chinese leaders and the American government seem willing to forget the fact that the Chinese turned on its WWII allies during the Korean War, and again during the Vietnam War, and was one of the main causes of a half-century of terrible conflict. Seeing ads for the 2008 Olympics in China makes it all seem as if we've been bosom buddies ever since.

Maybe if the prediction comes true that China will soon become a single nation is good for world peace. It will certainly add fuel to the current economic explosion that the sharp, new mainland China leadership has created. At least, we can hope it will.

Learn more about this author, Ted Sherman.
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