Did you see this one? Right there on the bottom of the front page of last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, the story of how Colorado’s Regis Jesuit High School, in an innocent and quite well-intentioned effort to expose its students to international affairs, applied to the United Nations for authorization to attend its Commission on the Status of Women. What one would think would be a rather rote and straightforward administrative request hit a snag when the school was informed that it had bitterly offended the People’s Republic of China. Their crime? Buried on their website was an article from a year or so earlier about one of their students joining a group called the Girl Up Teen Advocacy Board, which included, the article said, girls from countries all over the world including — prepare yourself — Taiwan. Unless Regis repented of this awful deed by “correcting” the reference to read “Taiwan, Province of China”, there was no way they could have the honor of attending the UN Commission.

Now of course, Taiwan is no more a province of China than Massachusetts is a province of Great Britain, or Poland a province of Russia, not since it broke from the mainland and established itself as the home of a free people in 1949. Nonetheless, the People’s Republic jealously maintains the pathologically solipsist and increasingly bizarre insistence that it be referred to as such, part and parcel with its official instructions to foreign diplomats that recognition of the little successful island will not be tolerated. And insofar as Red China sits on the UN’s Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations, which authorizes any group’s access to UN functions, it gets to impose that illusion with recurrent temper tantrums directed at such threatening institutions as a Jesuit High School in Aurora.

The school, of course, just went ahead and made the requested, if patently absurd, change in order to secure their credentials for the event, as do most groups that face this petulance on the part of the Beijing, and one can hardly blame them — they are just trying to do what they do, preferably without getting embroiled in the vagaries of international geo-politics. For the UN, on the other hand, to tolerate such nonsense is maddening, though expected of an institution that seems to govern itself on madness.

The United Nations General Assembly, which blithely coddles some of the most repressive regimes in history while excluding from its club democratic and liberal Taiwan, convened its 76th session this week, with its general debate set to commence next Tuesday. The theme for this session is, in typically bromidic UN-speak, “Building resilience through hope — to recover from COVID-19, rebuild sustainably, respond to the needs of the planet, respect the rights of people, and revitalize the United Nations.” Quite the tossed salad of platitudes that, but it is hard to argue that Taiwan couldn’t be a more useful partner in any of it than many of the nations constituting the UN. And yet the UN has steadfastly and unreasonably maintained a policy of exclusion towards Taipei, at the eristic behest of Red China – which has none but a vaguely rhetorical desire to “rebuild sustainably” and “respond to the needs of the planet”, and even less interest in respecting the rights of people.

And yet, China’s influence over the UN is so great that Cuba and Venezuela sit on the UN Human Rights Council, while Taiwan is kept locked out.

Communist China is desperate to keep it this way, for both moral reasons — it distracts from examination of Beijing’s responsibility for the continued misery of those Chinese not fortunate enough to have migrated to Taiwan in the late 1940’s — and strategic; as Robert Kaplan has pointed out in Monsoon: the Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, his masterful treatment of the subject of the interplay of geography, strategy, and politics in the wider region, an independent Taiwan is a formidable obstacle to Chinese expansion of sea-based power projection. Taiwan is, as Douglas MacArthur once described it, “an unsinkable aircraft carrier,” one which keeps China from fully being able to break out as a blue water naval power. Subdue Taiwan, and that obstacle is removed.

All the better if Beijing can count on the UN to help do its dirty work. If the UN has any desire to redeem itself, and to be an institution worthy of the interest of the good folks at places like Regis, it would start by telling the PRC where to stick their historically and geopolitically ignorant terminological nonsense, and welcome Taiwan as a full member, from whom the organization could learn a thing or two about civilized conduct.