Oooh, the double Uno reverse card! Nuh uh, you’re the narcisstic abuser, not me!! Nuh uh! Whataboutism!! Nuh uh! The US is evil but not as evil the CPC!! Bootlicker! Why can’t you just let the US military run the world like a good anarchist? Huh!
How is the historically accurate take on Palestine abhorrent? The racist white supremacist empires did not and most still have not acknowledged Palestinian statehood. That’s a fact. They should be recognized as a state, but my saying so doesn’t make it true. Is that what’s abhorrent to you? That I don’t insist that morality supervene on reality? I never said Palestine should be part of Israel nor did I say Palestinians should become Israeli citizens. Like, what do you think I said that was confusing to you that you are accusing me of positions diametrically opposed to my actual position on Palestine?
If you think it’s a bald-faced lie that Taiwan has never been a nation-state, never claimed to be a nation-state, and never been recognized as a nation-state, then source your claim. Of COUSE people recognized the KMT as the legitimate government of China (not the mainland, China. Again with the category error.) The KMT laid claim to being the legitimate government of the state of China, which includes Taiwan as a province, and many nations supported this claim. Eventually most nations changed their official stance and instead recognized the CPC as the legitimate government of China (the nation-state, not just the land, but the legal entity known as the nation-state of China).
Again, if you think that’s wrong, go find me sources of either Taiwan claiming to be a nation-state that is not China or find me examples of other governments official recognizing that Taiwan is a separate nation-state from China. I can wait.
LOL, the projection is strong with this one. You made the claim that China is threatening to invade and I asked you to clarify and backup your claim. But yes, I am disingenuous and obviously biased for … not believing the US is a trustworthy actor in the Pacific theater with respect to Chinese national security.
Yeah, you really can’t stop with the category error, can you?
The CPC isn’t a state. China is a state. It has had official international recognition as a state for centuries. The civil war did not change that. The civil war was for control of the state of China, the state that includes the province of Taiwan.
The majority of the world’s governments recognized the KMT as the legitimate government of the state of China, and some recognized the CPC as the legitimate government of the state of China. This split was largely along ideological lines - most countries would agree that the winner of a civil war is a legitimate government, but fascist anti-communists love supporting illegitimate governments like Juan Guaido or the recent Somaliland decision.
Nixon’s decision was to recognize the CPC as the legitimate government of the state of China. He did not recognize the CPC’s state because there was no such thing to recognize. Likewise, you are attempting to recognize the existence of a Taiwanese state when there is no such thing to recognize. It has never been a nation-state, it has never claimed to be a nation-state, and no government has ever recognized as a nation-state.
If you think history is convenient for my argument, perhaps what you mean is that my argument is supported by history.
All of Palestine was declared Terra Nullus by the imperialist. It is they who setup the system of Westphalian nation-states. This is, as they call it, the rules-based order. The reality is that Palestine should have been granted nation-state status by the entire world decades ago, but racism prevented that from happening, and now we have the situation we have. Some nation states have officially recognized Palestine’s status as a nation-state, but it has not been enough and it is far too late to have immediate impacts.
As for whether my understanding is strange, I would ask you to consider why the KMT itself did not claim Taiwan to be an independent nation state for the 50 years where it was a one-party fascist dictatorship on the island. Why did they find it so important to establish that they were still a faction within China and not a secessionary movement away from China? I didn’t decide that that’s what they would do. My understanding is fully inline with the understanding of the KMT and the CPC and the rest of official governments of the world. It’s really only the uninformed and the politically biased that have a strange understanding whereby the rules don’t matter, the never matter, and only what they believe is the correct moral answer, given their limited understanding, could ever be the right answer.
Sorry can you remind me the conditions that China has set for why it would invade? Or is just threatening generally?
I love repeating myself in these threads. It’s so fun. Political parties do not control territories. That’s not how anything works. When Japan took Korea, it was not a party within Japan that took it. It was the nation state that took it. When Japan took Taiwan it was not a party within Japan that took Taiwan, it was the nation state that took it. When the US took Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc same thing. You would never say that it was Democratic-Republicans that own the Louisiana Purchase even though they were in power when the purchase took place.
The nation state of China, with its competing factions, reclaimed the island of Taiwan by pushing out the Japanese. The retreating army of the KMT fled to the island as refuge and the British and American warships protected them, setting up the island and the party to be a fascist vassal of the North Atlantic imperial regime. At no time did the retreating army secede nor declare independence. It claimed that despite having lost the war and despite having lost popular support that it was still the rightful government of China. Never mind that it had to kill tens of thousands of Chinese citizens who disagreed. Never mind that it spent 40 years violently and brutally crushing all forms of dissent against its position. And never mind that the imperialists never stopped supporting the KMT with warships, intelligence, arms, foreign direct investment, and diplomacy despite it being about as legitimate of a government as Juan Guaido.
Saying that the island belongs to the KMT is a category error. Parties don’t own territory. Nation states do. This is why the UN doesn’t have separate delegations for Labor, Conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, Greens, AFD, etc.
Political parties don’t control territory. Nation states do. The island of Taiwan is a province of the nation state of China - it was ceded to the Japanese imperialist who invaded China and took Taiwan from China making it part of Japan (not part of a specific party in Japan) and then the nation state of China, collaboratively amongst its political factions, liberated the island and restored it as territory of the nation state of China.
This talking point about the CPC never owning it is a category error and you would never imagine making such claims about Labor or Conservatives owning this or that part of England, or Texas being the rightful property of Republicans or New York being the rightful property of Democrats. This use of language is double speak.
As for defending against US aggression being whataboutism, that’s not even close to being n accurate use of the phrase. For example, when Russia stationed nuclear weapons in Cuba, the US threatened total nuclear annihilation because it was threatened by what was a consensual agreement between two independent nations. The US making it very clear that they were going to bring their military might to Asia, while expanding their drone war and demolishing a half dozen countries is a far greater threat than the USSR ever was to the USA, but for some reason you bootlickers want to pretend that the US moving 2/3rds of their naval assets to the Pacific theater and constantly writing strategic assessments about whether the US could win a nuclear war if it encircled its opponents with sufficient offensive and defensive capabilities. The US’s interest in Taiwan is nothing more than as an unsinkable aircraft carrier that produces computer chips (which, btw it has been trying desperately to bring into the US so that it can use Taiwan exclusively as a war zone).
Whataboutism would be saying that China is allowed to kill 500K Taiwanese children because the US killed 500K Iraqi children. Realpolitik is recognizing that China has a requirement to be hyper vigilant regarding everything on its coastline and nearby waterways and islands because the US and UK have been abundantly clear that they are not happy that China has recovered from the Opium War and the subjugation that followed and that the imperialists have no problem with killing people anywhere in the world if it means advancing the interests of their ruling class.
During the Chinese civil war, the PLA defeated the KMT and the KMT fled to the island province of Taiwan, a part of the nation state of China.
The US and British navies protected the KMT during their retreat and afterward, essentially creating a protectorate out of the island while the KMT prosecuted the fascist White Terror, with mass killings and political repression for the next 40 years, only adopting a liberal democratic formation once the Brits established a similar one in Hong Kong, which was another imperialist holding stripped away from China.
That you don’t know this about the history of the island you claim as your cause is unsurprising
I wonder why the word blockade is not in quotes. Perhaps it’s editorializing from the author and not something the PLA actually said
LOL - as though it’s not believable to think that a country that hasn’t dropped a single bomb in 35 years might be concerned about the most violent nation in the world continuing to destroy country after country announcing “the pivot to Asia” in 2008 as they expanded drone warfare beyond anything the world had ever seen as we watched video after video of double tap strikes, bombings if weddings, funerals, hospitals, and schools and now we watch as that bully double taps fisherman in the Caribbean. To say that the US is not an existential threat to literally every country in the world is to allow your entire worldview to be shaped by centuries-old Yellow Peril propaganda
They certainly do work in a world where the naval blockade is literally only a few miles from your own shoreline and MAD is on the table
Interesting that would consider it imperialism when a country does a military exercise on the coast of their own country near an island that was stripped away from one’s direct control by imperialists when the military exercise is specifically to confirm readiness for the thing that the imperialists keep saying they are going to do - establish greater and greater military presence in the region.
Remember, you likely already agree that the US is an imperialist force, the largest in the world. Does the US deploy its military for good reasons or is it an abusive bully? If China says that it hears the US threats to build up military surrounding China and in particular in Taiwan, is it consistent for us to believe the US is telling the truth this time?
China was invaded by Japan and lost the war. To claim China gave away the island to Japan is like saying I have my wallet to the mugger. It reveals how unserious you are in your discourse
To be clear, the concept of “the Taiwanese people” is a modern construction. It would be like saying the people of California are the only ones who can decide if California is part of the United States of America. The people of California are in fact Americans. And while they may have an opinion about their desire to participate in the federal government, the existence of California depends entirely on the United States government for its legal basis. Additionally the territory that makes up California is of incredible critical importance to the national defense and economic ability of the United States of America to provide for the livelihood of its citizens. The people of California have no greater claim to completely independent nationhood than the people of Taiwan.
But to be abundantly clear not only do I agree with you, that the people of Taiwan have the authority to make the vast majority of decisions about their self-governance - excluding those issues that threaten the self-governance of others - but the CPC also agrees with that position and has clearly stated that position for decades. It is the US and the collective West that continue to report their speculation that China will invade Taiwan and is preparing to invade Taiwan despite literally decades of official Chinese government positioning that it will not invade Taiwan unless the United States or another foreign military uses its relationship with Taiwan to threaten the rest of China.
Yes, the use of force is on the table IF the US or other nation uses Taiwan to create a threat of force against the mainland.
China’s official position, consistently reiterated by Xi and other officials, is that they reserve the right to use force primarily in the context of the Taiwan issue to prevent formal Taiwanese independence or foreign interference
How would the Chinese government “take” Taiwan peacefully? The Chinese government position is very clear on Taiwan - Taiwan will come to desire integration with the Chinese government over time as relations between the mainland and the island improve (remember Taiwan was openly fascist until 1992, which is only 34 years ago) and as relations between the island and the West deteriorate.
Right now, the status of Taiwan is as ambiguous as the status of the dominance of the Western global system. When the KMT fled after their loss, all of China was totally impoverished after a century of humiliation at the hands of the imperialists. As the imperialists do, to create division, they improve the material conditions for a subset of people - in this case they invested in fascist Taiwan and developed it into an economic power, just like they did with Hong Kong. The purpose of this was to make the people living in the island prefer working with the rich imperialists over working with the very very poor communists, and of course it worked. But, as the West continues to sunset, Taiwan will get less and less economic benefit from aligning with the imperialists, and the whole dynamic will slowly, naturally change.
The problem here, as ever, is not actually the Chinese government but the Western governments.
And the majority have chosen to not decide at all.
But there are differences between formal status and de facto status.
A truly independent state has its own government and its own military. This is critical because the Chinese government has been very clear that it will not attempt to reintegrate Taiwan by force, knowing that doing so will create a terrible resistance movement that will make life bad for everyone.
But the Chinese government is also clear that if the US brings its military to Taiwan and establishes the island as a de facto or actual US military base then it will invade. If Taiwan allows the US to establish such a base there, then the locla Taiwan government is not choosing independence but vassalage.
LOL. So it matters that it was part of China, then part of Japan, but it stops mattering after that? Really?
Which country liberated Taiwan from Japan?
Sure. I also didn’t mention how the KMT soldiers were defecting in droves to the PLA because they were much better treated as prisoners of the PLA then they were as soldiers of the KMT and because the KMT was a brutal fascistic force and the soldiers saw the PLA as way more benevolent to the people. I don’t have to mention every single aspect of the conflict to get at the heart of the matter of the discussion at hand.
Or said another way - sucks to suck.