comrades, the Protracted People’s War against the liberal hive and haven for bigoted chasers that is lemmy.blahaj.zone has succeeded! blahaj has fallen! or at least fallen off.
really tho, i just checked in on their site to see how its been since defederating. that was only 3 days ago btw! it feels like its been a week lol. their daily user count has fallen by over 1/6th since defed. and while this could be attributed to less traffic during the work week, the posting situation there is abysmal. in the past 24 hours, 78% of the posts came from c/196, making it difficult to tell that their instance is a dedicated queer space. and while they have gained ~30 users since defederation, we have gained over 200! its pretty much just 196 at this point.
while its sad to see a queer space fail, i suspect its for the best. i hope all the anti-capitalists there find their way here, as many already have. especially the trans folk there, its genuinely sad that they feel like they have to accept chasers in their space in order to have a community that accepts them. that is the difference between liberal tolerance and socialist liberation— tolerance allows for objectification and marginalization, while liberation demands dignity and equality. may all the blahaj gender diverse who oppose capitalism find their way to c/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns!!!!
stuff like this are the best “dunks” the 196 reactionaries can manage:
this meme is weak and displays their ignorance. you cant have a conversation with ppl like the OP. they will just bombard you with thought-terminating cliches. gulag gulag! Uyghurs! hologramodor! no food! purges! NKVD KGB Stasi! free Tibet so they can have their wholesome slaves again! Taiwan is a legitimate state!
countless hexbears would be willing and even enthusiastic to have a good faith, respectful, nuanced discussion about these topics with them. but they dont want that. they want to roll in their own shit like a pig with massive balls. the good ones will find us, or other socialist spaces. but for such a small instance, there are too many scratched and soon-to-be scratched liberals for us to do any good with federation.
Alright, this is another one of those things where I feel like I only know half the story and so instinctively take the side of whichever old imperialist-capitalist propaganda I haven't yet unlearned. My impression was that Taiwanese leftists overwhelmingly want to not be part of China, and this is partly because the only claim to Taiwan that China has comes from pre-revolutionary settler-colonialism. Which is to say, that Taiwan is a legitimate country, even when the ROC rule of the island is not legitimate, if that makes sense.
I had a Taiwanese friend once. Online. Seven years ago. We were never close and only ever chatted about conlangs. This makes me a certified expert on strait politics who is incapable of having wrong opinions. Worship me for I am correct in all things.
There’s a complex split in views which you can view as a spectrum from
2 & 3 are basically the same in practical terms - kick the can down the road and let the situation develop peacefully, trade with China and develop relations while maintaining full de facto autonomy for now.
2 & 3 are overwhelmingly the most popular stances with roughly equal splits over the long term, the plurality position see-saws between them over the decades.
1 & 4 are not popular, to the point of being fringe with single digit support in most polls.
There has been a surge for (1) over the past maybe five years, but this has declined rapidly over the recent election cycles and this picture was complicated by the fact the politicians who align with (1) were also riding a wave of disgust with corruption by the KMT which is basically (2) and (3), so plenty of (2) started voting for (1) out of dislike for KMT corruption. But this wave seems to be rapidly receding, ironically enough because (1) was beating the drums of war with China in politically opportunistic fearmongering that it scared plenty of (1)’s back into the status quo (2) camp, largely benefiting the KMT. It also didn’t help that (1)’s had a major corruption scandal of their own.
Really the main driver of local politics is corruption rather than independence. Independentists will beat the drum of war to create a sense of crisis and nationalism, seeking to wedge (2) away from (3) but this tends to happen most when (1) is doing badly politically or when a major US weapons deal is being made (that’s not a joke.)
(4) usually sees 5-10%.
The idea that Taiwanese are itching to declare independence right now is not well supported by polling over time. By far the most popular position has been some form of maintaining the status quo, with a split between the long term goal of unifying and the long term goal of formalizing independence.
The current situation makes Taiwan a kind of giant Hong Kong colonial possession of the USA as a military base just off the coast of China. A sustainable peace for Taiwan would require ejecting the US military presence because that’s an untenable threat to China.
I think the mainland Chinese would be happy with a one-country two-systems arrangement that sees Taiwanese autonomy enshrined constitutionally while giving control of the island for purposes of defense and foreign policy to China. That seems the best practical outcome to me.
Thank you for the detailed response, this is very interesting.
Adding onto what WhatWouldKarlDo said, the situation in China is what it is because of the aftermath of a civil war. After China was colonized by the West + Japan for a hundred years, the Chinese people overthrew them all along with the Qing dynasty. But there was fighting over who should replace them: the Kuomintang or the Communist Party of China. The CPC eventually won, but the KMT refused defeat and retreated to Taiwan, where they still claim to be the legitimate government of all of China and have never signed any peace treaties to end the war (it's technically still ongoing).
To make another USA analogy, it'd be as if the Confederates fled to Puerto Rico after the American civil war and never gave up hope for ruling over the whole country.
(ofc this is a simplification; there are other parties besides these two and a lot more happened that I didn't mention like how the KMT ruled over China for a little while. This is just the gist of it)
And the kmt was originally a socialist party, it's why both Taiwan and the mainland still revere Sun Yat-sen. The KMT got taken over by a bunch of liberals though which purged the left and they all went to the communists
Even if that were completely true, the island of Taiwan has been under the rule of mainland China since 1683. That's longer than the existence of the United States. This would be like if the CSA had occupied an island off the coast of the USA, and Britain had guaranteed their independence instead of letting the US Civil War come to an end. I don't think it matters whether the PRC has a claim to the island older than 1683 or not. It's STILL under Chinese control, and the ROC needs to be wiped out. We can talk about whether it should remain under Chinese control or not after that happens.
others beat me to it with good answers but i just wanted to add that when the KMT nationalists left mainland China for Taiwan, the Han that were already there were treated as second-class citizens, and while workers and peasants in the PRC saw their material conditions improve and political power grow, the workers and peasants in Taiwan saw more exploitation. and the already-oppressed indigenous people of Taiwan faced genocide and brutal suppression worse than that of the dynasties or pre-civil war ROC
Let's not pretend Taiwan is not a settler-colonial state in living memory, unlike the PRC. It's no coincidence that the biggest support for reunification by ethnic group is the Formosans (yes, they are actually several Formosan ethnic groups, but they make up a tiny portion of the population now and have a great deal in common as non-Han colonized peoples).
The Formosans are the biggest supporters of reunification‽ Why'd I never hear of that‽
They are a tiny population that people don't talk about generally. Libs basically talk like the Han populations are indigenous to Taiwan. To be fair, the pre-KMT Han have at least been there for centuries, but it's still fucked up to forget about the original inhabitants.
Legit! I still don't know nearly enough about Taiwan's original inhabitants: only the most cursory of history, only the most superficial of culture, and any more specific knowledge is just Wikipedia rabbit-hole fun facts, like how the Cou language is the only language in the world which uses the letter X as a vowel. And even this is more knowledge of Formosans than most people have.
By the way, do you have a source for this? I want to mention it to someone.
I am looking and struggling to find any information on how Aboriginal Formosans respond to surveys on this topic. I'll keep looking, but the closest thing that should be pretty accessible is the sunstantial Formosan support for the modern KMT, currently a minority party and the only one of the big three to take a more conciliatory stance towards the mainland rather than rallying for full independence.
So the way I explain Taiwan is "Imagine if the confederacy had retreated to Florida after losing the civil war, massacred all the natives there, put tens of thousands of civilians in concentration camps to root out "yankee sympathizers", and implemented 40 years of martial law, all while claiming to be the true government of the United States and also some of Canada."