Don't mind us, just testing our hypersonic missiles by flying it across Taiwan:
Even before the main stage of the exercise kicked off on Thursday, Global Times called them “unprecedented,” adding that Chinese missiles were expected to “fly over the island of Taiwan for the first time.” People's Liberation Army (PLA) forces are also expected to enter the area within 12 nautical miles of the island, and could potentially surround the island “entirely,” it added, citing military “experts.”
I would imagine a serious reunification effort is a few decades off -- after the U.S. has seen a truly undeniable decline, specifically in its ability/willingness to do imperialism, and after China has fully overtaken the U.S. in the most developed sectors of the economy.
At that point I bet we'd see a "one country, two systems" approach like in Hong Kong, where Taiwan becomes formally a part of the PRC but retains substantial political independence for 50-100 years, with a gradual transition to full integration.
Isn't there a zone in southern China that has casinos and luxury shopping and such? I imagine that's how the two systems would look in practice until things developed more. Maybe mainland can finally use 注音符号 instead of 拼音, which I figure is a pride thing.
Macau is the one you're thinking of. It generally operates the same way as Hong Kong, as a special administrative region.
Actually the other way around, Pinyin is the international standard for the romanization of Chinese. Taiwan doesn't completely use it for pretty much the same reason the US doesn't use metric: Boomers insisting on being different.
Yeah, that might have been it. It was one of those English speaking folks who do videos of their travels around China, either guy guy who makes fun of the BBC a lot or Katherine's Journey to the East or another dude on there. Though, I feel like if it was Macau that I would have remembered it as such.
And yeah, I know that pinyin is the accepted standard in mainland but I like bopomofo for the same reason that I like hangul and hiragana/katakana versus romaja and romanji (and this all besides that 汉字 are good because it works better across the many dialects). I like orthographies that are formed from the languages themselves versus trying to use latin script for everything (even though the latter is much more convenient for myself). Consider the many attempts at romanization and even how Taiwanese pinyin is slightly different than mainland. Granted, pinyin has the momentum and that's hard to go against and it was developed by the Chinese versus an outside influence. In other words