:xi-clap:
With Hong Kong and the restive regions of Tibet and Xinjiang under ever-tighter control, Taiwan is the last remaining obstacle to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power
lol okay Reuters. Sure.
edit:
The Chinese government was asked detailed questions for this article, including queries about the gray-zone tactics and its overarching strategy on Taiwan. In a written statement, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said Beijing is committed to “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, a formulation it has used for decades. It added that “so-called experts’ remarks quoted in the story by Reuters are groundless, purely hearsay, and full of prejudice and show a Cold War mentality.” It continued: “They even include absurd remarks about the country's central leadership. We are strongly dissatisfied with and firmly opposed to such reports.”
:shocked-pikachu:
... are you familiar with Chinese politics?
You do realize that Taiwan is the most critical component of American imperial control over all of Asia and the Western pacific?
There’s a social-imperialist and an imperialist contradiction when we discuss control of Taiwan, and it would seem to me that we should resolve this in favour of China, against imperialism.
I don't care if Taiwan is the most critical peepee component of poopoo. Do the people of Taiwan want to be a part of China? If they don't, then reunification is wrong, and so is this jingoistic flyover bullshit.
There's resistance to China in the urban centers of Taiwan, but I've never read anything from western sources about the rural areas. They seem to exclusively interview people who are in the technology sector and studied abroad. Even those people aren't super worried about China. They aren't like "we're going to fight to the last person to defend Taiwan" they're like "If there's a referendum to rejoin China and it passes, I'll get used to it".
Theres not just "resistance", theres a decades long campaign of deliberate propaganda, disinformation, and brainwashing people into following the party line to hold a staunch anti china narrative and view. Most people in the US also "dont like socialism or communism", doest mean socialism or communism are bad, just means people were taught to believe that.
I totally agree, I was just providing an "by your own logic" response.
I think the answer to this varies depending on what you take as the atomic political unit. If the majority of a community's members want independence from a state, then I think that community has a right to seek independence even if most citizens of the state don't agree with it. If a town in Taiwan voted to be independent from Taiwan and rejoin China, I would uncritically support it. By the same token, if a town in Catalonia didn't want to be a part of the anarchist movement and was forced to regardless, I would condemn the movement for trying to control that town.
Do you have any idea what anybody from Taiwan wants other than its elite, and whatever other reactionary element is given voice by US media? By what demarcation are the people of Taiwan separate from the people of China?
Do you have any idea what anybody from Taiwan wants? If the people of Taiwan wanted to be a part of China again then I agree with you that Taiwan should rejoin. Where's your proof of that?
Taiwan is literally geographically separated from China by the Strait. If the leader of an uprising in America fled to Hawaii and said Hawaii was independent from America, I bet you wouldn't be asking me what separated the people of Hawaii from the people of America. I bet you'd also be rightly furious if America started pressuring the new sovereign nation by flying B-52s through its airspace.
Doesn't matter what jersey the team is wearing - militaristic bullshit is militaristic bullshit. I doubt this will actually convince you to agree with me, and that's fine. I'm replying mostly to show other posters that not everyone on here is homogenous on this issue.
Yeah it honestly matters very little what the "people of Taiwan" want. The reason most people of Taiwan are anti-communist is because they're the capitalists and KMT remnants who fled the mainland, the ones who massacred all the leftist and opposition groups in Taiwan with the help of a foreign imperialist power, the US.
A better analogy would be Israel and citing the far right political views of the average Israeli as a justification for their ethnic cleansing. There's no such thing as self-determination when you're a settler rump state, the idea that you can occupy and brutally subjugate a region for decades then turn around and claim that you democratically represent the people there is absurd.
You can call it militaristic bullshit but militaristic bullshit is what brought almost every socialist state to power, I see it as a belated finish to the communist revolution and civil war.
It doesn't matter if they're anticommunist. They have their own nation and the right to maintain it as they choose. The civil war is over. China won. Taking Taiwan militarily would just be taking clay at gunpoint for the sake of expansion.
I don't think Israel is a fair comparison. There's definitely a space to argue that just because a majority of people want something doesn't make it right, but wherever you fall on that spectrum, there is a clear difference between popular genocide and the desire to remain independent from China.
Calling Taiwan a "nation" is a stretch, maybe it's semantics to you but I don't see Taiwan as a nation that can exercise self-determination, they're more of a rump state propped up militarily by a foreign power. That's not hyperbole, the only reason the civil war is "over" is because the US used its fleet to repel a PRC invasion during the 1950s.
So does a state controlled and shaped by capitalists and anti-communists through violence and foreign support have the "right" to determine Taiwan's political structure and future? I don't think so, in fact I feel pretty hostile towards any secessionist movement supported largely by imperialists, the rich, and anti-communists, it's somewhat of a libertarian fantasy that any region with arbitrarily drawn borders can secede by claiming "popular support", especially when it's a direct result of some combination of mass migration and repression.
Wouldn't it be the other way around? I.e. the current United States regime is badly losing against an uprising and decided to flee to Hawaii. Rather than do a final assault on Hawaii, the revolutionaries decide to consolidate (and intervene on the behalf on revolutionaries in Mexico!). Meanwhile the entire capitalist world pretends that the remains of the former U.S. state in Hawaii is the sovereign government of the whole United States for the next 20 years, and the biggest imperialist power of the time makes a military alliance with the U.S. state in Hawaii and builds military bases there, etc. Eventually, it's been 70 years and the original criminals in the old US regime are dead and the whole thing is muddled.
The PRC's aggressive policy towards Taiwan long predates Deng. In the 1950s they even shelled Taiwan on two occasions collectively known as the Taiwan Straight crises. Back then it was pretty obviously a continuation of the civil war, but it is true that after so much time, and the end of the KMT dictatorship. I'm not terribly familiar with the polling data, but from what is immediately available, it shows that the majority of the Taiwanese people favor maintaining the status quo, and this pew poll indicates that many favor strengthening ties with the United States over mainland China (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/05/12/in-taiwan-views-of-mainland-china-mostly-negative/). That said, polling isn't the end of everything. After all, I imagine if they conducted a poll in the US about dissolving the state and instilling socialism, it wouldn't do too well either for a variety of reasons. Initially, the war on Iraq had high polling support in the United States as well. Polling isn't everything (and if it was, people would be forced to acknowledge the high level of popular support for the Chinese government within the mainland.)
A thing that doesn't get talked about much in the Aglosphere at least in the colonial history of Taiwan and the subsequent need for decolonization. I'll happily support a socialist uprising by the Taiwanese people independent from both the PRC and the United States, but I feel no sympathy for the Taiwanese neoliberal state and it's function for the United States as a mean to project power in it's imperialism.
Just to be clear we’re talking about an island province in China that the Kuomintang fled to at the end of the civil war. That’s it. Taiwan is not a true nation, separate from China in the way that Japan is. It’s just the last piece of clay from the civil war.
The relationship at play is between Taiwan and the rest of China, so it’s a little more nuanced than if Taiwan had an independent national history, which it really doesn’t
A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture. - Stalin
So it's a nation as old as the current incarnation of China?
Why is one real and not the other?
Because one is communist and the other is a fascist colony that wiped out indigenous population and formed a government in exile that aids imperialist invaders
Placing China and the American empire on equal footing with an “imperialism” signifier is a rhetorical trick that might fool non-leftists, but I’m not buying it
Never mind that this isn't a discussion about, say, Africa, but rather Taiwan, which was part of China until a civil war. Imperialism doesn't even factor into this at all!
I don’t think this is healthy, normal social behaviour on your part, comrade.
I think you have a point. I flip-flop between whether China is socialist or not daily. Same for other AES. I mean, if they aren't then the world is fucked. In a way it is similar to how people, despite all evidence to the contrary, believe US is a free, democratic country that preserves the rule of law and all that. Or that the US can get better somehow.
I mean, the truth is I want China to be socialist. So if people on the left show me some proof of that I'll gladly accept it. And if I read some defense against Western criticism, I'll believe it too. I've destroyed actual relationships over China.
But the doubts always creep back up. Partly because I try to keep an open mind and always explore everything on the left. Marx and Kropotkin, ML and LeftCom, MLM and SI. Just whatever I can get my hands on.
As a result, I'm always in a perpetual state of uncertainty. So, I listen, respect, and agree, with anarchist critiques of China, or what I read about Chinese workers' strikes, struggles etc from the bottom up. But I also never entertain any criticism that wasn't from those perspectives, especially if it's from a capitalist source. And because these Western sources are the only ones people IRL use, it means I come off as someone who stans China. Add in the fact that these people IRL are themselves racist or xenophobic and bam, no reason for me to back down either.
Life is messy. I wish I lived in a post-communist world, where we've already progressed to whatever comes after communism/anarchism.
"china is socialist" mostly boils down to vernacular. Do you mean "china achieved socialism"? In that case no, and they wouldnt claim that. Do you mean "is china a socialist state"? Well that also boils down to vernacular. A state ruled by a socialist party which upholds certain socialist ideology and undertakes the development of socialism? Sure thats certainly been part of its history and continues today. If we can't refer to states which are ruled by socialist parties as simply "socialist states" because they havent achieved socialism we're just playing a dumb game of vernacular. If you wish to learn about China read contemporary chinese marxists perspectives on it like Minqi Li or Hao Qi. Theres certainly different party lines represented within the communist party, and liberalism has certainly had its influence over the polity over the past decades, mostly during the 90s. It varies.
I'm from Romania. I come across people that say Romania was communist (it wasnt, but you can refer to it as that, but its just dumb arguments over vernacular). I come across people that say Romania wasn't socialist (more dumb arguments). I come across arguments of people saying Ceausescu wasn't a Marxist (this is just dumb chauvinism). I come across people who say Romania is still socialist (these are just morons). Its tiring that people focus so much on arguments over vernacular. The reality is that a "socialist society" is not a utopia, class contradictions only then begin to even start being addressed, exploitation continues, hard working conditions continue, etc. No country that has ever achieve socialism has ever been able to do anything but undertake a series of plans to address certain ills in modern society and work towards a better society, with varying degrees and often lots of failure.
Westerners focus on these other places because its easier than actually undertaking the enormously difficult task of achieving something similar here, and indeed many want to point to certain failures and downsides to socialist states and say well if things are like that I dont want to bother with that at all. And thats fine I mean what are you gonna do? But in reality this is how things are, it cant be perfect and there will be downsides and you arent the first to question or think about these things or conceive of what you think are better ways to do things, and theres reasons things didnt go different in these places. I dont know the answer to what the "right way" really is because it depends so much on the country and people there of course.
The question isn’t whether China has achieved socialism, because it clearly has not, even by the admission of the CPC. Right now, capitalist production, which largely replaced the planned economy won in the revolution, dominates in China, and the ostensible plan is to transition away from capitalist production in the future. It’s hard to say that the working class owns or meaningfully control the means of production in China, unless you also believe that the Chinese state, with its economic influence and participation, itself represents the democratic control of the working class.
The question of whether China is “socialist” is really the question of which class controls the Chinese state. And that is truly an either/or question: According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes .
If it is a state controlled by the working class, it is also a state for the subjugation of the capitalist class.In my opinion, this is no longer the case in China, and the state is generally functioning to prop up and maintain capitalist production and control. From the perspective of the working class, the most desirable subjugation of the capitalist class is the ability to expropriate, own, and exclusively control the means of production, from which flows the ability to do rational economic planning and development, lessen the workload for workers, provide essential goods and services, and so on. The planned economy that existed in China after the revolution was a step forward for the working class, albeit on shaky footing, and has since been clawed back.
The planned economy and expropriation of the capitalists is also an example of class contradictions being addressed in a fairly immediate way. Compare Lenin talking about the “immediate” tasks of the Russian revolution, which inherited a much smaller and less developed economy than present day China, as he saw them in October 1917:
“The Soviet Government must immediately introduce workers' control of production and distribution on a nation-wide scale.”
“It is necessary to nationalise the banks and the insurance business immediately, and also the most important branches of industry (oil, coal, metallurgy, sugar, etc.), and at the same time, to abolish commercial secrets and to establish unrelaxing supervision by the workers and peasants over the negligible minority of capitalists who wax rich on government contracts and evade accounting and just taxation of their profits and property.”
These steps, which China has moved away from, are the first steps towards building socialism; they are immediate tasks, not future goals.
And this meme that “western” socialists have no legitimate reason to focus on the Chinese working class is just silly. The working class in China is one of the most powerful in history and indispensable for building socialism internationally, their victories are our victories and their defeats, our defeats.
What we can generally do is critically support China against imperialism and recognize its beneficial impact as an alternative to US imperialism
"What we can do is vote for Joe Biden and recognise his beneficial impact as an alternative to Donald Trump"
Whether China is socialist or not isn’t really something we can impact (unless you’re Chinese)
What the hell is this besides magical thinking? You don’t have to be Chinese to understand basic things about China’s economy and society.
You even seem to recognize that—how are you supposed to “appreciate the good in China while understanding the bad” if the fundamentals are apparently indecipherable to anyone born outside of China?
no-strings-attached Chinese loans
You have to actively ignore the published terms of the loans themselves to believe this. Chinese loans, including belt and road initiative loans, generally have market-rate interest rates. Some are literally secured with claims on resources. “No-strings-attached” except for all the strings attached.
you're right, when the union went to war with the confederates, that was imperialism
words mean nothing
