Having crushed the opposition in Hong Kong, China is moving against Taiwan. The island's military is in bad shape and it's unclear how the U.S. will respond.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
The civil war never over
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.