this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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This article is nearly two years old. Also, I implicitly distrust any source which depicts Taiwan as part of the PRC.
Every single country on Earth except like seven (I only remember the Vatican and Paraguay) acknowledges that Taiwan is a dependent province of the PRC, including the USA and just about all of Europe.
Yes, but as you know in many cases it's for purely diplomatic reasons since acknowledging Taiwan's sovereignty means basically severing ties with the PRC, and most countries do far too much trade with it to make that in any way appealing.
Of course it's purely diplomatic, acknowledging countries is diplomacy. The end result is the same.
The end result here being the non-acknowledgement of Taiwan's de facto sovereignty, which is decidedly not a reflection of reality. I dare you to tell a Taiwanese person that they live in a dependent province of the PRC because other countries serving their own interests said so and see how they respond.
The bulk of Taiwanese support the status quo, including that being their official diplomatic position, so I think it would go over better than you imagine. The diehard separatists are a minority faction.
The status quo has broad support because it keeps the peace, and the Taiwanese people generally don't want to fight a war against China. That doesn't equate to the majority of the Taiwanese people holding the view that they're a part of the PRC and it should be fairly obvious that they don't believe nor want that.
You're the one that invited the thought experiment. I'm sure that is they were polled, they would also say that eternal youth and space travel would be nice, but they need to live in reality, and in reality the path they support is one where their official status as far as most international organizations are concerned is that Taiwan is part of the PRC.
You can't expect anyone to take you seriously when you are so blatantly trying to cherrypick concepts that support you and explain away those that don't.
I sure wonder how the descendants of the pre-1947 inhabitants -- those who survived the White Terror, I mean -- feel about this issue vs the blatant settler-colonial population of the "government in exile" shoe factory co-founded by the US
The reality is the Taiwan isn't broadly recognized as a sovereign country, so it doesn't wield the same authority as an independent nation in terms of international agreements, trade, etc. It doesn't have allies who would defend potential sovereignty, and it doesn't have enough guns or money to leverage itself as independent. That's way more important than some abstract discontent some people feel. At best you could say Taiwan is a Chinese client state.
Countries don't exist because some people feel like they should be one. I could ask you to talk to a Texan secessionist and tell them their cause is hopeless.
I will tell a person living in Taiwan they live in a province of China, sure. I don't care. Their government is the remnant of the defeated nationalist faction and I have no sympathy for it. I have way more sympathy for the Gaoshan and other indigenous Taiwanese people who aren't represented well. Taiwan will hopefully get reabsorbed into the mainland within my lifetime.
Texas is de fact and de jure a part of the United States. It's not a valid comparison and you know it.
What do you think about sources having depicted the Donetsk People's Republic as a part of Ukraine?
Apples to oranges, the DPR and LPR moreso puppet states of the Russian Federation than sovereign state in their own right. The same isn't true of Taiwan (despite its ties with Western states aiming to protect their interests in the region).
me when china threatens to abuse the living shit out of anyone if they recognise an 85 year running independently functioning island just so meatheads like you can spew obvious fat horseshit: 🙁
So fucking what? My government's official stance is not that they are a bunch of dickheads, yet here we are.
Outside of SOME official government communication (Western governments will happily send official delegations to Taiwan from time to time just to piss off the CCP) and other matters of strategic ambiguity like the Olympics, Taiwan is a country. Everybody but China and a few lonesome tankies agrees on that.
So when a private entity shows Taiwan as part of the PRC, it can only be assumed that they are tankies, Chinese propagandists, or incompetent. Either way, probably not trustworthy.
The unofficial consensus between the KMT/PRC was that Taiwan and China are one country. The NED-funded DPP has been trying to break that status quo, though.
What's the NED and DPP? I've been staying away from the news. I'll look them up in the future.
DPP is Taiwan's current governing party. Rather tight ties with the US government funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
that's a healthy way to distrust the US and chinese governments i guess
Imagine being so brainwashed by propaganda that you distrust your own government position 🤡
I'm not sure why you would assume I'm American. I mean, you happen to be right in this case, but I'm still not sure why you'd assume that.
Anyhow, there's an irony in your assertion that disagreeing with the position of one's government is "brainwashed."
Americans are very ease to distinguish based both on their political stances (which tend to be rather unique) and how they express them (which IS unique).
Y'all are like those pickup trucks with LED lights. Once you realize they exist, you can't miss them.
actually, a lot of Canadians have similar political stance too..
Anti-China/pro-Taiwan sentiment isn't exactly unique to the US. I think you're alluding to an incendiary tone with respect to how you say Americans express their views, but that doesn't seem to quite fit so I'm a little lost there.
I mean, clearly people can tell that you're American, so maybe it's time for some introspection?
You made an assumption and you've yet to expound on how you justified it beyond some vague assertion about American political discourse. Give me something to introspect on, then, for crying out loud.
Most countries that aren't America aren't inundated with anti-China rhetoric, so if someone starts spouting off about China (and especially Chinese civil rights, or uses the term "CCP") in English they're almost certainly an American.
Does China lag behind the west in terms of queer rights? Yes. We're critical of that but also recognize the grassroots initiatives within the CPC to change that, and support those efforts. Does China pollute more in raw numbers than America? Yeah, but they're also the global leader in green power production, so they're clearly working to fix the emissions problem, which we support. China also takes a non-imperialist stance internationally, which is far and away better than anything America has ever done internationally.
Didn't China literally just host the Gay Games?
You don't disagree with your government; you didn't know what your government's position was until right now.
You still don't really know what your government's position is, otherwise you'd understand that here, as in many cases, there's an official stance for diplomatic relations and then a bunch of propaganda (for both domestic and foreign consumption) that undermines that official stance.
Bold of you to assume what I do and don't know about geopolitics. I'm well aware of the fine line that the US government walks, but I don't speak for the US government and my views aren't informed by "propaganda" but by the simple observations that 1) the PRC is a totalitarian regime, and 2) that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign state which broadly speaking doesn't particularly want to be assimilated into the PRC. Where is the propagandistic angle here?
lol
Just because you agree with it doesn't mean it isn't propaganda
Do you disagree with either of those observations? They seem fairly indisputable to me.
you're only allowed to call the PRC "totalitarian" or undemocratic if you condemn the "democracies" of the english speaking world. the US president isn't even the person who gets the most votes🤡
Taiwan does not "generally" have a stance against reunification, some independence parties are a bit more popular than they used to be, but them becoming a legally independent state requires vast constitutional and international changes no government has even begun to implement
I'm sorry, but there's no way you can possibly equate the US government to the CCP without arguing in bad faith. The decidedly un-totalitarian nature of the US government is exactly why it's basically not functioning right now. There's plenty of valid criticism there, but to draw any sort of comparison to the Chinese form of government is insane.
Of course you believe in American exceptionalism
On the contrary, I think that totalitarian states are moreso the exception than the rule in this day and age. Hell, I wouldn't even group Russia in the same class. There are varying degrees of autocracy and the US president certainly wields more power than heads of state/government in many European countries, but it's just a bad faith argument to try to draw a comparison to it when speaking about a regime such as the CCP.
I mean yeah one has a bourgeois state (US) and the other an proletarian one (PRC) so technically you're right in that it's not really comparable.
Do you know what hegemony means? And do you think it's a coincidence that you hold the same belief as the US state department?
How does democracy in China work
"Totalitarian" is a buzzword with a hazy definition at best. Go ahead and substantiate it.
But my point is that using such a buzzword with no further explanation is a somewhat comical display of how propagandized you are for how thought-terminating your use of the word is.
You aren't brainwashed, you are just enculturated to a very reactionary ideology. I actually agree that it's better to analyze them as separate countries for the purpose of something like this graph, but this thinktank (which, to be clear, is very Atlanticist, i.e. aligned with your geopolitical views) is almost surely gunning for having their little infographics be diplomatically palettable in hopes that they get used by important bodies.
I understand what you're saying here and I agree that that's what's going here, but making something "diplomatically palatable" is for all intents and purposes equivalent to appeasement and (in my view) automatically makes any other claims made subject to suspicion.
I mean, Atlanticists are imperialists and should be condemned, but your view is rather unhelpful since it means the vast majority of statements connected to the UN since ~1980 fall under the same view. It's not like the PRC denies that the RoC government exists and effectively controls the island of Formosa, in our context it is just a rhetorical affectation to the effect of the RoC government not being legitimate, which is a pretty fair stance to take given the RoC's own positively absurd territorial claims.
Libs: I support Taiwan because China is bad
Leftists: do you support the 11 dash line then?
Libs: ???
The ROC's territorial claims are a side effect of the PRC's stance on Taiwan. I don't remember the exact details but essentially the PRC has previously declared that it would interpret any change in the ROC's territorial claims as a declaration of war. It's a matter of pragmatism.
Given that the civil war never technically ended, I'm pretty sure a "declaration of war" just reinforces the status quo.