cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/49224731
China’s ambassador to Australia has urged Canberra to prepare for dealing with a “reunified China”, declaring Chinese people “will not forgive” countries that seek to obstruct Beijing’s push to bring Taiwan under its control.
In remarks that frame reunification as inevitable and resistance as unforgivable, Xiao Qian likened Taiwan’s status to that of Tasmania and warned that any attempt of “compromising or openly distorting” Beijing’s one-China principle would constitute a retreat from prior commitments and erode trust.
He said Australia could not keep reaping the benefits of trade with China while seeking to block reunification, signalling economic consequences for resisting Beijing’s aims.
[…]
Mr Xiao also lashed a recent [Australian] Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade statement that described China’s military and coast guard drills around Taiwan as “deeply concerning, destabilising and risk inflaming regional tensions”, and reiterated that Canberra opposed any unilateral attempt to change the status quo.
[…]
He also cautioned governments, including Australia’s, against pursuing dialogue on Taiwan unless they were committed to reunification.
[…]
In this context, where the Australia is literally a imperial colony of the largest empire in the history of the world that continues to openly oppress the indigenous people of an entire continent, your comment is hilarious.
It’s a mixed situation after Federation. Historically, Australia (the state) was founded as a British colony, and we legally are still part of the Commonwealth under their king, and also the US has significant influence over Australia, but we’ve seen Australia has demonstrated its own capacity for imperialism in the region.
This doesn’t negate your point at all, it’s just something which is often forgotten.
Yes, all of the white supremacist colonies continued their white supremacist settler colonial dominance after independence. It’s almost like it has nothing to do with exactly who’s in charge but rather is a broad spectrum socio-historical phenomenon that requires more than just changing a flag or a leader
Why would it be hilarious? In this case, China is the one threatening others to accept their imperialist ambitions. His comment was on point. Yours, on the other hand, reeks of bootlicking.
Because Australia is saying this:
'ey Bruce! After you’re done ova there with your daily oppression of your imperial subjects of centuries, I need ya ta come over here and help me build a military alliance that we can threaten Choina wit just in case they ever try to integrate the Choinese people on the island province of Taiwan with the Choinese people on the main land.
And China is saying this:
Hey Chinese people who live on the island province of Taiwan. Now that you’re 30 years into your experiment where you’re no longer run by a Chinese military dictatorship that killed everyone who disagree with them for 40 years, we’re going to continue, as we have for 50 years, pursue peaceful unification of our national defense systems and ensure y’all can keep running your Western style democratic system because honestly we don’t care how you govern yourselves as long as you don’t let violent imperialists like Australia and the US to build military power on the island. And Australia, if you continue to make plans to violently intervene, we will be very cross with you and will hold a grudge for quite some time.
Funny how you frame a military defence alliance as a threat to China, but decided to frame the intended invasion of Taiwan as a “peaceful unification”.
Also, remind me again what happened to their promise to allow Hong Kong to govern themselves without China interfering again? Yeah, nobody believes them on that front.
Anybody who lives around the South China Sea knows how untrustworthy China is when it comes to their imperialist ambition.
Hong Kong is still governing themselves. Their governmental system is still intact. It was not dismantled. You clearly just saw some violent protests and assumed you knew what was going on.
China’s one country two system approach is very explicit about one country meaning one military and one national security apparatus. The protests were about a national security law coming into effect that would give the CPC the legal framework to remove politicians that collaborated with Britain, the US, or other enemies of China.
And even though the student protestors fire bombed the police, the police were extremely restrained on the face of protestors literally burning people alive. The protests raged for weeks on end and the violence we saw on the news was almost entirely showing students throwing molotovs while the police retreated slowly. A far different sort of conflict than what we see in the US or England.
So, yes, the world absolutely believes China’s One Country Two Systems because it’s been doing it for literally centuries and because even in Hong Kong, where there was a violent student protest, the Hong Kong system of government is still operating in the same form it was operating when the British installed it.
It’s not governing themselves if the CPC decides who they collaborate with. And your argument about police bring restrained is similar to how Israel supporters try to gaslight everyone how Israel is acting restrained against terrorists.
It’s an obviously overused tactic now to paint the students as the bad actor when they have every right to decide how their country is supposed to be run, given that they are the future of their country. Anytime a government cracks down on student protest, it’s never the government that is in the right.
So no, the world, especially China’s neighbours, doesn’t believe that China will let Taiwan to govern themselves. They’d only allow a puppet government to be in power, like they’re doing in Hong Kong.
Well then you’re not free because your government decides who you can collaborate with. What silly absolutism.
I mean, you could say that, but then you’d have to look up the numbers killed and then you’d be embarrassed for making such a comparison.
This is an obviously shallow take. Hong Kong isn’t a country. It’s a part of China that the British carved off at gun point. Then they abused and oppressed the Chinese people there for decades. Then, when Thatcher realized that they were going to have to abide by the terms of the lease and actually give it back to China, it was the British that decided on the form of economy and the form of government. And they made deliberate choices to privilege a specific subset of the population that was amenable to being supported of British rule. Compradors, we call them. The British were the ones who came up with the concept of a Hong Kong identity, even, as a way of creating separation between Chinese people in Hong Kong and Chinese people in China.
And the students grew up in a system organized by the compradors, with Western style universities tied directly to Western financial interests (Hong Kong, after all, became a strong British financial hub) and the British were well positioned after occupying the region for a century to really stir the pot.
The student protest movement in Hong Kong was nearly universally shunned by the parents and particularly the grandparents of the students. The grandparents had really gone through the oppression of British rule and they rightly told those kids that they were being manipulated, even shutting them out of their homes for protesting.
But of course, liberals like you see everything in a vacuum. Those students were protesting because they were fully formed intellectual with all the context and not a single thing could have swayed them one way or another - they just know deep down that communist China is evil because they’re the future of their country of Hong Kong…
It’s just so sad that you know all these concepts, like puppet government, but you think history started right around the time you graduated high school.
The government in Hong Kong was a British puppet. If you do not understand that, you are either ignorant or willfully ignorant. China, through One Party Two Systems, clearly knows that the government of Hong Kong was British puppet government at the time of the lease ending and instead of doing anything about it allows that government to continue operating for a decade while China focused entirely integrating Hong Kong into national defense. Then China went spy hunting and by 2015 had effectively shutdown all the Western spy networks in China. And then, as they saw Hong Kong and Taiwan being manipulated by the West, they tightened national security so they could go after British puppets in Hong Kong and the students took their bodies to the streets and risked their lives for some fucking compradors. And China, understanding that this was the situation, let the protests rage for weeks and kept having the police back off despite the protestors getting seriously violent. And now it’s called down, and the British puppets are gone or in jail, and the Hong Kong system is still operating as an independent government system, but without British manipulation.
You really need to take the wider view here. It’s not one sided. Hong Kong is not operating in a vacuum as some group of Chinese people that hate communism. It’s literally a British colony, now former colony being manipulated by the British, who have been enemies of China for literally centuries. It will take many decades for Hong Kong to recover from the traumas of British rule. The student protests were a manifestation of that trauma. They had to happen. But they do not represent some sort of signal that China is a brutal evil dictatorship.
Pretty much what “peaceful unification” means
White Euro centric westerns stop projecting challenge: impossible
MLs stop chaining random lingo with no substance to appear intelligent challenge: impossible
China hasn’t dropped a bomb in over 30 years.
It’s the USA that says “let me save you from what I will do to you if you don’t let me save you”.
The USA has destroyed a dozen countries in only the last 20 years. It is currently bombing multiple countries as we debate. China is doing nothing of the sort and has done nothing of the sort for decades.
You are projecting your own culture’s violent mobster-like behavior onto China in a way that is fundamentally divorced from reality.
You’re literally a yank… and through your Yankish Orientalism you’re just advocating for the Chinese Monroe Doctrine
Aaanyways, I don’t expect you read Chinese (most yanks fascinated by the PRC don’t), but this post is from the PLA Eastern Theatre Command, not some rando on Weibo, a part of Chinese state apparatus.
The Chinese state showing their “Taiwanese comrades” as vermin to be exterminated by barrages of missiles is peaceful unification to you. Lmao. The locations of the worms in the photos are the most dense population centres in Taiwan, not military installations
In genocide studies, dehumanization is commonly understood as a preparatory step on the path to mass killing, which is also seen in other statements such as 留島不留人" (leave the island, don’t leave the people), etc.
It’s just so tired.
Those are locations of military installations, primarily US military installations, which is in keeping with the entire theme of the poster which is the destruction of US military assets.
You can keep trying to scrape up little things like this and pretend it proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the CPC is just like every single evil European empire. But we all know it’s projection. The USA is actively showing us what it looks like to kill your own people and to drive violent rhetoric against them. China looks nothing like that. The US is actively showing us what naval bullying looks like. China looks nothing like that.
You are drawing false equivalencies to simultaneously assure yourself that they are equally or more evil people in the world while also providing the rhetorical support the empire needs to continue vilifying its enemies and expanding its violence.
China hasn’t dropped a bomb in 30 years. In that same time, the US has destroyed a dozen countries. There is no equivalency. China has been pursuing peaceful reunification with Taiwan for 50 years. It gains absolutely nothing by attacking the island. The only reason it would attack Taiwan, and again it has said this for 50 years, is if foreign imperial powers establish too strong of a military presence there. Remember, there are US soldiers stationed 4 miles off the coast of the mainland because those small islands are part of the province of Taiwan.
It’s disgusting how much water you will carry for the empire.
Yes, that’s completely true.
It does not in any way excuse China for its own current imperialism (e.g., Tibet, Xianjiang), or for its threats of further direct military conquests for the sake of expanding its empire (the subject of this article).
Tibet and Xinjiang are not the examples of Chinese imperialism.
I wish I could figure out a way to communicate the clear pattern here.
Tibet was party of One Country Two Systems centuries ago, before the phrase was even coined. The Mongols were the imperialists and they occupied a lot of China, and they occupied Tibet. When the Chinese reasserted their self-determination, they then liberated Tibet. And since Tibet literally could not defend itself against another Mongol invasion, the Chinese established a permanent military garrison to defend Tibet but did not dominate their people or run their government or colonize them.
Tibet declared independence in the early 1900s. Only a few countries recognized them. And they formed a theorcratic monarchy that enslaved 95% of their own people, tortured and killed them, and collaborated with Western imperialist powers. China then liberated the Tibetan people, again, this time from their own domestic oppresors. The free Tibet movement you remember did not originate from inside Tibet. It was an astroturfed campaign that emerged from the CIA collaboration with the exiled monarchy. The Dalai Lama’s brother wrote in his memoirs that he fully regrets working with the CIA because they harmed the Tibetan people instead of helping them. Specifically, we know that the CIA trained terrorists and air lifted them into Tibet to cause violent terror to create conditions for splitting Tibet from China. It killed people, failed to achieve the US’s violent imperialist aims.
Xinjiang has a long history of conflict with China dating back 2000 years. The current incarnation of the situation is a result of Qing imperialism occupying Xinjiang. China has not made moves to release Xinjiang, but what they have done is made them an autonomous region with self-governance. The US, yet again, decided to get involved in the East Turkistan independence movement and train terrorists to send into Xinjiang to destabilize the region. There was a constant growth in terrorist attacks in Xinjiang for years. China’s response has been nothing short of world historic. Their anti-terrorism program, which the West claimed as a genocide, greatly reduced terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. And the whole time they invited observers to the region and the consensus by on the ground observers has been that Xinjiang remains culturally and politically autonomous, celebratory of their religion, language, and historical culture, while simultaneously going through incredibly difficult and dangerous national security operations to bring terrorist attacks down.
Taiwan, too, is an imperial colony from the 1600s, when China occupied the indigenous population there. It still is that, but Westerners don’t talk about the indigenous people there. The indigenous people there are not asking from national recognition and total independence right now. They are a minority among the Han Chinese there. But China’s position regarding Taiwan primarily has to do with the fact that the US decided to make Taiwan an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which it can threaten China. China was more than happy to let history play itself out, knowing that time was on its side and that the Han Chinese on Taiwan would eventually reintegrate with the mainland. But the US turned the island into a protectorate and defended the fascist dictatorship that terrorized the island for 40 years straight and killed tens of thousands of people for the crime of wondering if maybe they should ally with their own people instead of the imperialist West. China still believes that the historical process will play out towards integration, but only if left alone. The US seems bent on continuing to escalate the violent threats with more and more weapon systems and troops. There are US troops stationed 4 miles from the coast of mainland China because those chain islands are part of the province of Taiwan. The US is the current imperial actor here and the dominant threat in the region. Once the US is removed, Taiwan will slowly choose to integrate with China, if only for purely economic reasons. Only after that process of resolving contradiction occurs can we begin to examine resolving the contradiction of Han imperialism over the indigenous people of Taiwan and resolve that contradiction.
Everywhere you look for Chinese imperialism in the modern era, you will see Chinese anti-imperialism against Western imperialism. It is a testament to Western propaganda that even though everyone knows the US is a violent psychotic belligerent that creates death and destruction wherever it goes, for whatever reason, Western propaganda is still capable of convincing us that actually China is the imperialist, when it hasn’t even dropped a single bomb for over 30 years!
Both is true, so is USA. Xi’s boot is already clean enough from their yesmen’s licking, you don’t have to join in.
Your statement is wrong. Please read my brief comment in this thread. You’ll find more information about Chinese imperialism in Asia and across the world across the web.
It’s not from an approved propaganda source. The tankie won’t read it. They’re just maga for Communism… everything to them is fake news if it doesn’t feed into their views.
They are as much communists as maga are rational patriots. Auth-simps self isolating in a chosen echo chamber. Then when reality comes knocking, instead of wandering out to take a look like a well adjusted person. They run deeper into the closet.
Communists in the West read twice as much as you liberals. We had to to even become communists. We had to read everything you had to read in school. We were raised by liberal parents just like you were, and they read the same shit your parents did and passed it down to us. We have to read the same anglosphere internet content and mainstream news sources, we watch the same movies and TV shows you do.
And then we ALSO have to read everything else that contradicts it and dismantles it and argues against it. And then, because this is how intellectual honesty works, then we have to dig deeper into the anti-communist Western corpus in order to review the arguments against communism and find the arguments that directly attack the procommunist content we recently found. I dare say communists are likely to have read two or three things for every one thing you’ve read.
Just because you only consume propaganda from your dominant culture doesn’t mean that people who disagree with you are just consuming propaganda from some other culture. It’s not really possible for it to be that way anyway. It’s not like I went through 16 years of communist schooling, or spent 30 years watching communist news casts and working with fellow communists in the work place or hanging out with communist friends. I have been fully immersed in Western anti-communist, Russophobia, sinophobic, capitalist white supremacist patriarchy, just like you have been.
I just read different things and came to different conclusions than you did.
Ahhahahaha