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.
[…]
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.
The arm of the Chinese state tasked with annexing Taiwan posting images showing Taiwanese as vermin to be exterminated is “scraping small things”.
I don’t want US involvement in Taiwan, I want Taiwan and China to have better relations on the basis that there’s two countries on opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait. I don’t want yanks like you to benefit from war in Asia-Pacific.
Most Taiwanese I talk to want the same, but have to swallow sending money to the US for weapons in order to keep their way of life.
China could pull back on the ultimatum of annexation and allow those relations to flourish, instead it is ratcheting up the tension through drills simulating blockading Taiwan and starving it’s population into submission (against UN Charter but we don’t care about that in tankie land if China does it), and bombing dense population centres.
Edit: also where did you get that map lmao? Looks like it’s from the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis which is in the fucking 50s
Yes, choosing to editorialize a few small images on a poster as depicting the Han Chinese in Taiwan as vermin to be exterminated, when there is 50 years of diplomatic evidence that this is not the perspective of the Chinese government. Yes. You are scraping.
You’re too educated to be this ignorant. I have to assume you’re being totally disingenuous.
The US got involved in Taiwan to punish China when China decided to support the Korean people trying to push the US imperialists off the peninsula. When the US got involved, they supported the 40 year white terror. The white terror involved purging the island of entire families where anyone even mentioned maybe rejoining the mainland and ending the civil war. 40 fucking years of violent fascist repression while the US built up its imperial military logistics and infrastructure in its psychotic quest to violent destroy communism in China.
The island’s current “way of life” is only about 30 years old at this. Democratic reforms were introduced at the same time they were introduced in Hong Kong. That’s not a coincidence. But more importantly, that democratic transition happened with the US military already fully integrated into the society. The idea that they are somehow forced to buy weapons to maintain their way of life is totally disingenuous. They were buying weapons long before they abandoned overt violent fascism and the only reason China is threatening violence is literally because of foreign military interference. Again, China has been consistent on that for 50 years.
China’s recent escalations of the preparation of force can be explained in two ways: 1) they just decided after 50 years to finally just get violent because they’re irrational fascists or 2) the material threat to national security has gotten worse.
Given ALL the evidence that we have available to us, from Afghanistan to Libya to Somalia to Iran to Nigeria to Venezuela, do we genuinely think that the national security threat from the US is not at the highest it’s been since the 1950s?
And yes, the image I provided is older. I don’t have an updated map of all US military threats and strategic positions in Taiwan. That’s sort of irrelevant though, as the US has only continuously increased its military investment in Taiwan.