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.
[…]
You say that as though there’s any prospect of that happening by any means other than violent colonial oppression on the part of the PRC.
LOL. You are so funny. The presence of Han Chinese people on the island of Taiwan is the colonial oppression. The very people you are supporting in Taiwan are settler colonists from a colonial project that started 400 years ago. Do you even know the name of the indigenous people of the island? Do you know their name for the island? Fuck off with your ignorant sanctimonious projection.
Nice deflection. We’re not talking about what happened 400 years ago. We’re talking about what’s going on right now.
Yes, the pre-communist, pre-republic Chinese imperialism against the native Taiwanese population was bad. It doesn’t justify modern-day imperialism from the PRC, any more than poor treatment of the various central Vietnamese native populations would justify Chinese imperialism against Vietnam. Or indeed any more than Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous population would justify China deciding to invade Australia.
Your blatant whataboutism is not a defence of China here.
So you understand what colonialism is but still insist on calling Chinese/Taiwanese integration colonialism? Your intellectual honesty is clearly unimpeachable.
Taiwan is a sovereign nation you tankie shit. Move to russia or NK or china since you love it so much. The west doesn’t need more division from tankies, we got enough to deal with right now.
Dealing with the ignorance is exhausting. But it must be done.
No, Taiwan is not a sovereign nation, nor is it a sovereign country (yes there are differences). The government of Taiwan is a Chinese government. It has never declared itself a sovereign nation or country. It has always maintained that it is the legitimate government of the country of China. The country of China includes Taiwan as a province. The legitimate government of China would be sovereign over the country of China which would include Taiwan. Both the government on the island and the government on the mainland agree with this and have agreed about it continuously.
The only people who have ever claimed Taiwan is a sovereign country are Western civilians. Western governments haven’t even made that claim.
You should read more about this. It will be easier than arguing with someone you don’t respect.
Lol, you have drank the fuck out of some CCP koolaid. You tankies really should just leave, you can enjoy your love for the CCP up close.
Said the anglophile who has been indoctrinated into imperial propaganda since birth and whose parents and grandparents and great grandparents were indoctrinated in the same vein for generations upon generations. Yes, it’s me who is drinking the Kool aid. You’re right
Lol you’re world view is with CCP glasses. Yet I and others in this thread don’t defend western imperialism…yet I’m indoctrinated lol sure thing kid.
Taiwan has been an independent country for over three quarters of a century. So yes, a forceful invasion of another country for the purposes of exploiting its resources and population would be colonialism.
No it hasn’t. For fucks sake read a book.
The island of Taiwan was a province of China starting 400 years ago. Imperial Japan attacked China and China lost. Japan demanded China give Taiwan Island to Japan as a condition of the war ending. When the nation of China expelled the Japanese during WW2, Taiwan reverted to its original centuries-long status as being a province of China.
During the civil war, two factions of the nation of a China fought, and one faction of the nation of China lost and fled to the Chinese province of Taiwan.
At no time did that faction of the nation of China declare independence, request independence, or describe itself as an independent nation. It continued to act on the world stage, with the support of over 100 other countries, as the government of the nation of China, which included the mainland.
Eventually, most countries in the world realized that the faction on Taiwan was not a legitimate national government and they recognized the CPC as the legitimate government of the country of China, of which Taiwan island was still a province and that status was never changed by literally anyone.
You know about Chinese settler colonialism on the island but you don’t know that Taiwan has never been an independent country? Talk about confirmation bias! Or maybe you know you’re being disingenuous and outright lying but don’t care so long as it opposes your ideological enemies?
None of what you said is new to me, or likely to anyone in this thread. And apart from the last two paragraphs, none of it is even controversial.
The penultimate paragraph is a bit misleading. It’s not that Taiwan is not “a legitimate national government”. It’s that its claims to be the national government of all of China were obviously bullshit for a government that had not had actual control over mainland China for over two decades at the point that UN recognition changed.
The last paragraph is true in the sense of what is official recognised, but obviously incorrect in reality. Taiwan is an independent country as a matter of fact and has been since the end of the civil war. I’m not interested in what they claim, or the PRC claims, or America claims, or even what Australia claims. It is an entirely separate country that maintains entirely separate foreign policy, separate defence force, and entirely operates its own internal affairs. In no real sense is it part of the same country. And that’s what actually matters. Anyone who claims Taiwan is not an independent country is doing so for political reasons, and their discussions on the subject should be treated with significant scepticism. At best, they’re playing a game of realpolitik. At worst they’re talking bullshit.
I know which is going on here.
That’s just not true. Independent countries are defined by consensus. If they weren’t, then Crimea and the Donbas are no longer part of Ukraine, and I doubt you hold that standard. Taiwan has less claim to independence because they literally never expressed a desire for independence.
That’s wild isn’t it. That’s the definition of chavunism. You don’t care about international law, about democratic referenda, about the history of the social construction of sovereignty, about the claims of the people in question. Nope you just care about your moral framing and everyone’s just gonna have to deal with it because it’s objectively correct.
You must be a blast at parties.
Maybe I can reason with you by analogy. Racism is a social construction, right? It was invented in a book by a Portuguese guy and through the process of history became elevated to the point where it is very real but also not based on reality. It’s made up but we still measure crime statistics and distribute money and do censuses on the basis of race, right? So in what sense is race real? Only in the sense of the socio-historical process of reifying an idea into a superstructural reality that effects human lives.
Sovereignty, nations, countries, and states are the same. They don’t exist “out there” for us to discover. Some guy wrote something down and through a socio-historical process these concepts have evolved and developed into “real” things. So there are MANY real senses in which Taiwan is not an independent country - it never declared independence, it never seceded, it isn’t recognizes internationally as one, etc. These are all the mechanisms by which we socially construct the shared legal fiction of sovereign nations.
So I know you want to say that because the PLA didn’t invade Taiwan during the civil war that therefore the didn’t get their seat and the music stopped and life is actually a game of musical chairs, but that’s actually less real than the realities of international consensus. And the international consensus is that Taiwan is not an independent country.
This is a retelling of the story that is biased towards your conclusion. It’s not precisely accurate. Taiwan did not claim to be the legitimate government of “all of China” including the mainland. The KMT faction of the country of China claimed to be the legitimate government of the country called China. That country is a social construction, internationally recognized as such. The country of China has a definition that is historically constructed and again internationally recognized. This social construct that we call the country of China includes the province of Taiwan. The KMT claimed to be the legitimate government of the country of China, like Juan Guaido claimed to be the president of Venezuela. He didn’t claim to be the president of “all of Venezuela including Miami where I am sitting now and also mainland Venezuela”. It’s a political claim about political entities. Control does not really factor into it.
At one level, you’re echoing Steven Miller when he says you can’t claim something if you can’t defend it, which he says to mean the US can take Greenland because the Danish can’t defend it. That’s equivalent to what you’re saying here, and it’s just not how the social construction of sovereignty works. We definitely still have the concept of might making right, in that if a country militarily annexes another country and holds it long enough and claims it to be part of their country the international community eventually concedes the point. But that’s not this. The KMT did not even secede, let alone claim Taiwan away from some other country. None of the conditions have been met for any claims of sovereignty.
And anyone who claims it is independent is carrying water for the US empire who wants nothing more than to continue the European project of carving away parts of China and creating conditions for civil war between Chinese people so they can fight each other and not risk American lives.
See. I can make broad claims like that too. Anyone who claims Taiwan is and independent sovereign nation is doing so for political reasons and is lying by omission, either through ignorance or maliciousness, and should be met with facts and history and eventually derision.
Blah blah blah.