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!