China launched its most extensive war games around Taiwan on Monday to showcase Beijing’s ability to cut off the island from outside support in a conflict, testing Taipei’s resolve to defend itself and its arsenal of U.S.-made weapons.
The Eastern Theatre Command said it had deployed troops, warships, fighter jets and artillery for its “Justice Mission 2025” exercises to encircle the democratically governed island, conduct live fire and simulated strikes on land and sea targets, and drills to blockade Taiwan’s main ports.
The live-firing exercises will continue on Tuesday across a record seven zones designated by China’s Maritime Safety Administration, making the drills the largest to date by total coverage and in areas closer to Taiwan than previous exercises. The military had initially said artillery firing would be confined to five zones.
Interesting that would consider it imperialism when a country does a military exercise on the coast of their own country near an island that was stripped away from one’s direct control by imperialists when the military exercise is specifically to confirm readiness for the thing that the imperialists keep saying they are going to do - establish greater and greater military presence in the region.
Remember, you likely already agree that the US is an imperialist force, the largest in the world. Does the US deploy its military for good reasons or is it an abusive bully? If China says that it hears the US threats to build up military surrounding China and in particular in Taiwan, is it consistent for us to believe the US is telling the truth this time?
Can you elaborate on this? I love watching gymnastics.
During the Chinese civil war, the PLA defeated the KMT and the KMT fled to the island province of Taiwan, a part of the nation state of China.
The US and British navies protected the KMT during their retreat and afterward, essentially creating a protectorate out of the island while the KMT prosecuted the fascist White Terror, with mass killings and political repression for the next 40 years, only adopting a liberal democratic formation once the Brits established a similar one in Hong Kong, which was another imperialist holding stripped away from China.
That you don’t know this about the history of the island you claim as your cause is unsurprising
My question was how exactly it was “stripped away from the CCP’s control”, which you didn’t address at any point in your colourful answer. You yourself admit it was always Republican territory. so which is it, then?
I love repeating myself in these threads. It’s so fun. Political parties do not control territories. That’s not how anything works. When Japan took Korea, it was not a party within Japan that took it. It was the nation state that took it. When Japan took Taiwan it was not a party within Japan that took Taiwan, it was the nation state that took it. When the US took Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc same thing. You would never say that it was Democratic-Republicans that own the Louisiana Purchase even though they were in power when the purchase took place.
The nation state of China, with its competing factions, reclaimed the island of Taiwan by pushing out the Japanese. The retreating army of the KMT fled to the island as refuge and the British and American warships protected them, setting up the island and the party to be a fascist vassal of the North Atlantic imperial regime. At no time did the retreating army secede nor declare independence. It claimed that despite having lost the war and despite having lost popular support that it was still the rightful government of China. Never mind that it had to kill tens of thousands of Chinese citizens who disagreed. Never mind that it spent 40 years violently and brutally crushing all forms of dissent against its position. And never mind that the imperialists never stopped supporting the KMT with warships, intelligence, arms, foreign direct investment, and diplomacy despite it being about as legitimate of a government as Juan Guaido.
Saying that the island belongs to the KMT is a category error. Parties don’t own territory. Nation states do. This is why the UN doesn’t have separate delegations for Labor, Conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, Greens, AFD, etc.
But by this logic, China is already in control of Taiwan, no? So why is the CPC threatening an invasion?
Truth is that you can’t really consider nations going through a civil war to be truly the same entity. I mean, they were literally fighting each other over control and claimed lands, bit strange if it’s all the same China no?
China (led by the CPC) is claiming lands it never controlled that are currently in control of China (led by the KMT). They’re de facto separate nation states, and the communist one does not and has never controlled Taiwan. Its territorial claims come from it claiming to be the successor state (or continuation state) of the Republic of China (officially, Mao declared the foundation of a new People’s Republic of China).
This is a wildly different situation from e.g. Labour/Conservatives in the UK. Neither make competing territorial claims nor claim to both be in power at the same time. They also all serve the same government, which the CPC/KMT do not.
I would like to help you see your words the way I see them.
Language matters. The nation-state of China isn’t really a controller of things so much as the government of China is controller of things. I would use the word “includes” here. By this logic, China, the nation-state, already includes Taiwan. This is indeed what I have been saying.
This is a great question and one I encourage everyone to examine. The CPC is very clear, and has been very clear for 50 years that it does not need to invade in order to integrate Taiwan into China, that it is confident Taiwan will peacefully integrate when the conditions are right for it. So then why is China threatening to invade Taiwan? As I’ve been saying, it’s exclusively because of national security. The US has been very clear that it is militarily focused on China, even to the exclusion of being focused on Russia. It is turning all of its power, soft and hard, overt and covert, political and military, diplomatic and subversive, directly and via proxies, towards China. And since the retreat of the KMT, the US and UK have been militarily supporting the KMT while they committed atrocities in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and many other countries. China’s demonstrations of force are explicitly a deterrent against foreign intervention, and they will invade to protect their national security. They will not invade without that imminent threat.
That’s just not true. It happens all the time. Again, language here matters. Your claim is that you can’t really consider “nations” going through a civil war, and to be clear, in this case, only ONE nation was going through a civil war, the Chinese nation. The reason I say this is because nation and nation-state are different concepts. For example, in Czechoslovakia there was one state with 2 nations resident - the Czech nation and the Slovak nation. When the country split it was a peaceful transition with a mutual declaration of recognition for the existence of two separate states and done with diplomatic channels to ensure international recognition. However, when Castro and Che overthrew Batista, there was not one Cuba and then another Cuba. There was one nation-state the whole time. One did not claim territorial superiority over the over, they claimed governance superiority over the nation-state. (Side note, there is also a Taino nation within Cuba, like there are many indigenous nations inside the United States. These are not nation-states, they are nations without states).
They were not fighting each other over control and claimed lands, and thus, it’s not strange at all. In fact, any attempt at revolutionary change makes no mention of specific territories that they believe are theirs. You don’t see military coups making territorial claims, do you? All those times the US couped other nation-states, you think they made entirely new nation-states by doing that? Not at all. It’s never been talked about that way, you’ve never talked about it that way, you weren’t educated that way. There’s nothing supporting this position except that you are trying to rationalize your assumption that of course I’m wrong and China is wrong and the narrative you believe about Taiwan is correct. But this is where that leads to, entirely new concepts you’ve never thought of for all the dozens of circumstances you’ve studied, heard about, or watched unfold live. This is what gymnastics looks like.
Again, no. There is only one China. The CPC says this. The KMT says this. The US says this. The UN says this. The EU says this. There are not two Chinas. There is one China that is territorially inclusive of the mainland, the island of Taiwan, and the islands of Hong Kong. Both the island of Taiwan and the islands of Hong Kong were separated from the governance of China by British gunboats, albeit at different times. Neither the governments of the island of Taiwan nor of the island of Hong Kong ever declared independence or seceded from China.
The island of Taiwan was indeed under the control of the KMT, a now disgraced political faction of the nation-state of China. But it remained that way because the British and US interfered to prevent the PLA and the KMT from negotiating an end to the war by blockading the island with their gunboats. The KMT never said “thanks Britain, we’re so excited to start own country and do it our way on this wonderful island we call home”. They said “We are still relevant and we are still the only legitimate government of the nation-state of China which absolutely definitely continues to territorially include the island we retreated to because it was literally part of the nation-state we claim to rule over.”
No. They’re not. First, they’re de facto both comprising the Chinese nation. It is the Han nation that inhabits both the mainland and the island of Taiwan. There is another nation on Taiwan, an indigenous one, but they are not who we’re discussing. When the Dutch settled New Amsterdam, they were WAY far away from the mainland, they had their own government and all, but they were both one nation and one nation-state. When the English eventually took over the American colonies, the territory of New Amsterdam was no longer part of the Dutch nation nor the nation-state of The Netherlands - it was now part of the English nation and the British nation-state. When the English colonizers revolted and seceded from the nation-state of Britain, they created a new state, the USA, but they did not create a new nation, as they were still all English (of course, with varied social histories).
You could argue that Taiwan is a de facto separate state, but you’d have to describe what you mean in specific details because not a single official body claims that Taiwan is a separate state and certainly not a separate nation-state. Everything you could use to describe Taiwan as a de facto state would reduce down to being a vassal of the European empire that intervened in the civil war to create a protectorate, not a state.
Again, changing of the guard has NEVER created a distinct state that somehow has to reassert all of the prior state’s territorial claims. Never. So why are you insisting that it must be true for China?
It’s territorial claims come from it being the government of the nation-state of China. The CPC, as it were, took over from the previous government. They did not make a new state. They took the state that existed.
Don’t confuse the liberal democratic KMT of the last 20 years with the KMT I am speaking of. The CPC and the KMT served the same state. They were all citizens of China, they were all motivated by their vision for what China should be. The fight was entirely internal to China between and among factions within China. It was not an invasion, it was not 2 separate governments, it was not 2 separate nations, and it was not 2 separate states. There was one China, there continues to be one China, and there were 2 factions and there continue to be those 2 factions. They were both in China and they both continued to be in China.
Again, this is obvious pretty much everywhere else in the world. When an occupying force takes a city, we don’t say that the city is now a part of that nation-state, we say that the original nation-state is occupied. If the US were to invade Canada and garrison Quebec while the Quebecois chose not to seceded nor declare independence but instead just created new laws and claimed they were the real Canada and then killed everyone in Quebec who disagreed with them and propagandized 3 new generations of children, would you say Quebec is a totally independent nation-state and that Canada has no claim whatsoever?
I mean, maybe you would, but then we’d see the US just carving chunks off of other countries left and right. There’s a reason we have use historical processes of official consensus for these things. What the Brits and Yanks did to China was not right then, and it’s not right now, and 70 years is a very short period of time for an 8000-year-old civilization. I know 70 years is more than a full quarter of the lifetime of the USA, but just because some imperialists decided to make Chiang Kai-shek a prototype for Juan Guaido doesn’t actually change these larger scale things.
Edit: And just to be clear about the threatening invasion thing. I just saw a headline that the US has just bombed is 30th boat in its campaign against Venezuela, and I’m sitting here thinking, does anyone sit here and realize that they are utterly convinced the only reason China isn’t invading Taiwan is because the US is protecting Taiwan while also simultaneously thinking maybe the US won’t invade Venezuela because really it’s just about drugs? I just feel so crazy watching these things happen contemporaneously and people just not seeing what is reality and what is false narrative.
You seem to be ignorant of the fact that the CPC did proclaim a new state, the People’s Republic of China, succeeding the Republic of China. In their constitution, they made territorial claims regarding what parts of the world belong to it. Just read the proclamation made by Mao where this is plainly stated.
You’re also seemingly confused regarding what “de facto” means. It does not matter what various governments recognize to be the true China, that’s more relevant for de jure. De facto speaking, the CPC has no control over Taiwan, and the KMT has no control over mainland China. They effectively govern separate states with separate territories, despite claims to the contrary (which are just claims and have no bearing on reality).
Your Canada/Quebec example falls a bit flat on its face since for it to be a proper parallel, the Quebecois declaring a new government would have to have the same role as the CPC, which is the party in China that declared a new role, not the other way around.
You’re very stuck in a dogmatic view regarding what nations/nation states/governments are, and are ignoring the messy reality of civil wars.
This is just laughable, it’s basically the first thing a military coup does, state which parts of the country it is in control of (and will soon control).
I’m not ignorant, I just understand it differently than you. You think that a national government changing which people are in charge is somehow the creation of a new state, despite there being zero other historical precedent for that. We understand that Prussia no longer exists. We understand that Iran is not Persia. But we also understand that the coup in Iran did not make a new state, it merely changed who was in charge. The same is true in China.
Yes, they do. Good call out. I see that as clarifying the understanding of China, which the KMT also had, not a point of contention between the PRC and the KMT. They both claimed, before and after the civil war, that there was one China and that China included Taiwan.
So this helps to illuminate my point. In order for the coup to have “parts of the country” something called “the country” must exist. The country exists regardless of which government is in charge. In this story that you’ve told, you are correct that military coups state which parts of the country are under their control and which will be under their control. This is a concept of control, not of integrity. The country itself remains integral. The coup has military control over parts of the country and unless the coup is stopped, it will become the government of the country. This is how coups work. Likewise, in the Chinese civil war, the country of China has a definition and the parties within the country fought to decide how the country would be governed. The KMT lost and the PLA had not yet gained military control over Taiwan, a part of the country, and then imperialists intervened to prevent the PLA from gaining military control over Taiwan, a part of the country.
I’m not. De facto has to do with the facts of the matter regardless what the law states. In a case of possession for example, while the law de jure may say it belongs to party A, it may de facto be in possession of party B. The issue we have here is not that I don’t understand the meaning of “de facto” but that it don’t believe it applies to entire legal fictions. Nation-states are not real in any sense of the word EXCEPT de jure. Nation-states are not a natural phenomenon like possession or presence, they are completely socially constructed legal fictions. There is no “what it’s like to be a nation-state” except “officially recognized by the international community”. Without a system of official recognition, there would be no such concept as a nation-state and we wouldn’t find them naturally occurring. They only exist de jure.
A, you’ve introduced a new concept called “the true China” and B, in fact it’s the key thing that matters when we’re discussing whether the United States military should be allowed to patrol the seas around the island of Taiwan under the auspices of defending what is de facto its protectorate (literally a land with people being protected militarily by another land of different people). The question of sovereignty is in fact the crucial matter at hand. The idea that somehow this does not matter is preposterous.
The province on Taiwan has always had its own territory and its own government, that’s how federal/federated system works. So clearly it’s not a question of separateness of territories nor a question of the existence of multiple governments. It is, de facto, entirely based on claims. Bureaucratic governments are deeply abstract things, and the fundamental aspect of bureaucratic governments are the claims they make. The claim is the reality vis-a-vis sovereignty. At the level below abstraction, islands are always separate and subdivisions of contiguous lands (like North Dakota and South Dakota) don’t exist at all.
What? No. Please re-read what I wrote. I was saying that the Quebecois, who were the losers in the battle for control over Canada, could become a protectorate of the US, just like the KMT, who were the losers in the battle for control over China, became a protectorate of the US.
I don’t know if there’s anything other than dogma defining a Westphalian nation-state. It’s literally just orthodoxy. I love that you want to be flexible by making an exception case for Taiwan because you fundamentally believe in the absolute immorality of the CPC and therefore all rules and history must be pushed aside to make way for the correct moral position, but forgive me if I think you’re just engaging in special pleading.
Anyway, happy to keep going. I don’t think you have the right end of the stick here. I see you trying to make exceptions to rules for the Chinese question and I see you trying to conflate concepts in order to do it. I don’t think my position is even counter to the position held by the KMT 40 years, maybe even 50 years. But, if it helps to keep trying to find the little points of contention that could unravel my position, let’s do it.
You have a pretty peculiar understanding of how nation-states claim territory. Using your own logic, I take it you believe that Gaza and the West bank are rightfully Israeli territory? if not, what’s the difference?*
* “Murica bad” is not a valid answer
All of Palestine was declared Terra Nullus by the imperialist. It is they who setup the system of Westphalian nation-states. This is, as they call it, the rules-based order. The reality is that Palestine should have been granted nation-state status by the entire world decades ago, but racism prevented that from happening, and now we have the situation we have. Some nation states have officially recognized Palestine’s status as a nation-state, but it has not been enough and it is far too late to have immediate impacts.
As for whether my understanding is strange, I would ask you to consider why the KMT itself did not claim Taiwan to be an independent nation state for the 50 years where it was a one-party fascist dictatorship on the island. Why did they find it so important to establish that they were still a faction within China and not a secessionary movement away from China? I didn’t decide that that’s what they would do. My understanding is fully inline with the understanding of the KMT and the CPC and the rest of official governments of the world. It’s really only the uninformed and the politically biased that have a strange understanding whereby the rules don’t matter, the never matter, and only what they believe is the correct moral answer, given their limited understanding, could ever be the right answer.
Wow, that’s convenient for your argument - what a remarkable coincidence. Some nations recognize it, others don’t, so who’s to say? It’s just too complicated and too late. 1948 was soooo long ago, unlike 1949 which is recent history. Plus the cession of Taiwan by Japan after WWII was definitely unambiguous, unlike Israel/Palestine. No issues there at all.
Do you consider the fact that the civil war never officially ended may be a mitigating factor here?
If that’s the case, why did over two decades pass until the west recognized the CPC’s state at all? Was everybody uninformed until Nixon educated us?
Yeah, you really can’t stop with the category error, can you?
The CPC isn’t a state. China is a state. It has had official international recognition as a state for centuries. The civil war did not change that. The civil war was for control of the state of China, the state that includes the province of Taiwan.
The majority of the world’s governments recognized the KMT as the legitimate government of the state of China, and some recognized the CPC as the legitimate government of the state of China. This split was largely along ideological lines - most countries would agree that the winner of a civil war is a legitimate government, but fascist anti-communists love supporting illegitimate governments like Juan Guaido or the recent Somaliland decision.
Nixon’s decision was to recognize the CPC as the legitimate government of the state of China. He did not recognize the CPC’s state because there was no such thing to recognize. Likewise, you are attempting to recognize the existence of a Taiwanese state when there is no such thing to recognize. It has never been a nation-state, it has never claimed to be a nation-state, and no government has ever recognized as a nation-state.
If you think history is convenient for my argument, perhaps what you mean is that my argument is supported by history.
You failed to mention the KMT did the vast the majority of fighting against Imperial Japan, while the shitbag Mao and hi CCP thugs hid in western China. After Mao took control, while murdering over 70 million Chinese, he thanked the Japanese for weakening the KMT.
Sure. I also didn’t mention how the KMT soldiers were defecting in droves to the PLA because they were much better treated as prisoners of the PLA then they were as soldiers of the KMT and because the KMT was a brutal fascistic force and the soldiers saw the PLA as way more benevolent to the people. I don’t have to mention every single aspect of the conflict to get at the heart of the matter of the discussion at hand.
Or said another way - sucks to suck.
Poor China trying to defend itself from the boolies 😭
LOL - as though it’s not believable to think that a country that hasn’t dropped a single bomb in 35 years might be concerned about the most violent nation in the world continuing to destroy country after country announcing “the pivot to Asia” in 2008 as they expanded drone warfare beyond anything the world had ever seen as we watched video after video of double tap strikes, bombings if weddings, funerals, hospitals, and schools and now we watch as that bully double taps fisherman in the Caribbean. To say that the US is not an existential threat to literally every country in the world is to allow your entire worldview to be shaped by centuries-old Yellow Peril propaganda
This is all whataboutism and has nothing to do with China threatening to invade Taiwan.
Sorry can you remind me the conditions that China has set for why it would invade? Or is just threatening generally?
No. I’m not engaging with a disingenuous person with an obvious bias. You claim to know all about this issue. I’m sure you won’t have a problem finding it yourself.
LOL, the projection is strong with this one. You made the claim that China is threatening to invade and I asked you to clarify and backup your claim. But yes, I am disingenuous and obviously biased for … not believing the US is a trustworthy actor in the Pacific theater with respect to Chinese national security.
You lemmy.ml zealots have the DARVO part down but you’re terrible at arguments.
Oooh, the double Uno reverse card! Nuh uh, you’re the narcisstic abuser, not me!! Nuh uh! Whataboutism!! Nuh uh! The US is evil but not as evil the CPC!! Bootlicker! Why can’t you just let the US military run the world like a good anarchist? Huh!