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.
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).