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Something could have easily been lost in translation--on your end--there. For Taiwan in particular, there's a lot of nuance and purposeful ambiguity in its rela

Something could have easily been lost in translation--on your end--there. For Taiwan in particular, there's a lot of nuance and purposeful ambiguity in its relationship with mainland China. The ROC's official policy is that Taiwan is just another province of China, which the ROC administers (along with part of Fujian province); the ROC, furthermore, is the legitimate government of all of China, including the island, current mainland, many of the PRC's disputed territorial claims, and even Mongolia. This is more or less identical to the PRC position. There are many Taiwanese who do see it as a totally separate country, but that's controversial even within Taiwan. If you had asked her the more concrete question about whether Taiwan is currently administered by an entity calling itself the ROC, I guarantee there wouldn't have been such a manifest gap in understanding.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> The ROC's official policy is that Taiwan is just another province of China, which the ROC administers (along with part of Fujian province); the ROC, furthermore, is the legitimate government of all of China To be fair, part of the reason that is the official policy is because the PRC is perceived to be (because it's pretty openly said this) more willing to be tolerant of dispute over which one governs all of China (which the PRC can't reasonably lose barring some radical inversion of power) than Taiwan declaring independence, such that the latter would be more likely to lead to war to settle the dispute.
- scarmig 7y ago
  Of course. And if China pledged to respect the results of a unification vs independence referendum, independence would likely win in a landslide. But the concrete disagreement mentioned in the comment I was responding to seemed to imply that the writer thought that his coworker might literally think that the ROC did not currently administer Taiwan, while she certainly does know that; it's a gap in understanding because the comment writer didn't realize that whether Taiwan a province of China is not how mainlanders conceptualize the dispute. I would be curious to know if the average mainlander recognizes that most Taiwanese see themselves as having a separate identity and would ideally have a separate country, which is a real on-the-ground fact that I can imagine being glossed over in education and media.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> The ROC's official policy is that Taiwan is just another province of China, which the ROC administers (along with part of Fujian province); the ROC, furthermore, is the legitimate government of all of China To be fair, part of the reason that is the official policy is because the PRC is perceived to be (because it's pretty openly said this) more willing to be tolerant of dispute over which one governs all of China (which the PRC can't reasonably lose barring some radical inversion of power) than Taiwan declaring independence, such that the latter would be more likely to lead to war to settle the dispute.

scarmig 7y ago
Of course. And if China pledged to respect the results of a unification vs independence referendum, independence would likely win in a landslide. But the concrete disagreement mentioned in the comment I was responding to seemed to imply that the writer thought that his coworker might literally think that the ROC did not currently administer Taiwan, while she certainly does know that; it's a gap in understanding because the comment writer didn't realize that whether Taiwan a province of China is not how mainlanders conceptualize the dispute. I would be curious to know if the average mainlander recognizes that most Taiwanese see themselves as having a separate identity and would ideally have a separate country, which is a real on-the-ground fact that I can imagine being glossed over in education and media.