7 ms·

The whole "unrecognised country" nonsense should begone. Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country (and does a reasonable job of being a decent country for t

The whole "unrecognised country" nonsense should begone. Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country (and does a reasonable job of being a decent country for the people living in it, it obviously is a better country than a number of completely recognized ones) yet it still has "limited recognition". How about recognizing the facts rather than virtual reality of politicians' imagination? Banning an entire country is bullshit.

thewholeview 7y ago
It's not nonsense, and "everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" is a flawed statement. The UN does not recognize Taiwan. Taiwan is recognized as a sovereignty by 19 UN member states. It has formal diplomatic relationships with ~50 UN member states. UN has 193 member states in total. Please refrain from using subjective unprovable ideology to represent the mass.
- AWildC182 7y ago
  The UN is a political organization and, importantly, highly leveraged by China for political gain. The objective reality is that Taiwan is an independent country that sets its own laws and is free to conduct its own foreign relations.
  - thewholeview 7y ago
    The objectivity in your eyes is subjectivity to another. Similarly objectivity in others is subjective in yours. There is never true objectivity in our collective presence. If UN ceases to be your objectivity, that's respected.
  - vkou 7y ago
    The objective reality is that most of the world, including the United States, does not actually recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. It recognizes that it exists as... Something. I think you would be hard-pressed to argue that the Department of State, and its counterparts in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Japan[1], etc, etc, etc, have been 'highly leveraged by China for political gain'. Oh, and to throw another monkey wrench in your argument, consider that both China and Taiwan believe that Taiwan is not an independent country, but that it is part of China. What they disagree on is who is the legitimate government of China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy
    - AWildC182 7y ago
      Countries that don't recognize Taiwan, the US included, do so solely because the GDP of China is much greater than the GDP of Taiwan and China is more than willing to throw their weight around in an attempt to legitimize their claim through coercion. If you hold a gun to someone's head and/or give them $100 and tell them to repeat that you are a cabbage, you don't become the cabbage, no matter how much of the world you coerce. Both governments make claims against the other's land but that doesn't make them the same government.
      - vkou 7y ago
        I do all sorts of things, because people who have physical, or economic power over me compel me to. Just because their authority is enforced through force (Or the implicit threat of force) (Or the promise of rewards for compliance) does not mean that they are illegitimate authorities. Compelling other people to do things, with either a carrot, or a stick, is an incredibly normal state of affairs in life. My landlord will have me out on my ass if I don't cut him a check on the first of every month - does that mean that my recognition of his authority to my apartment is illegitimate, or somehow coercive?
        AWildC182 7y ago
        coun·try /ˈkəntrē/ noun 1. a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory. Does the Peoples Republic of China currently occupy and govern the island of Taiwan?
        vkou 7y ago
        1. I'm not sure how this has anything to do with your claim that PROC is improperly coercing the world into saying that black is white, by putting a gun to their heads. (And I still don't understand how it squares with the reality that the ROC is trying its best to do the same thing.) 2. Is Taiwan a distinct nation, or is it part of the Chinese Nation? Both the PROC and the ROC currently seem to think that it is the latter. Most of the world agrees with them. (Bonus points: Is Catalonia a country? What about Cascadia? What about Transnistria, and South Ossetia? What about Crimea? By your definition, it seems to quite clearly be part of Russia... Be careful where you express that viewpoint, though, it's not one shared by most of the world's governments, or most Ukranians...)
- hawkice 7y ago
  I mean, you can take a plane to Taipei. It isn't subjective or unprovable: the ROC will check your passport. They issue the currency you will use to buy food. The police work for them. Taxes are collected, exclusively, by them.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    >I mean, you can take a plane to Taipei. It isn't subjective or unprovable: the ROC will check your passport. They issue the currency you will use to buy food. The police work for them. Taxes are collected, exclusively, by them. The question of whether or not ISIS is therefore a country is left as an exercise for the reader.
    - gataca 7y ago
      They were a country for a period of time. They had passports and a currency. I don’t see how that disproves OP’s point
    - 1123581321 7y ago
      It would be a better exercise to define a sovereign state first and then independently apply the test to Taiwan and IS. History is full of unpleasant governments.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      I assume they were, but since most of the world was intent on squashing the country flat as a bug I doubt formal recognition would have done anything for them.
      - qwerty456127 7y ago
        Why wouldn't everybody recognize it as a country and declare it a war?
- incompatible 7y ago
  You are technically right in that most states recognize Taiwan as a province of the PRC. However, describing Taiwan as a distinct country is ambiguous, since "country" doesn't have a strict definition. E.g., it's normal to consider the parts of the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark to be countries, although they are not independent. It's not much of a stretch to consider Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan, or Catalonia, to be countries too. Edit: if you look at the font in question, it does have flags for England and Aruba, for example, so offering the flags doesn't imply that you are recognizing the places as sovereign states.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    The parts of the Netherlands are called provinces, and are not sovereign nations. The larger area you call the Netherlands that includes Belgium and Luxembourg is currently called the Benelux[1] 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelux
    - incompatible 7y ago
      I was thinking of the Kingdom of the Netherlands with its constituent countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands
      - Aeolun 7y ago
        Ah, my apologies. I’ve never heard ‘the Netherlands’ used to refer to the kingdom without actually specifying that part. (And a few times to the 1700’s ish low countries, hence my confusion)
- dwyer 7y ago
  The UN was founded in 1945. I have reason to believe that countries existed long before that.
vkou 7y ago
It took until 1979 for the United States to recognize that China was, in fact, governed from Beijing, not Taipei. (Beijing won the civil war in 1950.) Today, in 2019, Taiwan still does not recognize China. Recognition is a chip in the game of geopolitics.
- taobility 7y ago
  You made few mistakes: 1. Beijing won the civil war at 1949. 2. UN has recognized PRC at 1971 and abandoned Taiwan or ROC. And till now, only very limited countries in the world (17) recognized Taiwan as independent state
  - dlcmh 7y ago
    Down to 15 now, after Solomon Islands and Kiribati switched diplomatic ties in recent weeks https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3029626/taiwan-down-15-allies-kiribati-announces-switch-diplomatic https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3029626/ta...
paulific 7y ago
Part of the politics is that the Republic of China still officially claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China. So it really is recognize one or the other. Politics within Taiwan have so far prevented declaration of Taiwanese independence from China in any form, and the One-China policy that everybody agrees to prevents recognition of the PRC and establishment of two-state relationships. Until either of these political realities change, the formal fiction of unrecognized statehood is unlikely to change.
- jasonjei 7y ago
  This is not very true. Taiwan, Republic of China, has made attempts to change its name, only to be met with the threat of war from the People’s Republic of China if they perform a name change to Republic of Taiwan.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I think it’s about time China gets the chance to make good on this promise, or gets defanged when it turns out they don’t have the stomach for it (they have a good thing going, shame to let it be ruined by war). Everyone is tiptoeing around them for fear of waking the dragon.
    - vore 7y ago
      An uneasy peace is miles better than war.
      - Aeolun 7y ago
        To a point. I’m not saying we should have a war. I’m saying we should stop tiptoeing around China.
  - lacampbell 7y ago
    When was this?
- umanwizard 7y ago
IIAOPSW 7y ago
De Jure nationhood is a stupid game that ignores facts on the ground in favor of politicians vision. It is predicated on a fallacy that "legitimacy" is a vital resource and that those already in the nation club have a monopoly on it. At this point calling groups "countries" and calling other groups "terrorists" is better understood as the geopolitical equivalent of a curse word and/or a propaganda trope. -Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era. -Trasnistaria. Has population, land, flag, collects taxes. Only recognized by Russia. There's a few Russian backed puppets like this, I won't name them all. -Taiwan. Already discussed. -Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese media calls the protestors terrorists. Yet another example of "terrorist" meaning simply "whoever the establishment wants to de-legitimize". If you follow the CCP narrative, the thing they care about isn't Democracy but separatism. "One China" is about not recognizing Taiwan and HK as a matter of ethno-nationalist principal. -Palestine. Recognized by majority of UN countries. Still not recognized by US, Israel, and associated power block. Why? Because of the stupid belief that recognition will somehow legitimate it. -ISIS. At their peak they had a sizeable chunk of land, a flag, a capital, civic functions like a court system, an oil industry, handed out passports, were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics, had a uniformed army, and the word "state" was right there in the name. But don't you dare call them a state lest someone mistake you for a terrorist sympathizer. This is why I subscribe to De Facto nationhood instead. A nation is a nation when it satisfies the following properties: -A plot of land with well defined borders. -A permanent population on said land. -A Monopoly on violence over said land. -An organization capable of credibly making peace, declaring war, and otherwise accepting agreements with other nations. The last one is tricky as it only specifies the capability not the actualization. For example, if the organization agrees to peace but the individual factions of the army keep fighting then this condition is not satisfied and what you have is a stateless warlord situation. For another example, the ISIS situation clearly had an organization which was capable of agreeing to a surrender or appointing an ambassador, but they never wanted to or were allowed to. The condition is still satisfied even though they never did it.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era. Almost no one, including the Order itself, considers the Sovereign Military Order of Malta a country; it's the usual textbook example of a sovereign entity that is not a state/country by those who see it as sovereign (a point on which there is considerable dispute, despite the claim in its name and it's wide diplomatic interactions and grants of extraterritoriality, and, for it's headquarters, concurrent sovereignty with Italy.) It's basically a NGO with a sui generis diplomatic status and disputed (among scholars) international legal status.
howtofly 7y ago
"Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" Really? Does your government officially call Taiwan "a country"? Show us the proof. Considering only 15 countries in this universe still do this, it's almost safe to guess NO.
- Thorrez 7y ago
  "Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" is referring to people, not to governments. Just because a government doesn't recognize a country doesn't mean the people under that government don't recognize the country.
  - howtofly 7y ago
    Theoretically, a government should represent its people, which should be the foundation of democracy. If that foundation were broken, it is far more worrisome than these China/Taiwan/HK events. I suggest fixing it ASAP. For example, the op can protest to urge his/her government to recognize Taiwan as a country, which will be "a beautiful landscape" as described by Nancy Patricia Pelosi.
    - qwerty456127 7y ago
      > Theoretically, a government should represent its people, which should be the foundation of democracy. If that foundation were broken Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this. And even if a government was really elected legitimately and chosen not to recognize Taiwan I doubt this meant the people didn't know Taiwan is a de-facto independent country and actively wanted to keep it unrecognized. To be honest I myself have only found out Taiwan recognition is limited a couple of years ago. I always knew there is such a country and never knew about its diplomatic problems.
      - howtofly 7y ago
        > Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this. That a legal government of a modern democratic country cannot represent its people is a horrendous claim. As a strong believer of democracy, I'd rather assume that you were the minority in this case. The everyone claim may hold true for everyone you know (among the minority of your country of course).

thewholeview 7y ago

It's not nonsense, and "everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" is a flawed statement. The UN does not recognize Taiwan. Taiwan is recognized as a sovereignty by 19 UN member states. It has formal diplomatic relationships with ~50 UN member states. UN has 193 member states in total. Please refrain from using subjective unprovable ideology to represent the mass.

AWildC182 7y ago
The UN is a political organization and, importantly, highly leveraged by China for political gain. The objective reality is that Taiwan is an independent country that sets its own laws and is free to conduct its own foreign relations.
- thewholeview 7y ago
  The objectivity in your eyes is subjectivity to another. Similarly objectivity in others is subjective in yours. There is never true objectivity in our collective presence. If UN ceases to be your objectivity, that's respected.
- vkou 7y ago
  The objective reality is that most of the world, including the United States, does not actually recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. It recognizes that it exists as... Something. I think you would be hard-pressed to argue that the Department of State, and its counterparts in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Japan[1], etc, etc, etc, have been 'highly leveraged by China for political gain'. Oh, and to throw another monkey wrench in your argument, consider that both China and Taiwan believe that Taiwan is not an independent country, but that it is part of China. What they disagree on is who is the legitimate government of China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy
  - AWildC182 7y ago
    Countries that don't recognize Taiwan, the US included, do so solely because the GDP of China is much greater than the GDP of Taiwan and China is more than willing to throw their weight around in an attempt to legitimize their claim through coercion. If you hold a gun to someone's head and/or give them $100 and tell them to repeat that you are a cabbage, you don't become the cabbage, no matter how much of the world you coerce. Both governments make claims against the other's land but that doesn't make them the same government.
    - vkou 7y ago
      I do all sorts of things, because people who have physical, or economic power over me compel me to. Just because their authority is enforced through force (Or the implicit threat of force) (Or the promise of rewards for compliance) does not mean that they are illegitimate authorities. Compelling other people to do things, with either a carrot, or a stick, is an incredibly normal state of affairs in life. My landlord will have me out on my ass if I don't cut him a check on the first of every month - does that mean that my recognition of his authority to my apartment is illegitimate, or somehow coercive?
      - AWildC182 7y ago
        coun·try /ˈkəntrē/ noun 1. a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory. Does the Peoples Republic of China currently occupy and govern the island of Taiwan?
        vkou 7y ago
        1. I'm not sure how this has anything to do with your claim that PROC is improperly coercing the world into saying that black is white, by putting a gun to their heads. (And I still don't understand how it squares with the reality that the ROC is trying its best to do the same thing.) 2. Is Taiwan a distinct nation, or is it part of the Chinese Nation? Both the PROC and the ROC currently seem to think that it is the latter. Most of the world agrees with them. (Bonus points: Is Catalonia a country? What about Cascadia? What about Transnistria, and South Ossetia? What about Crimea? By your definition, it seems to quite clearly be part of Russia... Be careful where you express that viewpoint, though, it's not one shared by most of the world's governments, or most Ukranians...)
hawkice 7y ago
I mean, you can take a plane to Taipei. It isn't subjective or unprovable: the ROC will check your passport. They issue the currency you will use to buy food. The police work for them. Taxes are collected, exclusively, by them.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  >I mean, you can take a plane to Taipei. It isn't subjective or unprovable: the ROC will check your passport. They issue the currency you will use to buy food. The police work for them. Taxes are collected, exclusively, by them. The question of whether or not ISIS is therefore a country is left as an exercise for the reader.
  - gataca 7y ago
    They were a country for a period of time. They had passports and a currency. I don’t see how that disproves OP’s point
  - 1123581321 7y ago
    It would be a better exercise to define a sovereign state first and then independently apply the test to Taiwan and IS. History is full of unpleasant governments.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I assume they were, but since most of the world was intent on squashing the country flat as a bug I doubt formal recognition would have done anything for them.
    - qwerty456127 7y ago
      Why wouldn't everybody recognize it as a country and declare it a war?
incompatible 7y ago
You are technically right in that most states recognize Taiwan as a province of the PRC. However, describing Taiwan as a distinct country is ambiguous, since "country" doesn't have a strict definition. E.g., it's normal to consider the parts of the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark to be countries, although they are not independent. It's not much of a stretch to consider Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan, or Catalonia, to be countries too. Edit: if you look at the font in question, it does have flags for England and Aruba, for example, so offering the flags doesn't imply that you are recognizing the places as sovereign states.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  The parts of the Netherlands are called provinces, and are not sovereign nations. The larger area you call the Netherlands that includes Belgium and Luxembourg is currently called the Benelux[1] 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelux
  - incompatible 7y ago
    I was thinking of the Kingdom of the Netherlands with its constituent countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      Ah, my apologies. I’ve never heard ‘the Netherlands’ used to refer to the kingdom without actually specifying that part. (And a few times to the 1700’s ish low countries, hence my confusion)
dwyer 7y ago
The UN was founded in 1945. I have reason to believe that countries existed long before that.

vkou 7y ago

It took until 1979 for the United States to recognize that China was, in fact, governed from Beijing, not Taipei. (Beijing won the civil war in 1950.) Today, in 2019, Taiwan still does not recognize China. Recognition is a chip in the game of geopolitics.

taobility 7y ago
You made few mistakes: 1. Beijing won the civil war at 1949. 2. UN has recognized PRC at 1971 and abandoned Taiwan or ROC. And till now, only very limited countries in the world (17) recognized Taiwan as independent state
- dlcmh 7y ago
  Down to 15 now, after Solomon Islands and Kiribati switched diplomatic ties in recent weeks https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3029626/taiwan-down-15-allies-kiribati-announces-switch-diplomatic https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3029626/ta...

paulific 7y ago

Part of the politics is that the Republic of China still officially claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China. So it really is recognize one or the other. Politics within Taiwan have so far prevented declaration of Taiwanese independence from China in any form, and the One-China policy that everybody agrees to prevents recognition of the PRC and establishment of two-state relationships. Until either of these political realities change, the formal fiction of unrecognized statehood is unlikely to change.

jasonjei 7y ago
This is not very true. Taiwan, Republic of China, has made attempts to change its name, only to be met with the threat of war from the People’s Republic of China if they perform a name change to Republic of Taiwan.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I think it’s about time China gets the chance to make good on this promise, or gets defanged when it turns out they don’t have the stomach for it (they have a good thing going, shame to let it be ruined by war). Everyone is tiptoeing around them for fear of waking the dragon.
  - vore 7y ago
    An uneasy peace is miles better than war.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      To a point. I’m not saying we should have a war. I’m saying we should stop tiptoeing around China.
- lacampbell 7y ago
  When was this?
umanwizard 7y ago

IIAOPSW 7y ago

De Jure nationhood is a stupid game that ignores facts on the ground in favor of politicians vision. It is predicated on a fallacy that "legitimacy" is a vital resource and that those already in the nation club have a monopoly on it. At this point calling groups "countries" and calling other groups "terrorists" is better understood as the geopolitical equivalent of a curse word and/or a propaganda trope. -Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era. -Trasnistaria. Has population, land, flag, collects taxes. Only recognized by Russia. There's a few Russian backed puppets like this, I won't name them all. -Taiwan. Already discussed. -Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese media calls the protestors terrorists. Yet another example of "terrorist" meaning simply "whoever the establishment wants to de-legitimize". If you follow the CCP narrative, the thing they care about isn't Democracy but separatism. "One China" is about not recognizing Taiwan and HK as a matter of ethno-nationalist principal. -Palestine. Recognized by majority of UN countries. Still not recognized by US, Israel, and associated power block. Why? Because of the stupid belief that recognition will somehow legitimate it. -ISIS. At their peak they had a sizeable chunk of land, a flag, a capital, civic functions like a court system, an oil industry, handed out passports, were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics, had a uniformed army, and the word "state" was right there in the name. But don't you dare call them a state lest someone mistake you for a terrorist sympathizer. This is why I subscribe to De Facto nationhood instead. A nation is a nation when it satisfies the following properties: -A plot of land with well defined borders. -A permanent population on said land. -A Monopoly on violence over said land. -An organization capable of credibly making peace, declaring war, and otherwise accepting agreements with other nations. The last one is tricky as it only specifies the capability not the actualization. For example, if the organization agrees to peace but the individual factions of the army keep fighting then this condition is not satisfied and what you have is a stateless warlord situation. For another example, the ISIS situation clearly had an organization which was capable of agreeing to a surrender or appointing an ambassador, but they never wanted to or were allowed to. The condition is still satisfied even though they never did it.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era. Almost no one, including the Order itself, considers the Sovereign Military Order of Malta a country; it's the usual textbook example of a sovereign entity that is not a state/country by those who see it as sovereign (a point on which there is considerable dispute, despite the claim in its name and it's wide diplomatic interactions and grants of extraterritoriality, and, for it's headquarters, concurrent sovereignty with Italy.) It's basically a NGO with a sui generis diplomatic status and disputed (among scholars) international legal status.

howtofly 7y ago

"Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" Really? Does your government officially call Taiwan "a country"? Show us the proof. Considering only 15 countries in this universe still do this, it's almost safe to guess NO.

Thorrez 7y ago
"Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" is referring to people, not to governments. Just because a government doesn't recognize a country doesn't mean the people under that government don't recognize the country.
- howtofly 7y ago
  Theoretically, a government should represent its people, which should be the foundation of democracy. If that foundation were broken, it is far more worrisome than these China/Taiwan/HK events. I suggest fixing it ASAP. For example, the op can protest to urge his/her government to recognize Taiwan as a country, which will be "a beautiful landscape" as described by Nancy Patricia Pelosi.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    > Theoretically, a government should represent its people, which should be the foundation of democracy. If that foundation were broken Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this. And even if a government was really elected legitimately and chosen not to recognize Taiwan I doubt this meant the people didn't know Taiwan is a de-facto independent country and actively wanted to keep it unrecognized. To be honest I myself have only found out Taiwan recognition is limited a couple of years ago. I always knew there is such a country and never knew about its diplomatic problems.
    - howtofly 7y ago
      > Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this. That a legal government of a modern democratic country cannot represent its people is a horrendous claim. As a strong believer of democracy, I'd rather assume that you were the minority in this case. The everyone claim may hold true for everyone you know (among the minority of your country of course).