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One thing i could never understand. And I don't really have a horse in this race, and I feel sorry for everyone who suffers or is unhappy. But why was Hong Kong

One thing i could never understand. And I don't really have a horse in this race, and I feel sorry for everyone who suffers or is unhappy. But why was Hong Kong happily gifted to China (instead of say giving it independence), but Taiwan is so sacred that it's worth risking ww3 to protect it, instead of perhaps negotiating some kind of a special status for it as well? The people who want to be left alone, sure, but were the people of Hong Kong somehow ecstatic about their transfer? or did anyone even bothered asking them at the time? The trends in '97 were already exactly the same as today, the same regime, China was already bulking up.

geoka9 2y ago
From my layman's understanding, parts of Hong Kong had to be returned to China according to the terms of a 99-year lease; the rest of it was dependent on the leased territory for stuff like fresh water, so it didn't make sense to hold on to it. Also, there was fear that China would take it by force. With Taiwan there's no such legal obligation (in fact some even consider Taiwan the legal government of China). It also has an industry of strategic importance (semiconductors) and is much easier to defend: (again, not an expert) I've read opinions that it may not be even possible to invade due to the prohibiting coastal terrain.
livueta 2y ago
While I don't think you're wrong to say that the trends/regime were the same then as today, that's very much more obvious in hindsight than it was at the time. You've got to recall the triumphal attitude in the West towards China circa the run-up to WTO admission in the late 90s. Read Clinton on the topic: https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/Full_Text_of_Clintons_Speech_on_China_Trade_Bi.htm https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/Full_Text_of_Clinto... The trendy thing was to believe that exposure to global markets and the Internet would inevitably result in further liberalization, and anyone who disagreed was probably a car-burning anarchist. It was only in the 2010s that the fact that reality wasn't quite that beneficent started creeping into mainstream neoliberal perspectives. To be fair, China really had seen massive changes under Deng, so the idea that continued reform would eventually result in major political liberalisation wasn't completely insane. It went from Mao to a semblance of rule of (in retrospect, obviously "by" rather than "of", but whatever) law, so was extending the trend line really so implausible? In retrospect, obviously, yes, it was implausible. But that general vibe meant that many really did think that the Sino-British Joint Declaration would be respected. Of course, the actual history of how that whole thing turned out w.r.t. tearing up the treaty and burning the bits in the fires of national-security laws, has altered perspectives on how well Taiwan would cope under rule from Beijing. Now that the concept of one country, two systems - that idea of a special status - is widely understood to be a meaningless platitude, the assumptions that were common at the time of HK reunification are totally invalid. You can see this in trends of polling of Taiwanese attitudes to reunification: as HK has been strangled, the Taiwanese public has come to understand the worthlesness of any of the sort of assurances that were offered to HK, which at the time assauged a lot of objections. Finally, there's a matter of basic military calculus: HK is a lot harder to defend than Taiwan. It's not a natural polity grounded in geography, and not potentially self-sufficient in the same ways as Taiwan. Thatcher didn't agree in 1984 because she loved and trusted Deng, but because he could credibly have taken it by force in a day and told her so, so, in a very real sense, there wasn't much of an alternative.
ein0p 2y ago
Because Taiwan is the casus belli for the war. The US cannot afford losing the “center of gravity” status in the world economy, and China was going to take that away within a decade. By some metrics it’s already gone. It’s clear that the economic war is not going to work, so the usual solution for such a thing is to create a persistent source of instability right next to China, armed to the teeth and ready to die. Same as the US could not afford to lose control in Europe, so it decoupled Russia from Germany by funding a war on Russia’s border and blowing up Germany’s energy supplies. Or how the US was worried about the Arab world unifying and constraining its choices in the region, so it started half a dozen wars there. Or how the US was worried about South America and started wars there as well.

geoka9 2y ago

From my layman's understanding, parts of Hong Kong had to be returned to China according to the terms of a 99-year lease; the rest of it was dependent on the leased territory for stuff like fresh water, so it didn't make sense to hold on to it. Also, there was fear that China would take it by force. With Taiwan there's no such legal obligation (in fact some even consider Taiwan the legal government of China). It also has an industry of strategic importance (semiconductors) and is much easier to defend: (again, not an expert) I've read opinions that it may not be even possible to invade due to the prohibiting coastal terrain.

livueta 2y ago

While I don't think you're wrong to say that the trends/regime were the same then as today, that's very much more obvious in hindsight than it was at the time. You've got to recall the triumphal attitude in the West towards China circa the run-up to WTO admission in the late 90s. Read Clinton on the topic: https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/Full_Text_of_Clintons_Speech_on_China_Trade_Bi.htm https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/Full_Text_of_Clinto... The trendy thing was to believe that exposure to global markets and the Internet would inevitably result in further liberalization, and anyone who disagreed was probably a car-burning anarchist. It was only in the 2010s that the fact that reality wasn't quite that beneficent started creeping into mainstream neoliberal perspectives. To be fair, China really had seen massive changes under Deng, so the idea that continued reform would eventually result in major political liberalisation wasn't completely insane. It went from Mao to a semblance of rule of (in retrospect, obviously "by" rather than "of", but whatever) law, so was extending the trend line really so implausible? In retrospect, obviously, yes, it was implausible. But that general vibe meant that many really did think that the Sino-British Joint Declaration would be respected. Of course, the actual history of how that whole thing turned out w.r.t. tearing up the treaty and burning the bits in the fires of national-security laws, has altered perspectives on how well Taiwan would cope under rule from Beijing. Now that the concept of one country, two systems - that idea of a special status - is widely understood to be a meaningless platitude, the assumptions that were common at the time of HK reunification are totally invalid. You can see this in trends of polling of Taiwanese attitudes to reunification: as HK has been strangled, the Taiwanese public has come to understand the worthlesness of any of the sort of assurances that were offered to HK, which at the time assauged a lot of objections. Finally, there's a matter of basic military calculus: HK is a lot harder to defend than Taiwan. It's not a natural polity grounded in geography, and not potentially self-sufficient in the same ways as Taiwan. Thatcher didn't agree in 1984 because she loved and trusted Deng, but because he could credibly have taken it by force in a day and told her so, so, in a very real sense, there wasn't much of an alternative.

ein0p 2y ago

Because Taiwan is the casus belli for the war. The US cannot afford losing the “center of gravity” status in the world economy, and China was going to take that away within a decade. By some metrics it’s already gone. It’s clear that the economic war is not going to work, so the usual solution for such a thing is to create a persistent source of instability right next to China, armed to the teeth and ready to die. Same as the US could not afford to lose control in Europe, so it decoupled Russia from Germany by funding a war on Russia’s border and blowing up Germany’s energy supplies. Or how the US was worried about the Arab world unifying and constraining its choices in the region, so it started half a dozen wars there. Or how the US was worried about South America and started wars there as well.