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It's worse than a rebellious province. It's a more successful rebellious province. For China, they hold up all of these technical accomplishments and quality o
by legitster 2y ago
It's worse than a rebellious province. It's a more successful rebellious province.
For China, they hold up all of these technical accomplishments and quality of life improvements they have made under their one party system. But now over here is Taiwan that never bought in and is doing even better! It undercuts all of their messaging.
If the communist party could wave a magic wand, they would take Taiwan and not just extract wealth, but also pump out a lot of propaganda that says Taiwan is doing even better under party rule and Western-style democracy was holding it back.
- axus 2y agoHong Kong is a test case for what would happen to Taiwan (but with less shooting).
- knowitnone 2y agothe US made China it's manufacturing arm and now the US wants to take that back? Kind of late. If China invades Taiwan, the US is to blame. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.
- xxpor 2y agoAnd China made the US its source of income. The relationship works both ways. The consumer market in China is a disaster.
- ethbr1 2y agoHard to have a strong consumer market with 17%+ youth unemployment.
- xxpor 2y agoAnd the reason there's 17%+ youth unemployment is because there's a weak consumer market! This is what happens when you structure your entire economy around exports: artificially weak currency, capital controls, artificially low wages, etc.
- lupusreal 2y ago> If China invades Taiwan, the US is to blame That's completely deranged. The CCP has intended to take Taiwan from day one. Before they even managed to drive the ROC out of mainland China they intended to take all of China, including Taiwan, and their failure to take Taiwan has never been something they were satisfied with. Manufacturing has nothing to do with it. America only has anything to do with it insofar as they have helped Taiwan resist the CCP so far.
- ithkuil 2y agoYeah that weird logic is all too common recently. I'll paraphrase: The ravenous wild beast is pounding at your door. The only thing standing before you and certain death is your front door that needs urgent repairs. You call your landlord begging for help but they say it's not their problem. The beast smashes through the door and eats you up. Some would agree that the landlord is to blame because of inaction. Some would argue instead that the landlord is not responsible for your problem. You should have not provoked the beast. Or fixed the door yourself. Or paid more rent etc. This framing only works of the wild beast has no agency at all. It's by definition wild and we all know what it will do and it can't help itself but being a man eating wild beast. It has no moral obligation to not be a man eating beast. But by applying this framing to Russia and CCP you're dehumanizing them. You're assuming that they are so evil they cannot possibly have any moral obligations and so the burden falls on third parties (or worse, you, their victim!) if they attack you!
- jjtheblunt 2y ago> the US made China it's (sic) manufacturing arm.. i think it's more accurate to give credit where earned: one thing the CCP did smart was _win_ foreign business (US Apple and Dell etc) by building the rentable factory system with deep dependable supply chains directly adjacent. That was uniquely able , globally, to compete and win business. The US didn't seemingly even think to do that, perhaps distracted by the Cold War?
- dehrmann 2y agoUS tariffs on China are worse for Taiwanese independence than TSMC building fabs in the US.
- nine_k 2y agoPray elaborate! What is the mechanism of that, in your opinion? (Not saying that the US policy is decent here, or anywhere else, under the current administration.)
- dehrmann 2y agoThe trade war reduces China's dependence on the US, whether through sales or holding US treasuries. This means China can invade Taiwan with less risk of economic sanctions. That said, without TSMC, and especially with the current administration, I doubt the US would step in.
- tdeck 2y ago> they hold up all of these technical accomplishments and quality of life improvements they have made under their one party system. But now over here is Taiwan that never bought in Never bought in to one party rule huh? It seems like people forgot about the 38 years of martial law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_Taiwan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_Taiwan
- Retric 2y agoThis isn’t an abstract comparison. CCP mostly overthrew the existing government and Taiwan was a continuation of that existing system. So for that system be quantifiably better is an issue independent of things like elections. It’s a clear demonstration that failures like the great Chinese famine simply wouldn’t have happened if the communist revolution failed. That’s a significant political issue, because people from that time period are still alive so they can’t simply erase the memory of it.
- legitster 2y agoEven so, this doesn't change the fact that anything that Maoists could take credit for was done better by the non-ideologue dictator next door. But the fact that the martial law came to an end largely democratically is good evidence that both democratic reform was easier outside of the CCCP, and that the Taiwanese single party rule was probably not as totalitarian as some people claim.
- r00fus 2y ago> It's worse than a rebellious province. It's a more successful rebellious province. That statement just made me LOL. In what dimension other than foreign investment do you see Taiwan as more successful than China? In 2025, it's pretty clear that China has self sovereignty, is the world's factory, leads in BRICS, and isn't subject to the US empire.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoTaiwan is 3x more prosperous per capita. PRC just has a lot more people.
- tazjin 2y agoSo Norway and maybe Monaco are more successful than the US?
- ithkuil 2y agothere are multiple success metrics
- junipertea 2y agoalso, to answer the original question: yes they are
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ithkuil 2y agowell that really depends on the metric right? do you care about quality of life? literacy? about social justice? about women's rights? or about who has the most richest billionaires or the strongest military? or who has the best american football teams? Not every people care about the same things. Some people would rather live in a country that treats others as shit, and take pride in that and absolutely don't see the point why other other countries have some better metrics on some they may consider useless stuff like education. EDIT: I mean, I know it sounds silly, but failure to understand that there are so many people who literally don't give a shit about why education matters, or why empathy matters is the reason we are in this situation. We took for granted that there are universal values, and organized our societies around goals oriented towards those universal values and in the meantime we got this resentment brewing in part of the population that got exploited by populist forces
- hosh 2y agoI mean, it depends on what you mean by "rebellious". There is a lot more nuance than that. From the Kuomingtang's perspective, the CCP are the rebels. One piece of history is that after Sun Yat-Sen died, his successor Chang Kai Shek purged the Kuomingtang of any socialist, community, and otherwise left-leaning members of their assembly. When some members escaped the purge, this sowed the seeds of the CCP that came to fruit after fighting off the Japanese during WWII. When the Kuomingtang retreated to Taiwan, it was not run as a republic or a democratic society. Martial law ended in 1987 and a second political party did not appear until it was illegally formed in 1986. The Kuomingtang and its coalition continues to identify with China -- the civilization -- whereas the DDP-lead coalition is done with that and wants their own national identity of Taiwain.