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> Once China solves the Taiwan problem they're going to turn their sights on Korea and Japan. China will not annex Japan or South Korea. As a Chinese person, I

> Once China solves the Taiwan problem they're going to turn their sights on Korea and Japan. China will not annex Japan or South Korea. As a Chinese person, I can assure you that this is not how our mindset works at all. Most of the Western media hype about this is deliberately designed to muddy the waters around the Taiwan issue. Taiwan is different: the vast majority of people there are ethnically Chinese, so reunification is seen as an absolute necessity. But historically, China has never been good at ruling non-Han peoples. Every non-Chinese group has always been viewed as a net burden. Take Myanmar as an example: even if China occupied it and gained a warm-water port, the price would be having to assimilate tens of millions of Burmese people. That cost is simply too high; no one in China wants to pay it. The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.” So with South Korea and Japan, the real goal is to surpass them industrially and economically, to leave them in the dust on the factory floor and in the lab. When it comes to Japan in particular, the deepest desire in many Chinese hearts is for Japan to start a war first—so China can finally settle the historical score once and for all. But even in that scenario, turning Japan into “part of China” is not on the table. No one wants 125 million thoroughly non-Sinicized Japanese inside the country; that would be seen as an endless headache, not a prize.

voidfunc 11mo ago
> Taiwan is different: the vast majority of people there are ethnically Chinese, so reunification is seen as an absolute necessity. Your illegitimate authoritarian government is free to surrender at any time and hand the keys back to the legitimate democratic ROC government then.
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  yeah its a civil war, lets see who will won. (Thank you for acknowledging that this is a civil war — that's something you rarely see on Western forums.)
  - Larrikin 11mo ago
    Chiang Kai-shek is a standard part of the world history course in the US in high school. We know why China wants Taiwan at the personal level, much of the world is just interested in that not happening. It's a civil war like the American revolution was a civil war and France helped out.
    - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
      This is the first time I've ever seen a non-Chinese person say it this way on Reddit, X, or this platform. I must have scrolled through way too much Reddit.
      - shallowsax 11mo ago
        Yep, it's 100% common knowledge. I distinctly remember my teacher making a point to explain why Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Jieshi were both valid transliterations in my 10th grade world history class. No one in America with a high school education believes that Taiwan is an unrelated country that China randomly decided to pick on after throwing a dart at a map. Chinese history from antiquity to modern European/Japanese colonialism and war crimes to the unresolved civil war and KMT's retreat from the mainland are standard course material; the history and politics around reunification aren't some big mystery. Don't get me wrong. The history is interesting, but from an American perspective interesting history doesn't translate into justification for violent incursion on an established nation's sovereignty. We largely don't even support our own past unprovoked invasions, much less invasions by rivals against stable and prosperous liberal democracies that we have long-standing friendly relationships with. The American lesson from our history isn't "we screwed up in Iraq and Vietnam, so other countries should get a pass to behave similarly"; it's "let's work to prevent such tragedies from repeating".
        yanhangyhy 11mo ago
        so the war in Venezuela...
forgotoldacc 11mo ago
I read Chinese news from China in Chinese sometimes to get a bit of language practice. It's not western media reporting that China says Okinawa isn't legitimate Japanese territory. It's Chinese state media saying Okinawa needs to be "liberated" from Japan. Fears that China one day tries a Russian approach by saying "no way bro. We'd never try to take Georgia. Nah bro. We'd never try to take Crimea. Nah dude. We'd never try to take eastern Ukraine. Nope. We definitely aren't interested in taking Poland." aren't exactly baseless. And just like with Russia, they justify their prodding of a sovereign country as "well it's our territory" (it isn't). China already has fighter jets and ships going around the Senkaku Islands periodically. It's clear they'll take them and push further and further if they think they can get away with it.
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  And they will never become part of China again, ever. They once were, and after World War II they were supposed to be handed over to the Republic of China (Nationalist government), but the Nationalists stupidly refused. Then the United States gave them to Japan as a reward. This completely violated the post-WWII United Nations agreements. So if the UN still wants to claim any legitimacy or relevance, these places should not belong to Japan, but they will never belong to China either.
  - forgotoldacc 11mo ago
    Okinawa was as much a part of China as Botswana and Argentina were. Going back centuries, they've always spoken a japonic language so your government propaganda is a strange approach for seeding justification for invasion in the future.
    - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
      I never said they speak Chinese or anything like that. in ancient times they were part of China’s tributary system. The Chinese tributary system explicitly allowed different places to keep their own culture and language. It was Japan that annexed them and then systematically destroyed the local culture. The post-WWII agreements (Cairo Declaration, Potsdam Proclamation, San Francisco Peace Treaty framework) all stated that these places was to be stripped from Japan. China is only using this historical fact now to pressure Japan on the propaganda and diplomatic level. No Chinese person actually believes China should (or will) annex them. All Chinese media are emphasizing that these places do not belong to Japan, not that they belong to China. That’s the essential difference.
curseofcasandra 11mo ago
For those unfamiliar with the history, Taiwan’s (ROC) own constitution says it is part of China. Its dispute is with the CCP, not China itself. Conflating the PRC vs ROC conflict with a China vs Japan conflict is just ignorant.
- alisonatwork 11mo ago
  That is, the constitution written by the KMT dictatorship that was awarded the island as spoils of war after the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in WW2. In the present day, neither the Taiwanese government nor Taiwanese people are in some kind of dispute with the CCP over who owns Gansu province or whatever, they just would like recognition of their already-existing sovereignty.
  - mytailorisrich 11mo ago
    That's a little misrepresenting history... Taiwan was part of the Qing Empire and Japan took it in 1895 following China's defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War. China got it back after WWII.
    - alisonatwork 11mo ago
      Sure, and before the Qing armies invaded it was declared an independent kingdom by a Ming loyalist who was born in Japan to a Japanese mother, and before that there were a couple of European outposts and scattered settlers from Fujian, and before that there were indigenous peoples who themselves are part of an ethnic group that can now be found everywhere from Madagascar to New Zealand. The point I was responding to was the misleading comment that the people of Taiwan are actually just engaged in some kind of internal dispute with the CCP, which is entirely a CCP framing of the issue. Few if any people in modern-day Taiwan believe that they are the true inheritors of the Chinese mainland. The pretense has to be upheld in order to preserve the status quo, but in practice there is no serious movement staking a claim to any part of China.
      - mytailorisrich 11mo ago
swordsmith 11mo ago
> No one wants 125 million thoroughly non-Sinicized Japanese inside the country; that would be seen as an endless headache, not a prize. I don't think what you claim the people want matters (if even true). Look at Tibet and Xinjiang
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  Xinjiang and Tibet have been part of China for many periods throughout history; Japan never was. At most, Korea was merely part of the tributary system. There is a fundamental difference here.
  - indigo945 11mo ago
    Tibet, too, was only part of the tributary system. Even during the Qing dynasty, the Chinese imperial state had no effective control over central Tibet - all local rulers and judges were Tibetan, and they employed Tibetan, not Chinese, law. Outside of diplomatic circles, Tibetans at the time weren't paying any attention to Chinese culture and politics. Claims to the contrary are largely historical revisionism. (As are the various claims that Tibet was culturally influenced by China - the story of Princess Wencheng bringing agricultural technologies to uncultured Tibet, as it is often taught in Chinese schools and portrayed in period dramas, is a myth that only came to popularity during the Chinese Civil War.) Remember also that until 1951, Tibet occupied Chinese territories more often than vice versa - although given the case of Manchuria, China might actually see this as an argument in favor of Tibet being Chinese.
adrian_b 11mo ago
The majority of the people of Taiwan are ethnically Chinese, but this is a relatively recent status. Taiwan is not an ancient part of China. Taiwan has become ethnically Chinese in 2 stages, first an immigration from the neighboring Chinese province that is a few centuries old, then the invasion of the island by Kuomintang at the end of WWII, which took the political power from the native Chinese. So Taiwan has become a Chinese-populated territory only during the last few centuries, and the desire to unite it with mainland China is not something that can reassure China's neighbors that this is where its desire of expansion will stop.
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  During the American Civil War, the majority of the population in the Deep South states were actually Black slaves
  - loeg 11mo ago
    Are you arguing by metaphor that the Han Chinese on Taiwan are slaves to the native Taiwanese, or what? Or that slaves weren't Americans? I have no idea what your comment is trying to say.
- _t9ow 11mo ago
  > not something that can reassure China's neighbors that this is where its desire of expansion will stop May I ask if you actually live in one of these neighbouring countries? I do -- in fact I have lived in more than one -- and I can assure you that many/most people living in these areas outside of the Western media bubble absolutely do not share your view. From the CCP's (and many Chinese people's) perspective: 1) the U.S. repeatedly interfered in the CCP's/KMT's attempts to resolve the civil war -- see e.g. the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises (during which the PRC shelled Taiwan), Project National Glory (the ROC's plan to reconquer the mainland) -- preventing the mainland and Taiwan from reunification; 2) the Taiwanese government has lost the civil war, and the loser doesn't get to set the terms. Pretending that the PRC's interest in Taiwan isn't special is to ignore extremely crucial historical circumstances that are core to understanding the situation today. Regardless of what you think of the PRC's stance on reunification, their desire to reunify doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it takes ahistorical leaps of reasoning to suggest that the PRC might want to annex South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. next. > only during the last few centuries This is way more than enough time to drastically transform the culture of a society. Taiwan today is culturally much more similar to the PRC than it is to the West. In some aspects it is also similar to Japan, despite the fact that Japan colonised it for "only" 50 years.
inkyoto 11mo ago
> Take Myanmar as an example: even if China occupied it […] Historically, however, the record is rather unflattering for China in its engagements with Myanmar (formerly Burma) – China has waged four wars[0] with Myanmar and suffered a defeat to Myanmar in each instance. [0] Or one war with four invasions – depending on the point of view.
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  so i guess the Mayanmar people shouldn't blame china now.. they should build some thing like the Vietness people: we fight the chinese and we always win, lets be proud of it.
macleginn 11mo ago
> But historically, China has never been good at ruling non-Han peoples. "Good" is not a very objective term, but China does have 55 official minorities, coming from a long period of imperial expansion, so arguably it can be done. > The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.” Firstly, this is a troubling statement, again given that China has 55 official minorities, who are evidently failures of assimilation more than anything. Secondly, there are other ways of imperial sovereignty: Vietnam was a Chinese dominion for a longest time, and Korea was effectively ruled from China as well. In other words, China has a long and not very remote history of territorial expansion and old-school dependent-state imperialism. The fact that the Han have a very strong cultural identity and do not find it easy to coexist with other peoples doesn't help either: just look at the history of the relations between Britain and Ireland.
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  > "Good" is not a very objective term, but China does have 55 official minorities, coming from a long period of imperial expansion, so arguably it can be done. Don’t forget the history of Northern Wei, Yuan Dynasty, and Qing Dynasty – none of them were products of “Han Chinese imperialism.”
  - macleginn 11mo ago
    Qing Dynasty annexed Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, as well as large chunks of Central Asia, and fought with Sikhs over Kashmir. Looks like a good case of imperial expansion to me.
    - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
      basiclly every big country...
    - _t9ow 11mo ago
      The person you replied to wrote: none of them were products of “Han Chinese imperialism.” This is correct, since the Qing Dynasty was led by the Manchus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty), not by the Han Chinese.
NalNezumi 11mo ago
While I'd like to believe this, I also know that CCP have as of late tapped in to a dangerous remedy for the dissatisfaction of their rule(economic slowdown): Nationalistic fervor. From my Chinese friends (and Hong Kong friends) it seems to be clear that the "century of humiliation" rhetoric is getting more prominent. Which includes rationalization such as "Japan and West (and Russia) humiliated us so it's our right to revenge. Whatever they're complaining about right now is just historical rebalancing". My British friend in HK seems to be getting tired of this rhetoric thrown at her every time she meets a Chinese person. And CCP might be drinking that nationalism koolaid and get hooked to it just as US/West and recently Japan is. It's a very useful tool for the elite to dissipate discontent and I'd belive it will only accelerate. And it's a strong rationalization rhetoric. Whatever "historical" you claim will probably be moot. Give us a decade or two and you'd probably be here posting something along the line, with multiple citations that have accumulated during the time
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  Sure, nationalism definitely serves that purpose. But please consider: in the most recent conflicts/flare-ups, the initiator has actually been Japan, not China. Their new female prime minister is an extreme-right-wing politician who is not only provoking China, but also picking fights with South Korea and Russia at the same time, while pushing aggressively anti-immigrant and exclusionary policies. Her approval ratings are also unusually high. It feels pretty strange that Japan gets zero criticism for this while all the focus stays on China.
  - actionfromafar 11mo ago
    Not strange at all. China is powerful, thus scary.
    - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
      sounds fair. but i doubt the normal japan people know that...
  - jeeeb 11mo ago
ivell 11mo ago
> That cost is simply too high; no one in China wants to pay it China was happy to invade Tibet and assimilate it's population. Hard to believe that a government who claims all of South China sea, large parts of India (Arunachal Pradesh) does not want to expand. Or do you think people of Arunachal Pradesh are also Chinese?
- mytailorisrich 11mo ago
  Arunachal Pradesh is a historic part of Tibet and was part of the Qing Empire before the Chinese revolution of 1912. When Tibet then broke away from China the Brits got what is now Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet. Hence the ongoing Chinese claim but the days of any military actions are long gone.
  - ivell 11mo ago
    If historical claims are valid, then Mongols would be very happy to claim large swaths of land. Or if more recent claims are to be taken, then the Brits have claims over quite a large amount of countries. Historical claims are meaningless and are just an excuse for expansion.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
      if its not valid maybe we should return Califonia to mexico?
    - mytailorisrich 11mo ago
      I did not comment on the "validity" of the claim, just explained its rationale and history. Chinese territorial claims in general are not "an excuse for expansion", they are rooted in territorial losses at the end of the 19th century and during the revolution of 1912 with the formal aim of recovering them. They also predate the PRC as you'll find that the ROC/Taiwan has the same claims for the same reason. This does not mean that China is going to go to war over them, certainly it won't go to war with India. No need for drama or hysteria over those claims.
kalaksi 11mo ago
> Taiwan is different: the vast majority of people there are ethnically Chinese, so reunification is seen as an absolute necessity. How does that make it a "necessity"? It's not for China to decide? This is the reasoning Russia uses when invading neighboring countries. To "protect" russian people and claim that <insert part of country> are russians anyway and want to get annexed (still wouldn't make it right). If someone wants to join Russia, they should move to Russia. (Or maybe it could happen through some longer and slower political process. And the country as a whole should agree, with a lot more than 50% agreeing, to a unification.) > The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.” Like above, I hope you're not implying that a culturally similar people in another country #2 somehow gives country #1 power over it's sovereignity.
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  > It's not for China to decide? do your homework, taiwan also claims its china. maybe you mean its not for them to decide?
  - kalaksi 11mo ago
    I don't claim to know the Taiwan situation well. I'm just saying that culture or ethnicity of people isn't a sufficient argument in general.
- sofixa 11mo ago
  > How does that make it a "necessity"? It's not for China to decide? This is the reasoning Russia uses when invading neighboring countries. To "protect" russian people and claim that <insert part of country> are russians anyway and want to get annexed (still wouldn't make it right). If someone wants to join Russia, they should move to Russia. The difference is that Taiwan only exists because the losers of the Chinese Civil war ran away to it, and the winners (CCP) were not allowed by the US to finish the job. So for the CCP, Taiwan has always been a problem still left to resolve, an American thorn in their side. It was along the main reasons for them joining the Korean war, because the monumentally dumb McArthur publicly praised and supported Chiang (the leader of the losers of the civil war, the KMT), which led to CCP fears the US will use the Korean peninsula as a sprinboard to attack them and install Chiang back to power. So while self-determination trumps those concerns for my personal view, I can totally see where China (CCP) is coming from. Especially with a very aggressive American stance against them, why would they want to keep a very friendly to the US runaway province out there? For Americans, imagine the Confederates ran away to Puerto Rico, force assimilated the locals, and became very friendly with Russia. For the French, that a Bonaparte was ruling Corsica while being friendly with the big bad wolf (depending on the age, Brits or Russians maybe). And on and on.
thaumasiotes 11mo ago
> Take Myanmar as an example: even if China occupied it and gained a warm-water port What, does the Pearl River freeze over in winter?
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  we also would like to have Vladivostok back
  - codedokode 11mo ago
    And what was the original, Chinese name of the city, may I ask?
YurgenJurgensen 11mo ago
The CCP has demonstrated that it’s not above killing tens of millions of its own citizens to achieve its political aims. I doubt they’d see ‘pacifying’ an occupied population as much of an issue.
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  you sounds dispointed. but i believe the future will tell you the truth and i'm telling the facts.
corimaith 11mo ago
Invasion is one thing, unfavorable trade deals, deindustrialization, and political coercion is more realistic outcome yet all the more undesirable. Imperialism after all often didn't spread spread by outright conquest.
- yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  yeah like the tariffs.
  - corimaith 11mo ago
    Well no actually, it would be more like forcefully removing tariffs. The right to export to foreign markets is ultimately a privilege after all.

voidfunc 11mo ago

> Taiwan is different: the vast majority of people there are ethnically Chinese, so reunification is seen as an absolute necessity. Your illegitimate authoritarian government is free to surrender at any time and hand the keys back to the legitimate democratic ROC government then.

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
yeah its a civil war, lets see who will won. (Thank you for acknowledging that this is a civil war — that's something you rarely see on Western forums.)
- Larrikin 11mo ago
  Chiang Kai-shek is a standard part of the world history course in the US in high school. We know why China wants Taiwan at the personal level, much of the world is just interested in that not happening. It's a civil war like the American revolution was a civil war and France helped out.
  - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
    This is the first time I've ever seen a non-Chinese person say it this way on Reddit, X, or this platform. I must have scrolled through way too much Reddit.
    - shallowsax 11mo ago
      Yep, it's 100% common knowledge. I distinctly remember my teacher making a point to explain why Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Jieshi were both valid transliterations in my 10th grade world history class. No one in America with a high school education believes that Taiwan is an unrelated country that China randomly decided to pick on after throwing a dart at a map. Chinese history from antiquity to modern European/Japanese colonialism and war crimes to the unresolved civil war and KMT's retreat from the mainland are standard course material; the history and politics around reunification aren't some big mystery. Don't get me wrong. The history is interesting, but from an American perspective interesting history doesn't translate into justification for violent incursion on an established nation's sovereignty. We largely don't even support our own past unprovoked invasions, much less invasions by rivals against stable and prosperous liberal democracies that we have long-standing friendly relationships with. The American lesson from our history isn't "we screwed up in Iraq and Vietnam, so other countries should get a pass to behave similarly"; it's "let's work to prevent such tragedies from repeating".
      - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
        so the war in Venezuela...

forgotoldacc 11mo ago

I read Chinese news from China in Chinese sometimes to get a bit of language practice. It's not western media reporting that China says Okinawa isn't legitimate Japanese territory. It's Chinese state media saying Okinawa needs to be "liberated" from Japan. Fears that China one day tries a Russian approach by saying "no way bro. We'd never try to take Georgia. Nah bro. We'd never try to take Crimea. Nah dude. We'd never try to take eastern Ukraine. Nope. We definitely aren't interested in taking Poland." aren't exactly baseless. And just like with Russia, they justify their prodding of a sovereign country as "well it's our territory" (it isn't). China already has fighter jets and ships going around the Senkaku Islands periodically. It's clear they'll take them and push further and further if they think they can get away with it.

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
And they will never become part of China again, ever. They once were, and after World War II they were supposed to be handed over to the Republic of China (Nationalist government), but the Nationalists stupidly refused. Then the United States gave them to Japan as a reward. This completely violated the post-WWII United Nations agreements. So if the UN still wants to claim any legitimacy or relevance, these places should not belong to Japan, but they will never belong to China either.
- forgotoldacc 11mo ago
  Okinawa was as much a part of China as Botswana and Argentina were. Going back centuries, they've always spoken a japonic language so your government propaganda is a strange approach for seeding justification for invasion in the future.
  - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
    I never said they speak Chinese or anything like that. in ancient times they were part of China’s tributary system. The Chinese tributary system explicitly allowed different places to keep their own culture and language. It was Japan that annexed them and then systematically destroyed the local culture. The post-WWII agreements (Cairo Declaration, Potsdam Proclamation, San Francisco Peace Treaty framework) all stated that these places was to be stripped from Japan. China is only using this historical fact now to pressure Japan on the propaganda and diplomatic level. No Chinese person actually believes China should (or will) annex them. All Chinese media are emphasizing that these places do not belong to Japan, not that they belong to China. That’s the essential difference.

curseofcasandra 11mo ago

For those unfamiliar with the history, Taiwan’s (ROC) own constitution says it is part of China. Its dispute is with the CCP, not China itself. Conflating the PRC vs ROC conflict with a China vs Japan conflict is just ignorant.

alisonatwork 11mo ago
That is, the constitution written by the KMT dictatorship that was awarded the island as spoils of war after the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in WW2. In the present day, neither the Taiwanese government nor Taiwanese people are in some kind of dispute with the CCP over who owns Gansu province or whatever, they just would like recognition of their already-existing sovereignty.
- mytailorisrich 11mo ago
  That's a little misrepresenting history... Taiwan was part of the Qing Empire and Japan took it in 1895 following China's defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War. China got it back after WWII.
  - alisonatwork 11mo ago
    Sure, and before the Qing armies invaded it was declared an independent kingdom by a Ming loyalist who was born in Japan to a Japanese mother, and before that there were a couple of European outposts and scattered settlers from Fujian, and before that there were indigenous peoples who themselves are part of an ethnic group that can now be found everywhere from Madagascar to New Zealand. The point I was responding to was the misleading comment that the people of Taiwan are actually just engaged in some kind of internal dispute with the CCP, which is entirely a CCP framing of the issue. Few if any people in modern-day Taiwan believe that they are the true inheritors of the Chinese mainland. The pretense has to be upheld in order to preserve the status quo, but in practice there is no serious movement staking a claim to any part of China.
    - mytailorisrich 11mo ago

swordsmith 11mo ago

> No one wants 125 million thoroughly non-Sinicized Japanese inside the country; that would be seen as an endless headache, not a prize. I don't think what you claim the people want matters (if even true). Look at Tibet and Xinjiang

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
Xinjiang and Tibet have been part of China for many periods throughout history; Japan never was. At most, Korea was merely part of the tributary system. There is a fundamental difference here.
- indigo945 11mo ago
  Tibet, too, was only part of the tributary system. Even during the Qing dynasty, the Chinese imperial state had no effective control over central Tibet - all local rulers and judges were Tibetan, and they employed Tibetan, not Chinese, law. Outside of diplomatic circles, Tibetans at the time weren't paying any attention to Chinese culture and politics. Claims to the contrary are largely historical revisionism. (As are the various claims that Tibet was culturally influenced by China - the story of Princess Wencheng bringing agricultural technologies to uncultured Tibet, as it is often taught in Chinese schools and portrayed in period dramas, is a myth that only came to popularity during the Chinese Civil War.) Remember also that until 1951, Tibet occupied Chinese territories more often than vice versa - although given the case of Manchuria, China might actually see this as an argument in favor of Tibet being Chinese.

adrian_b 11mo ago

The majority of the people of Taiwan are ethnically Chinese, but this is a relatively recent status. Taiwan is not an ancient part of China. Taiwan has become ethnically Chinese in 2 stages, first an immigration from the neighboring Chinese province that is a few centuries old, then the invasion of the island by Kuomintang at the end of WWII, which took the political power from the native Chinese. So Taiwan has become a Chinese-populated territory only during the last few centuries, and the desire to unite it with mainland China is not something that can reassure China's neighbors that this is where its desire of expansion will stop.

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
During the American Civil War, the majority of the population in the Deep South states were actually Black slaves
- loeg 11mo ago
  Are you arguing by metaphor that the Han Chinese on Taiwan are slaves to the native Taiwanese, or what? Or that slaves weren't Americans? I have no idea what your comment is trying to say.
_t9ow 11mo ago
> not something that can reassure China's neighbors that this is where its desire of expansion will stop May I ask if you actually live in one of these neighbouring countries? I do -- in fact I have lived in more than one -- and I can assure you that many/most people living in these areas outside of the Western media bubble absolutely do not share your view. From the CCP's (and many Chinese people's) perspective: 1) the U.S. repeatedly interfered in the CCP's/KMT's attempts to resolve the civil war -- see e.g. the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises (during which the PRC shelled Taiwan), Project National Glory (the ROC's plan to reconquer the mainland) -- preventing the mainland and Taiwan from reunification; 2) the Taiwanese government has lost the civil war, and the loser doesn't get to set the terms. Pretending that the PRC's interest in Taiwan isn't special is to ignore extremely crucial historical circumstances that are core to understanding the situation today. Regardless of what you think of the PRC's stance on reunification, their desire to reunify doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it takes ahistorical leaps of reasoning to suggest that the PRC might want to annex South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. next. > only during the last few centuries This is way more than enough time to drastically transform the culture of a society. Taiwan today is culturally much more similar to the PRC than it is to the West. In some aspects it is also similar to Japan, despite the fact that Japan colonised it for "only" 50 years.

inkyoto 11mo ago

> Take Myanmar as an example: even if China occupied it […] Historically, however, the record is rather unflattering for China in its engagements with Myanmar (formerly Burma) – China has waged four wars[0] with Myanmar and suffered a defeat to Myanmar in each instance. [0] Or one war with four invasions – depending on the point of view.

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
so i guess the Mayanmar people shouldn't blame china now.. they should build some thing like the Vietness people: we fight the chinese and we always win, lets be proud of it.

macleginn 11mo ago

> But historically, China has never been good at ruling non-Han peoples. "Good" is not a very objective term, but China does have 55 official minorities, coming from a long period of imperial expansion, so arguably it can be done. > The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.” Firstly, this is a troubling statement, again given that China has 55 official minorities, who are evidently failures of assimilation more than anything. Secondly, there are other ways of imperial sovereignty: Vietnam was a Chinese dominion for a longest time, and Korea was effectively ruled from China as well. In other words, China has a long and not very remote history of territorial expansion and old-school dependent-state imperialism. The fact that the Han have a very strong cultural identity and do not find it easy to coexist with other peoples doesn't help either: just look at the history of the relations between Britain and Ireland.

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
> "Good" is not a very objective term, but China does have 55 official minorities, coming from a long period of imperial expansion, so arguably it can be done. Don’t forget the history of Northern Wei, Yuan Dynasty, and Qing Dynasty – none of them were products of “Han Chinese imperialism.”
- macleginn 11mo ago
  Qing Dynasty annexed Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, as well as large chunks of Central Asia, and fought with Sikhs over Kashmir. Looks like a good case of imperial expansion to me.
  - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
    basiclly every big country...
  - _t9ow 11mo ago
    The person you replied to wrote: none of them were products of “Han Chinese imperialism.” This is correct, since the Qing Dynasty was led by the Manchus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty), not by the Han Chinese.

NalNezumi 11mo ago

While I'd like to believe this, I also know that CCP have as of late tapped in to a dangerous remedy for the dissatisfaction of their rule(economic slowdown): Nationalistic fervor. From my Chinese friends (and Hong Kong friends) it seems to be clear that the "century of humiliation" rhetoric is getting more prominent. Which includes rationalization such as "Japan and West (and Russia) humiliated us so it's our right to revenge. Whatever they're complaining about right now is just historical rebalancing". My British friend in HK seems to be getting tired of this rhetoric thrown at her every time she meets a Chinese person. And CCP might be drinking that nationalism koolaid and get hooked to it just as US/West and recently Japan is. It's a very useful tool for the elite to dissipate discontent and I'd belive it will only accelerate. And it's a strong rationalization rhetoric. Whatever "historical" you claim will probably be moot. Give us a decade or two and you'd probably be here posting something along the line, with multiple citations that have accumulated during the time

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
Sure, nationalism definitely serves that purpose. But please consider: in the most recent conflicts/flare-ups, the initiator has actually been Japan, not China. Their new female prime minister is an extreme-right-wing politician who is not only provoking China, but also picking fights with South Korea and Russia at the same time, while pushing aggressively anti-immigrant and exclusionary policies. Her approval ratings are also unusually high. It feels pretty strange that Japan gets zero criticism for this while all the focus stays on China.
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  Not strange at all. China is powerful, thus scary.
  - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
    sounds fair. but i doubt the normal japan people know that...
- jeeeb 11mo ago

ivell 11mo ago

> That cost is simply too high; no one in China wants to pay it China was happy to invade Tibet and assimilate it's population. Hard to believe that a government who claims all of South China sea, large parts of India (Arunachal Pradesh) does not want to expand. Or do you think people of Arunachal Pradesh are also Chinese?

mytailorisrich 11mo ago
Arunachal Pradesh is a historic part of Tibet and was part of the Qing Empire before the Chinese revolution of 1912. When Tibet then broke away from China the Brits got what is now Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet. Hence the ongoing Chinese claim but the days of any military actions are long gone.
- ivell 11mo ago
  If historical claims are valid, then Mongols would be very happy to claim large swaths of land. Or if more recent claims are to be taken, then the Brits have claims over quite a large amount of countries. Historical claims are meaningless and are just an excuse for expansion.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - yanhangyhy 11mo ago
    if its not valid maybe we should return Califonia to mexico?
  - mytailorisrich 11mo ago
    I did not comment on the "validity" of the claim, just explained its rationale and history. Chinese territorial claims in general are not "an excuse for expansion", they are rooted in territorial losses at the end of the 19th century and during the revolution of 1912 with the formal aim of recovering them. They also predate the PRC as you'll find that the ROC/Taiwan has the same claims for the same reason. This does not mean that China is going to go to war over them, certainly it won't go to war with India. No need for drama or hysteria over those claims.

kalaksi 11mo ago

> Taiwan is different: the vast majority of people there are ethnically Chinese, so reunification is seen as an absolute necessity. How does that make it a "necessity"? It's not for China to decide? This is the reasoning Russia uses when invading neighboring countries. To "protect" russian people and claim that <insert part of country> are russians anyway and want to get annexed (still wouldn't make it right). If someone wants to join Russia, they should move to Russia. (Or maybe it could happen through some longer and slower political process. And the country as a whole should agree, with a lot more than 50% agreeing, to a unification.) > The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.” Like above, I hope you're not implying that a culturally similar people in another country #2 somehow gives country #1 power over it's sovereignity.

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
> It's not for China to decide? do your homework, taiwan also claims its china. maybe you mean its not for them to decide?
- kalaksi 11mo ago
  I don't claim to know the Taiwan situation well. I'm just saying that culture or ethnicity of people isn't a sufficient argument in general.
sofixa 11mo ago
> How does that make it a "necessity"? It's not for China to decide? This is the reasoning Russia uses when invading neighboring countries. To "protect" russian people and claim that <insert part of country> are russians anyway and want to get annexed (still wouldn't make it right). If someone wants to join Russia, they should move to Russia. The difference is that Taiwan only exists because the losers of the Chinese Civil war ran away to it, and the winners (CCP) were not allowed by the US to finish the job. So for the CCP, Taiwan has always been a problem still left to resolve, an American thorn in their side. It was along the main reasons for them joining the Korean war, because the monumentally dumb McArthur publicly praised and supported Chiang (the leader of the losers of the civil war, the KMT), which led to CCP fears the US will use the Korean peninsula as a sprinboard to attack them and install Chiang back to power. So while self-determination trumps those concerns for my personal view, I can totally see where China (CCP) is coming from. Especially with a very aggressive American stance against them, why would they want to keep a very friendly to the US runaway province out there? For Americans, imagine the Confederates ran away to Puerto Rico, force assimilated the locals, and became very friendly with Russia. For the French, that a Bonaparte was ruling Corsica while being friendly with the big bad wolf (depending on the age, Brits or Russians maybe). And on and on.

thaumasiotes 11mo ago

> Take Myanmar as an example: even if China occupied it and gained a warm-water port What, does the Pearl River freeze over in winter?

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
we also would like to have Vladivostok back
- codedokode 11mo ago
  And what was the original, Chinese name of the city, may I ask?

YurgenJurgensen 11mo ago

The CCP has demonstrated that it’s not above killing tens of millions of its own citizens to achieve its political aims. I doubt they’d see ‘pacifying’ an occupied population as much of an issue.

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
you sounds dispointed. but i believe the future will tell you the truth and i'm telling the facts.

corimaith 11mo ago

Invasion is one thing, unfavorable trade deals, deindustrialization, and political coercion is more realistic outcome yet all the more undesirable. Imperialism after all often didn't spread spread by outright conquest.

yanhangyhy 11mo ago
yeah like the tariffs.
- corimaith 11mo ago
  Well no actually, it would be more like forcefully removing tariffs. The right to export to foreign markets is ultimately a privilege after all.