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Comment by maehwasu | Hacker News Reader

Ethnic, linguistic, and cultural ties tend to have great staying power (see US-Britain, the unification of Germany and Italy, Balkan conflicts, and on and on). This is all even more true when the countries are close geographically.

Counting the power of Taiwan for China and Ukraine for Russia is likely more predictive of the future than not counting them. Lines on a map and citizenship papers are easier to redo than centuries (millenia for China/Taiwan) of culture/language.

This is NOT an endorsement of China taking over Taiwan, which I do NOT want and think would be a bad thing.

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> Counting the power of Taiwan for China and Ukraine for Russia is likely more predictive of the future than not counting them.

More predictive in what regard? The only way I can see it being usefully predictive is if you count on the larger entity annexing the smaller one. An I missing something?

You can exert power through hegemony without annexing.

In the part that I quoted “power”, I believe, stands for economical strength. How can it be useful or at all correct to count economical strength of, say, Kazakhstan (as another example) as part of Russia’s stats, if the former is developing and trading independently?

That’s why I object to article’s angle: it uses “China” to refer to an aggregate in one case (lumping ROC and PRC together), and to PRC in another case (quoting their president and intentions to dominate global economy).

Counting ROC in PRC’s favor serves to tip the numbers and make article’s premise seem more compelling, but since PRC and ROC are separate economies the premise is false. It almost makes it look like a major business publication is playing a political game.

Russia already exerts a lot of economic influence over Kazakhstan, so this example actually goes the other way.

There are MANY ways to derive benefit from a relationship between countries: it’s not binary annex/not-annexed.

If we're comparing culteral/linguistic spheres of influence, then the US side should also include Canada, the UK, Australia, etc.

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