Beijing is slow to realize that trying to strong-arm the West's views on Tibet, Hong Kong, etc will not work, and in fact, makes their international position weaker.
China wants other countries to fear China's economic and military power, and to bow down to China's demand (or, at the very least, fearful of repercussions from China.)
I suspect that China is perfectly content with not interacting with other countries ever, as long as other countries recognizes China as the most powerful country in the world.
PS. Do you know China's netizens most popular nickname for USA? "America Empire"
Tibet cannot be a separate country (or in that respect, Hong Kong) very much like Quebec cannot be a separate country from Canada.
You can say that China becomes arrogant, but what exactly West expect other than a total war that rewrite much of the world nation borders?
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Although way passed the point to convince anyone, my comment above and below conditioned on "after WW2 (breaking up any large geographical country is unlikely)".
The Supreme Court of Canada went on to confirm that a referendum is a legal method for Quebec to initiate secession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_Re_Secession_of_Queb...
The motivation? A belief that humans are entitled to at least a modicum of political self-determination.
They want 1 hive mind, including religion
Can you expand on that? In particular, how that justifies governing those people against their will.
The rule-based global system is a relatively new thing. if you look back pass WW2, it is obvious without the United States as the solo superpower, it is barbarian politics between countries, not so much for "rule-based system".
Thus, what many really expect to see, when they think about national self-determination, it is envisioned as many smaller countries with one superpower, that is the United States, with globally projected military power.
That is certainly possible, but there are many questions left, for example, how that many smaller countries counter-balance the desire of the United States?
Alternatively, can the E.U. be an example? It is certainly possible as well, but we have to ask, at which point, the E.U. will act more like one nation, where is the boundary?
All these discussions are orthogonal to the authoritarian discussions. I am certainly sad to see people view the Chinese as unable to pursuit their own democratic process without breaking the whole country.
No, that is extremely unlikely. Not just unlikely, I would view it as pretty much impossible.
You must be talking about the Han people, certainly not the Tibetans or the Uighurs. Those clearly have separatist ambitions, but they don't have the power and the support to make it happen.
As for Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau - none of these want to be united politically with the PRC either, even though they are mostly Han.
A soviet-style political breakdown could be the best thing to happen to the people of the PRC, considering that those smaller Chinese countries are very successful.
Who are you grouping under auspices of "the Chinese people"? Clearly there are large groups of people within China who want nothing to do with the One China policy.
There is no telling what will happen when the economic gravy train comes to an end, especially if it were to do so in a jarring way. I suspect this is one of the reasons why Xi has become more authoritarian recently.
And if Singapore is viable as a separate country, why not Hong Kong too?
Chinese empires have broken up many times in the past. I don't expect the fate of this current empire will be any different.
[Edit: oska beat me to it, and said it better besides.]
https://www.thebalance.com/world-s-largest-economy-3306044
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-worlds-largest-expor...
I think people are slow to realize their new position in the world.
When US and Europe shipped all that manufacturing to China, it created this problem.
"A regular Chinese now matches a regular American in quality of life as measured by typical economical metrics (adjusted for purchase parity, not in nominal value)."
A regular Chinese in Shenzhen, maybe. I'm not sure about someone from the part of China that isn't on the coast or Beijing.
No. China’s per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity is still under US$17K. Even with perfectly flat income distribution that would be around half of US median personal income. Realistically, the gap is much more than 2×.
So what? Its exports account for only ~13%. According to the same data, Belgium is 2.4%. I've never even heard of anything "Made in Belgium".