Hacker News Reader

Comment by zachguo | Hacker News Reader

This is meaningless. Taiwanese can still access job posting sites or be contacted by recruiters from Mainland China. There's no language barrier and they can simply buy a flight ticket to Shanghai and start working wherever they want with full Chinese citizenship.

The brain drain is serious and I don't see how it can be solved unless Taiwan can offer competitive salaries against first-tier cities in the mainland, 10% of Taiwanese population is now living and working in the mainland.

View on HN

Taiwan isn't part of China. Using the term "mainland" is extremely loaded.

I think they used "mainland" here, so that it is differentiated from something like Hong Kong. And in this case, that differentiation actually matters and helps the context.

Tl;dr: the parent comment didn't use "mainland" to imply that Taiwan is a part of China. They used it to say "contacted by recruiters from Mainland China [as opposed to recruiters from HK]"

Ya exactly, China is part of Taiwan!

But seriously, this is a standard non-politicised term.

I think if you were to talk to hkers or taiwanese you would know that the term "mainland" is pretty well understood

Taiwan is an island in a country formally known as "Republic of China". So yes, it is China. The mainland is occupied by communist rebels, but it also belongs to the Republic of China. Happy to help!

Saying Taiwan isn't part of China isn't right, but neither is saying it is part of China. Similar the term mainland while maybe not liked by all Taiwan wouldn't necessary be that wrong either on technical terms.

Because things are complicate ...

Both Taiwan and China are "China".

Basically China/CCP claims the Taiwanese government are rebels, and the Taiwanese land belongs to China.

But Taiwan is also claiming that the CCP and co. are rebels and the Chinese/CCP land belongs to them.

I.e. both claim to "be" China.

So the reason Taiwan is called Taiwan and not China is because it's mainly limited to the island of Taiwan.

But this also means that using e.g. China/Mainland and China/Taiwan isn't wrong either.

In the end from a Taiwan historic point of few China/Mainland is the mainland they have lost.

I myself found it annoying that many western countries don't officially recognize Taiwan.

Until I learned about that fact, which explains a lot of things.

The relevant part is that Taiwan officially kinda sees themself as part of the historic/demographic/non CCP defined China, but NOT as part of the "political" China controlled by the CCP.

Naturally due to years separation both have developed in different directions and from a external point of few both China and Taiwan are separate countries with separate governments, land, politics etc.

Anyway I'm not a China/Taiwan expert, I hope I got things more or less right.

I guess the main takeaway is that the relationship between Taiwan and China is much more complicated than many people from the other side of the world believe it is.

I personally thought for a long time it basically "just" Taiwan is a country split of from china which aims to be independent from China and go it's own way but is suppressed by China but also somewhat protected by external forces mainly the US. Well I was wrong and things are more complicated than that.

We were not educated enough about this particular history in China but when I grew up I read a bit to know most of it. But I'm shocked it wasn't well known internationally.

I find the same situation in Ireland complicated as well after living there for 6 years. Before it was simply a naive 'why didn't NI unite with the republic of Ireland / why UK split Ireland up'. And being related to Britain and most events were in the press and it's english, there are still many people have no clue what happened. No wonder there could be so much misunderstanding and needless emotional arguments.

I can't speak for other countries or even the current education system but when I went to school in Germany history (and political) class was filled up with European History/Politics and Germanies past to a degree that most Asian countries only where covered in context of European history (e.g. Opium-Wars where covered, but e.g. Taiwan or the Indian-China relationship was hardly covered at all).

But things have changed a bit since I went to school, but just a bit. And somewhat it also depends on the teacher.

PS: If you want to know the conflict around UK and Ireland was covered. And was covered more deeply then the Opium-Wars, to some degree because it also was used as basis for topic in english classes. But it was also a time in school from which I don't remember much, because being a teen in puberty annoyed by english and in turn not caring about the UK at all. So I have no idea if the coverage was "good" or "bad".

Similar experience to yours. European history didn't constitute a majority of the history lessons in my old days but one can understand that (there is a lot!).

I'm certain the quality of education back then in China weren't up to scratch for sure but for the curious you can always get books if you have an interesting topic. I find books even superior media over history education because like you said younger me simply wasn't interested enough in class :)

I also can recommend Extra Credits (on YouTube), it's imperfect and simplified, but it still tries to be reasonable accurate for the kind of information source it is. At least it's much more concerned about accuracy then many modern (TV) documentation are. They also tend to have episode where they go through mistakes they accidentally had done in previous episodes..

EDIT: You to be clear they haven't done a episode about Taiwan (I think), but about other things I hadn't (or had) known about.

Thanks for recommending. Well that'll be a nice video idea :)

As I understand it Taiwan no longer makes any territorial claims on the mainland (Taiwan still claims ownership of nearby islets). Ball is in the CCP's court to invade before 2049, the centennial of the "peoples revolution". There is a strong symbolic desire to do so on the part of many in the CCP, but there is a smaller competing clique whose preference is to have a peaceful reunification (loaded term since many would say China was at no point really unified with formosa in recent centuries).

Taiwanese use the term mainland (大陸) to refer to China all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com