Second, this policy by china is the problem. Not the lack of obedience by the rest of the world.
China wanted the UN seat, right? Would they really turn that down because the US insisted on saying some shit about Taiwan? When they were kinda broke and caught between us and Soviets? Did the KMT really not want to give up "Republic of China", even if it meant being relegated to non-country status? Does it even matter what they think, being a subordinate dictatorship at that point?
This seems like entirely a problem of the US's creation.
Because the security council seat was for the taking.
And ChiComs had a very good memory how the Korean war started.
Of course now there is no UN seat to dangle, and they are strong, and like with NK it's a fuck situation of our own procrastination, but then I think it was easy, and we just fucked up.
The more important point is I don't see KMT having any leverage over the US in the 1970s, so it doesn't matter what they think.
Civil Wars, partial rebellions, partial revolutions, are one the mechanisms of state formation.
It's nothing to respect. The US is something to respect, because it's got a lot more economic and military power than poor backwards NK. Through the US, South Korea became a country. That's the mechanism of state formation.
China doesn't bow to the US, so it's an entirely different dynamic. I say entirely different but the creation of Taiwan was a forceful takeover of an inhabited island by a retreating army who ruled with an iron fist. It was under martial law for 40 years. The nicest thing I hear people say about Taiwan is that it's 1) not China, and 2) not that oppressive anymore.
The idea that China would suddenly respect that is weird. Plenty of people in Taiwan support unification.
It also isn't like people who also wish to deal with China don't deal with Taiwan as if it were a country, they just don't call it one. It's like when they tried to call gay marriage "civil unions" in order to maintain the letter of homophobic policies while abandoning the substance.
No, this is demonstrably false. Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910. After the war, Korea was partitioned -- much like Europe -- with North Korea occupied by the Soviet Union and South Korea occupied by the US along the 38th parallel in 1945. Except the nature of the respective military presence was very different. The Soviet Union and China brought in large quanties of military equipment and troops, while actively supporting communist guerrillas in the South (but there were never more than ~5000 such guerillas). North Korea invaded the South on June 25, 1950 with ~200K troops and 75K PLA troops of Korean ethnicity, whereas the US had 2-300 troops in all of South Korea. The North attacked with 280 tanks furnished by the Soviet Union, whereas South Korea had no tanks, as the US refused to provide them with any prior to 1950. The North had 110 attack bombers, and 150 Yak fighter planes provided by the USSR. The US did not give any aircraft to the South, and there were only 22 aircraft in the South. The US had basically a token military presence in South Korea as it was not interested in either invading the North or building military bases in the South. You can read more at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Prelude_to_war_(195...
To call this a "US invasion" is absurd. Moreover, somehow trying to make this about the boogeyman of "fighting fascism" or even "civil unions" is bizarre -- what is the state of civil unions in North Korea or China? What is the state of freedom of expression? Or freedom of religion? If you are going to be using words like "fascist", then they are much better applied to North Korea or China than to South Korea or Taiwan.
Please don't spread this type of disinfo on public forums.
A US invasion to prop up the Rhee government that massacred leftists is the only reason there isn't a unified Korea under North Korean rule. You can argue that's a good thing, but trying to claim the US did not invade is absurd.
And on the fascist bogeyman parts, any improvement in those areas happened in South Korea and Taiwan rather recently, in the past thirty years or so.
* forced collectivization of agriculture
* attacks on schools, press, and bringing all instutions under the control of the party functionaries
* execution of monks, priests and missionaries and destruction of all religious organizations
* seizure of all private property.
Enforcing something like that requires a very bloody attack on the entire civil society:
"Concentration camps came into being in North Korea in the wake of the country's liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II. Those persons considered "adversary class forces", such as landholders, Japanese collaborators, religious devotees and the families of people who migrated to the South, were rounded up and detained in large facilities. Additional camps were later established in the late 1950s and 60s in order to incarcerate the political victims of power struggles along with their families as well as overseas Koreans who migrated to the North. Later, the number of camps saw a marked increase with the cementing of the Kim Il Sung dictatorship and the Kim Jong-il succession."
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_inte...
You can argue that Stalinist dictorships destroying civil society are a good thing, but trying to claim that the US "invaded" South Korea with 300 troops is absurd.
> any improvement in those areas happened in South Korea and Taiwan rather recently, in the past thirty years or so.
There was no period of time in which North Korea was more free or respectful of human nature than the South, as evidenced by people continuing to flee to the South from the North, which is why the North had to build walls to keep people in.
It is because the government of the South did not launch a wholescale attack on human nature and provided more freedom than the North that it could evolve in directions that promoted greater individual liberty over time, whereas the North remained mired with famines, collectivization insanity, and repression.
>who was himself dissapeared by Kim Il Sung in 1949.
1957, supposedly for being part of a China and Soviet backed coup attempt.
>but trying to claim that the US "invaded" South Korea with 300 troops is absurd.
I'm not making that claim, the US had over 400,000 troops invade North Korea. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#UN_forces_invade_No...
I recommend learning about the history of North Korea. Those concentration camps existed before the war. Do you really think the forced collectivization policies and murder of "class enemies", monks, priests, landlords, university professors, members of the press, etc., that killed 30 million in Russia and 55 million in China were miraculously bloodless in North Korea? It was the same set of Stalinist policies in all these places, with similar networks of gulags, summary executions, etc.
> 1957, supposedly for being part of a China and Soviet backed coup attempt.
He was dissapeared in 1949. No one knows what happened to him, but there are some rumors that he was killed in 57.
Third from the left in 1955. He was Chairman of the Supreme Assembly until 57.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Tu-bong#/media/File:%E5%BA...
Beyond that, "I recommend learning about the history, then you can guess that terrible things were happening" isn't really changing anything I said, which is primarily about how the US backed it's own military dictatorship in South Korea.
I stand corrected - he was dissapeared in the 60s.
> I said, which is primarily about how the US backed it's own military dictatorship in South Korea.
The US "backed" an illiberal government with 300 soldiers.
Meanwhile North Korea set up concentration camps, exterminated monks, executed "class enemies", those with property, priests, and nuns, and engaged in forced collectivization of land as part of widespread destruction of civil society -- all prior to the North's invasion of South Korea.
Somehow you are trying to create a moral equivalence between a Stalinist dictatorship in North Korea with many concentrate camps in it, and South Korea - which although it is illiberal by modern standards, was by far more free and humane than anything on the Korean peninsula in the history of that land. Then you are arguing that the US "supported" the South because of these 300 American soldiers. Meanwhile the North had over 100,000 PLA and Soviet troops and hundreds and tanks and fighter aircraft. From this, you conclude that the North did not invade the South, as historians say, but that the US actually invaded Korea.
Look, I know which Chomsky pamphlet you are getting this stuff from and it is an Orwellian reading of history. The 300 US soldiers is not an "invasion" of Korea by the US, and there is no comparison between the North and the South in the arena of human rights or freedom.
He was removed from his position in 1957, and completely purged in 58. Not 49, not the 60's.
>Then you are arguing that the US "supported" the South because of these 300 American soldiers.
Again, this is not my argument. The US invaded North Korea with over 400,000 troops. I linked you the details of this invasion, it's common knowledge that it happened.
I'm not trying to create a moral equivalence, you accused someone of spreading disinfo for a factual version of events.
I've said that North Korea had a horrible human rights record, and that I wouldn't be surprised if their were prewar massacres. That doesn't change that the US invaded to prop up the military dictatorship headed by Rhee. Maybe his dictatorship was better than the North's would have been, I won't speculate. Either way, the US is the reason Korea wasn't unified under the North.
I have no idea what Chomsky pamphlet you think I'm getting this from, you're making up most of what you think my argument is. Let's keep it simple, Rhee was a military dictatorship, the US invaded North Korea to ensure he stayed in power.
The war was started by North Korea, but the US definitely invaded North Korea in the war and preceded to burn down every town in the entire country.
The nicest thing I can say about Taiwan an White Terror is that it gave us this horror game called Detention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_(video_game)
Now it's even made it into a movie https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/detention-movie-review-20...
None of those people had strong local ties, either personal ones with the non-Mainlander population or political ones with homegrown political movements. Taiwan, for them, was at best a consolation prize, not a home.
From the US perspective, why would they go out of their way to call Taiwan its own country when neither government, on either side of the Strait, was interested in that?
:) I feel like this the same sort of thinking as tech debt. Names? Who cares! Everyone knows what the situation is on the ground.
In my view, norms have to be actively upheld, even especially if you are on "Team 'rule of law'". If the thing is a state, call it a state dammit! I like this argument because it doesn't rely on "well, you gotta foresee China becoming strong and stuff". No, you don't, just have a principle that de jure and de facto should deviate as little as possible.
I stand by my original analysis that doesn't matter what the KMT thinks, because RoC effectively a client state of the US at the time, with no TSMC to get more leverage, and also that the PRC should be happy enough to get its UN seat. If we wanted to, we could have made this happen, but we are sloppy and we didn't try.
What norm or law makes Taiwan a state other than that it claims itself to be? If you're team "rule of law" I think you have to insist that the KMT still run China.
US did attempt to block it by claiming that it is an "important question" under Article 18 of the UN Charter - specifically, that it counted as expulsion of a member. This was rejected on the basis that no member was actually expelled: China was a member before the vote, and it remained a member after the vote, the only difference being which government's delegation represented it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
That’s not how the CCP sees it. They have threatened hotel chains and airlines that referred to Taiwan as a country.
Yes they can. A private organization could just treat it like a state, in the same way that it treats any other state.
The consequences of that depend on what the organization does.
You apparently do not recognize that a private organization can recognize a state; I do.
What powerful entitites such as states recognize and not recognize is already quite meaningless; it is certainly meaningless what you and I do or do not recognize.
“Recognition” very often is unimpactful jabber of semantics. — Many of the states hat do not recognize Taiwan have business relations with it outside of the P.R.C. regardless.