What about what they did in Hong Kong? They changed the rules once, what stops them from doing it again? History clearly means nothing.
For example, the US clearly agreed on the One China Policy but they are now changing it. Because the US no longer values the original purpose that the One China Policy served.
So the question "will China renegade on its agreement or not?" is best answered with another question: "What is China's core interest? What purpose does an agreement serve to China?"
It is unfortunately here where big misreadings happen. Popular western understand of China says that China does things because they are "authoritarian", "expansionist", "power hungry", etc. But a true analysis of China's interest would show that one of China's core interests is territorial integrity, defined largely by the territory it had inherited from the Qing empire in 1911, and the Republic of China in 1949. China's policy on territorial integrity has not changed since 1949.
We may not always agree with China's interests. Maybe they conflict with ours. But properly understanding those interests will at the end of the day surely yield better outcomes than misreading China with stereotypes.
Yes, but merely looking at the agreement that China broke recently with the invasion of Hong Kong, a reasonable person would assume that there's a much higher risk of them breaking more agreements than another arbitrary country that hasn't been invading other countries recently. Said another way, most people currently will trust France to honor a pact more than they trust Russia.
...not that that somehow makes violating the agreement with and invading Hong Kong somehow morally excusable.
China seems pretty similar to Russia right now - with an authoritarian dictator planning to use military force to invade nearby countries.
You can even draw parallels between their mindsets - Putin wants to recreate the glory of the Soviet Union and views the old USSR countries as "his", just as Xi Jinping wants to recreate the glory of old China and views Hong Kong and Taiwan as his.
> So the question "will China renegade on its agreement or not?" is best answered with another question: "What is China's core interest? What purpose does an agreement serve to China?"
I don't see what purpose this statement has. It's clearly in China's core interest to be aggressive and expansionist and invade nearby countries and steal IP from other countries, but none of that is right, and none of that changes the fact that they're an aggressive enemy who pose a threat to the whole Asia region at least, if not the whole world.
And talking about inheriting territory, let's not forget that the Republic of China still very much exists.
the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position.
If by that you mean the US agreed that Taiwan should be a part of the PRC, that's never been true. It was just a condition of establishing relations with China that the US officially pretend that Taiwan isn't an independent nation. But everyone understood that the actual belief and policy of the US was that Taiwan has a right to independence. There hasn't been any change there.
So the US didn't officially support "Taiwan independence". After the US flipped to PRC, they opposed the PRC taking over Taiwan, but the "Taiwan independence" notion didn't exist in Taiwan at the time. The govt in Taiwan wanted to retake the mainland. The independence notion only came into existance relatively recently.
ie. The original generation that considered themselves Chinese has mostly died off, and now the younger generation who consider themselves Taiwanese are slowly taking over.
In reality, the US doesn't believe that they're the same country: the status quo is that they aren't. The fact that the US can't say as much out loud, to avoid insulting the government of the PRC, doesn't make that any less true.
I guess what I'm saying is, nobody should pretend that the the official pronouncements of the US are its actual beliefs or policy around Taiwan. Everybody knows the US supports Taiwan staying independent, and just has to dance around that in public statements. Anything it says to the contrary is a polite fiction without real world effect.
I guess this shows how unfundamented is the current chinese territorial claim. Xinjiang was for most centuries an independent region or part of a different (usualy turkish) empire. Something similar happened with Tibet. It might make sense to include what's currently Mongolia into the chinese claim.
Regarding Xinjiang, the Xinjiang claim is older than the US's claim on its own land so it cannot be more unfundamented than the US as a nation is.
Today the Chinese govt, aka Xi and the CCP seem to be working to become the most powerful country through trying to weaken democratic governments, along with this comes increasing threatening military actions. The world is in a dangerous 10 year period as China's power increases to a maximum, dictator Xi is in charge, and pressure will increase on them as their population starts to shrink along with an increasing retired population compared to the number of workers.
This is all separate from my belief that China should be able to be free to make their own choices about their own country, they just can invade and destroy everyone else to get their own way. I feel great sadness for the Chinese people being subject to a horrible central government (yeah, they've also moved millions of people out of poverty and improved their lives, but they still ended up with a country that like the USSR now won't let people leave freely, holds foreign citizens hostile, and also records college lectures so they can see if profs talk about impure thoughts).
This is false. All of today's claims existed back in 1949 when the PRC inherited claims from the ROC. In fact the PRC today claims fewer territories than 1949 because they've given up some territory as part of diplomatic deals.
While the EU, US, India, Australia are all trying to change this semi conductor status quo by building their own manufacturing facilities, it is not easy as I understand it. Am guessing it would take at least 5-10 years to have full fledged production facility in the scale the world demands if this needs to be changed. That is if really wanna be Taiwan free with semi conductors. Which I doubt the world will do. But hey with M1 and RISC-V, there is a whole new future waiting for the semi conductor industry. So who knows what will happen?!
Yeah. But with the current geopolitical environment every country is thinking about this. But like I said, ONLY IF they have the motive. Which I also mentioned that the world won't have so as to completely take Taiwan out of the equation.
> RISC-V is still years from matching ARM performance or cost, and by the time it does, a lot of it will likely be getting manufactured by TSMC.
You are probably right. Also RISC-V is used as a support module with Nvidia cards already if I am not wrong. They just are not used as standalone processors. And with M1, I meant ARM in general. But RISC-V is very promising. Like I said, who knows about the future?!
> TSMC is really good at making chips, and really good at learning how to make new kinds of chips, so any change will have to come from other fabs getting equally good.
I don't think me or any country for that matter disapproves that. But with China as it's neighbor, it's just stupid for the world to think everything will be sunshines and butterflies. It's always a good idea to deter from putting everything in one basket.
Many people in Hong Kong grasp onto useless documents like the Sino-British Declaration because their actual constitution (the basic law) gave them no assurance to match promises. That constitution always gave the PRC ability to control any and everything there to suppress anything. The appointments always came from Beijing, and it inherits a system similar to City of London where 100% of the people’s vote and representatives can only be 50% of the legislative outcome. Its hopeless - for those deathly afraid of PRC life - and always has been, and China can wait out that “50 year thing” ever so nominally, in a way that doesnt match anything remotely close to what is often repeated in the west about what “should” happen. To me, having read the basic law and prc constitution, China didnt break its agreement, and anyone grasping at the Sino British Declaration is being disingenuous, ignorant, or really that desperate. Only thing to point at is Britain for giving up on negotiations, because they failed the people of Hong Kong back in the 90s and let the basic law be good enough.
But again, look at Macau and why that area isn’t an issue in the minds of the west, its not the smaller population.
Despite rule of law being kind of a burgeoning concept in the PRC (unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to the stuff they were already going to do), China is pretty predictable and operates within some easy to understand confines.
The unrest over the potential use of an extradition bill prompted China to clamp down on nearly everything Hong Kong residents held near and dear and show how powerless the people there are in this reality.
It is also convenient to accelerate the "harmonization" of Hong Kong into the PRC system because many (depending on how you count) places in China are well to do now. They don't need Hong Kong's different system to be a bastion of economic progress, because its like 3% of the GDP now, compared to like 20% during handover.