It is immaterial what Taiwan was born as. It is a self-governing, free country, and the only thing that matters should be the wishes of the people who live there. And that overwhelmingly is to not be a part of communist China.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/26/1139270577/taiwan-election-pr...
edit: What the US is doing with Taiwan is not being done based on consultation with the Taiwanese people. It is not for the Taiwanese.
Polls indicate that the Taiwanese overwhelmingly want to either "maintain the status quo" or "maintain the status quo with incremental movement toward independence" (https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963), which is entirely what the US policy is intended to support! Like the Taiwanese people, we also don't want an apocalyptic conflict with China when the status quo is already de facto independence, regardless of what we call it to appease nationalist factions in Chinese domestic politics.
It's almost as if this is NPR's editorial opinion, rather than a fact about Taiwan. I intentionally linked a hostile article.
"If Not Cross-strait Issues, What Are The 2022 Elections About?"
> CROSS-STRAIT RELATIONS are not the dominant frame of this election cycle. Namely, nine-in-one elections, which serve as midterms between presidential elections, are primarily about local issues rather than cross-strait issues. Cross-strait relations are for Taiwanese, after all, largely a matter of foreign policy.
> As such, it would not surprise if the KMT performed well in this set of elections. The KMT has always had a stronger grip over local politics, seeing as its local clientelist and patronage networks date back to the authoritarian period. As the party that rose out of Taiwan’s democracy movement in past decades–and which may have had two presidents but never controlled the Taiwanese legislature until the first term of the Tsai administration–the DPP is still unable to break the stranglehold of the KMT over local politics.
> However, the key domestic election issues that voters will be voting on return to Taiwan’s economic outlook and its demographic challenges. Taiwan’s economy has seen growth, particularly with regards to exports, due to the minimized effects of COVID-19 after going for more than a year without any lockdowns as the rest of the world saw, and outbreaks that were contained with relative speed when COVID-19 did finally enter Taiwan. But such growth has not trickled down to the population writ large. As such, the issue of stagnant wages is a major issue up for contention.
https://newbloommag.net/2022/11/24/cross-domestic-issues-202...
That doesn't stop me (or anyone else) from believing that the Taiwanese should be entitled to self-determination. Or the Hawaiians, Indigenous peoples, or Puerto Ricans for that matter. If support for that aim happens to come from the US then that's fine by me. Moral consistency from a national government is not something I require or expect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_re...
Should they be asked again? Maybe. But it’s impossible to do fairly at the present time.
I'm part of The West :)
Probably a coincidence.