Is Hokkaido defensible? Once China solves the Taiwan problem they're going to turn their sights on Korea and Japan.
In my lifetime I've only seen one major county besides Russia having a habbit of starting illegal wars whenever geopolitics doesn't go its way and it's not China.
There's a reason why so many countries in that region are very happy to partner with the US for military drills or support.
Then if it's decided it's illegal, who enforces that decision?
*reasons given for China being an actual threat*
"Ah, but who's to say anything's illegal really, am I right??"
I never said they weren't a threat, I said they haven't done anything illegal. But with the reasons you gave, then the US is an even bigger threat to my country.
> "Ah, but who's to say anything's illegal really, am I right??"
You still haven't answered my question and are beating it around the bush with silly jokes.
And you know the answer, you just don't like to say it because it's not politically correct. Here, I'll remove your burden and say the uncomfortable truth for you: In war, whatever you can get away with, is legal. Similar to all the warmongering and meddling the US has done in the Middle East, Asia and LATNM. If nobody can hold you accountable and punish you for it, then it's legal. Same with China's actions. When you're too big and too powerful to be held accountable for your actions, nothing that you do can be illegal because legality is an artificial man made construct where the strong enforce their will on the weak, not an irrefutable fact of nature. This has been the US's MO and soon China's.
You might not like that it's like this, but IT IS like this. And you're not doing yourself nor anyone any favors by pretending it isn't like this.
> If nobody can hold you accountable and punish you for it, then it's legal.
Just because someone isn't punished for an act doesn't make the act legal. I think a more accurate description of the behaviour of certain countries is "if you can get away with it, who cares if it's legal."
"Nothing's illegal in war, bro!"
I sincerely hope China doesn't go that was as it is to me, despite all its flaws, a super impressive country, but I think it careless to ignore warmongering talk.
What do you want to do about it? Start a world war with them just in case to provent them from doing it (further)? Bombing them in the name of peace?
Otto von Bismarck
So, again, any example of China suddenly started to claim lands?
In contrast to Taiwan, where the governments in both Beijing and Taipei officially maintain that those places are part of the same country, and the international community sometimes pretends the same and only recognises one government, but de facto everyone trades with both countries and deals with both governments.
Not an issue I follow, but I did read something that said China had proposed swapping claimed territory for zones of actual control, and India turned them down.
Interestingly enough, there's a recent theory putting the location of the proto-Germanic speakers in Finland.
There is no credible theory to that effect. Either you have stumbled on something that is not taken seriously, or you are misunderstanding the consensus. Namely, Proto-Germanic speakers did visit the eastern Baltic coast for trading and raiding, and so there are Germanic loanwords into Finnic languages of Proto-Germanic date, but the agreed location where Proto-Germanic formed is in Scandinavia, not Finland.
I'm not sure you have a good grasp on the meaning of the word "recent". A recent theory, by definition, must differ from the consensus.
> There is no credible theory to that effect.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.13.584607v2
Granted, they don't say "Finland". They say "the northeast along the Baltic coastline".
There’s no new theory here at all, just some nice archaeogenetic evidence to support a quite traditional view. FWIW, I work in a closely related field and am constantly reading Germanic–Finnic and Baltic–Finnic contact literature, and I can assure you this is old-hat stuff.
You've quoted something that says after proto-Germanic had diversified, daughter lineages left southern Scandinavia to establish themselves elsewhere in the world.
But I pointed out a completely different idea in the paper, that before proto-Germanic diversified, about 2000 years before the time you mention, its speakers arrived in Scandinavia from "the northeast coast of the Baltic".
Moreover, you posted about a “new theory”, but the paper here only gives new evidence for an old theory.
Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s Prime Minister), on the day that China launched an unprovoked surprise war against India in 1962. It was a crushing victory for China, and they grabbed all their territory they wanted. More can always be said but here’s a 2 minute video that explains the war - https://youtu.be/zCePMVvl1ek
You know how Mao said diplomacy flows from the barrel of a gun? That wasn’t a metaphor. That is PRC policy since 1949.
There is not going to a be a war in the modern context.
Secondly, only one war has happened between China and India, in which arguably we Indians kind of started it- Read here- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_policy_(Sino-Indian_co...
""" The forward policy had Nehru identify a set of strategies designed with the ultimate goal of effectively forcing the Chinese from territory that the Indian government claimed. The doctrine was based on a theory that China would not likely launch an all-out war if India began to occupy territory that China considered to be its own. India's thinking was partly based on the fact that China had many external problems in early 1962, especially with one of the Taiwan Strait Crises. Also, Chinese leaders had insisted they did not wish a war.[18]
"""
Both countries, have now have growing economies with stable politics, and social direction. Things can only get better from here, and will.
Whatever issues exist, we resolve by talking. Often, a few give and take moves are needed, which are mostly ok. Because way bigger good things await these both nations. And we want them.
Either way there is no theatre. The Himalayas make a large wall and ensure no big border conflict can even happen. Even through missiles. The remainder is irrelevant, and both parties are more than happy to just keep talking until some agreement is in place, which even without isn't much of an issue with regards to economy, resources or anything.
Much ado about nothing!
Americans love sending other people into meat grinders for bankers' profit.
By the way China doe not want to share the power with anyone in Asia
I suspect they only care about Tibet in as much as it’s crucial for freshwater supply across significant parts of Asia, which is precisely why there are border clashes with Indian forces.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3333468/ch...
The territory we now call "China" is the product of relentless expansion and assimilation. Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia,d , Manchuria, much of the southwest... none were historically Han or Mandarin-speaking. Beijing's own justification is usually "they were Chinese all along" (because "genetics" -- or because they once paid tribute). That's the same logic every empire has ever used.
Modern Han Chinese themsleves carry heavy Mongol (Yuan) and other steppe ancestry, descendants of the single most successful conquest dynasty in human history.
For centuries the Chinese court literally styled itself the center of the world and demanded tribute from "barbarians" on every side. Zheng He's fleets in the 15th century were larger and reached farther than anything Europe fielded for another 80 years. China stopped because the court lost interest, not because it lacked capability or ambition.
Today's Nine-Dash Line, wolf-warrior diplomacy, and the "century of humiliation" narrative are all framed as restoring China's "rightful place." Xi's favorite phrase is "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," and the classical concept behind it is tianxia: "all under heaven" belongs, ultimately, under one orderly hierarchy (guess whose "manifest destiny" it is to sit at the top??).
So when people say "China doesn't invade," what they usually mean is "China prefers to win without fighting," which is straight out of Sun Tzu and exactly the current playbook. Pretending otherwise is how you lose the game before it even starts.
Now do the same for the USA, UK, Japan, Italy, Turkey, etc.
How about a fake alien reveal?
These do not have a non-hostile invasion purpose. China could have used these peacefully as some sort of "Look at how peaceful we are" PR in getting aid into Palestine, like the US's floating piers, and likely had better results, but they didn't, because these are war machines for invading Taiwan.
Almost all other military buildup China has done can be validly called protecting itself from a US blockade and maintain an ability to protect shipping, but these barges cannot be considered anything else.
>What's with all this scaremongering around China gonna invade everything anytime soon?
China has publicly declared their intentions to take back Taiwan, and publicly declared their intent to be militarily competitive with the United States, and publicly bitches and moans whenever anyone treats Taiwan as the independent country it is.
Stop squeezing your eyes shut.
We need to win the AI race! The implication being that there can not be more than one winner…
For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia
In 1962 China launched a surprise war against India completely unprovoked over some border territory. China’s aggression continues unabated even into present day - they’ve been illegally annexing territory in Bhutan to put pressure on India. That has been China’s way of negotiating all their borders - through violence first. More can always be said but here’s a simple 2 minute video explaining the 1962 war - https://youtu.be/zCePMVvl1ek.
Here you are defending China when I bet you’d be hard pressed to point to Bhutan or Aksai Chin or the Chicken’s Neck on a map. But those are lesser known places. Are you seriously claiming you don’t know of the Nine Dash line and the violence with which China enforces its absurd maritime claims?
Is that not a threat?
The Chinese threat is also being handled by rapid rearmament. JSDF has been like, dual-fast-tracking lots of things including MRBMs for operational capabilities in 2026-27 timeframes.
- Chinese Consul-General in Osaka, Xue Jian, in reference to Japan
China will not annex Japan or South Korea. As a Chinese person, I can assure you that this is not how our mindset works at all. Most of the Western media hype about this is deliberately designed to muddy the waters around the Taiwan issue. Taiwan is different: the vast majority of people there are ethnically Chinese, so reunification is seen as an absolute necessity. But historically, China has never been good at ruling non-Han peoples. Every non-Chinese group has always been viewed as a net burden. Take Myanmar as an example: even if China occupied it and gained a warm-water port, the price would be having to assimilate tens of millions of Burmese people. That cost is simply too high; no one in China wants to pay it. The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.” So with South Korea and Japan, the real goal is to surpass them industrially and economically, to leave them in the dust on the factory floor and in the lab. When it comes to Japan in particular, the deepest desire in many Chinese hearts is for Japan to start a war first—so China can finally settle the historical score once and for all. But even in that scenario, turning Japan into “part of China” is not on the table. No one wants 125 million thoroughly non-Sinicized Japanese inside the country; that would be seen as an endless headache, not a prize.
Your illegitimate authoritarian government is free to surrender at any time and hand the keys back to the legitimate democratic ROC government then.
(Thank you for acknowledging that this is a civil war — that's something you rarely see on Western forums.)
It's a civil war like the American revolution was a civil war and France helped out.
No one in America with a high school education believes that Taiwan is an unrelated country that China randomly decided to pick on after throwing a dart at a map. Chinese history from antiquity to modern European/Japanese colonialism and war crimes to the unresolved civil war and KMT's retreat from the mainland are standard course material; the history and politics around reunification aren't some big mystery.
Don't get me wrong. The history is interesting, but from an American perspective interesting history doesn't translate into justification for violent incursion on an established nation's sovereignty. We largely don't even support our own past unprovoked invasions, much less invasions by rivals against stable and prosperous liberal democracies that we have long-standing friendly relationships with. The American lesson from our history isn't "we screwed up in Iraq and Vietnam, so other countries should get a pass to behave similarly"; it's "let's work to prevent such tragedies from repeating".
Of course you don't support invasions of your puppet nation that only exists because of your intervention. But let's flip this around. Suppose that there was a second American civil war, one side lost and retreated to California. PRC funds the losers, stations troops there, signs a treaty guaranteeing to defend their independence. Do you think the US would ever, in a million years, accept that? Even after 75 years, it's obvious the US is going to state that California still belongs to it, and would try to reclaim it whenever possible.
If you looked at this objectively, rather than from your perspective as the defender of the puppet state, it would be clear that PRC's claim is justified. All the more so because not only was the territory rightfully theirs, but now they have a hostile power from halfway across the world threatening to use it as a staging point against them.
Your American lesson, also, does not disbar any country from having any claim to any land. America is by far the most egregious actor in the world stage because it routinely does, in fact, invade lands that are halfway across the world. It can be true that invading a country on the other side of the planet is wrong, and that seeking to re-unify your partitioned country is not so wrong.
That said, I don't particularly expect it to ever come to war, anyways. I think it's much more realistic that PRC will exercise political influence and economic pressure to achieve re-unification rather than invasion.
We're 79 years removed from Philippine independence, and you would have to try very hard to find a single American who wants them back. The US military would have been fully capable of annexing Iraq and Afghanistan with violent repression of dissent and zero concern for civilian casualties, had that been the will of the people. After 75 years of peaceful coexistence with a hypothetical independent California, I would be very surprised to see any political will for annexation.
The "same international norms as the rest of the world" you refer to are anachronistic. The post-WWII norms, to a large extent defined and upheld by the US, aren't based around maximal balkanization or unconditional support for separatism, but rather opposition to transfer of territory by force. If that sounds like ladder-pulling, maybe it is, but China has no standing to complain; Western conquests have been largely disbanded, while China remains as the third-largest nation in the world (ahead of the US).
I'm not claiming that the US has never done anything wrong. I asserted the opposite of that. I'm arguing that pointing out someone else's crime isn't a justification for someone to go commit a crime of their own. If you shoot someone from a rival gang, your lawyer isn't going to argue in court that it's okay because someone else from that gang shot someone else a decade ago. There's actually a word for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism.
But if we both agree that wars of aggression are bad regardless of whether they're started by the US, China, Russia, or anyone else, then we're basically on the same page.
Moreover, the US specifically simply adopted a different model: puppet governance. As did the USSR. You would hardly find an American who would say that the USSR was benevolent, despite the fact that they believe themselves to be benevolent while doing the same things. Invading a country to install a regime loyal to yours is not meaningfully different from annexing the country outright. But it allows the populace at home to believe that they are doing the right thing. Why, their form of governance is the best governance in the world, so they're doing other nations a favor by invading them and replacing their governments!
Americans will make all kinds of fuss over China doing meaningless posturing in territorial waters, meanwhile their government is currently launching missiles in Venezulean waters, actually killing people. They violated the sovereignity of Iranian airspace, dropping bunker busters on government buildings. They assassinated another nation's top general. These are all acts of war. Nothing has changed. America continues to operate as it always has, under the principle of "might makes right", while dressing its operations up in pretty rhetoric.
Pointing out hypocrisy in ongoing international norms is not whataboutism. In a world where nobody is ever punished for shooting a rival gang member, then you either shoot or get shot; that is simply the natural way of things. And moreover, the prosecutor bringing charges against the Red Gang is a member of the Blue Gang that shot theirs first. Why would the Red Gang entertain, for a moment, the charges of aggression from the Blue Gang which did already intervene in its civil war and effectively seized territory from it? For the Blue Gang to possibly be convincing to the Red Gang, it would first need to make amends and to stop actively committing 10x worse crimes than the crime it accuses the Red Gang of. If we want a peaceful world, I'd argue the onus is on the US to live up to its self-proclaimed "rules based international order" first, because it is the one violating those rules the most, and other nations will not simply lie down and agree to be bound by rules that are openly being violated to their detriment.
I'm in agreement that wars of aggression are bad, but I strongly dislike the tendency for that to be selectively leveraged to paint only certain actors in a bad light. I think from a non-American perspective, it's pretty clear that the US is a much more egregious international actor than China. But if you agree with that, you're in a true minority of Americans. Even if there are a substantial portion of Americans who disagree with their own invasions, most of them will still see China as much worse than themselves, despite the fact that the PRC's last and only real invasion was the reclamation of Tibet 70 years ago, and otherwise it has only started a couple of minor border skirmishes for the entirety of its existence. Meanwhile Americans engage in Yellow Scare-esque fearmongering about China invading Japan which, as a neutral third party, seems so far outside the realm of possibility as to be utterly delusional.
I wouldn't unconditionally agree that "the US is a much more egregious international actor than China". I'd use a more neutral descriptor than "egregious", maybe "militaristic". Following the rule of "might makes right", as you point out, the US more or less became the self-appointed world police after WWII. That's inherently going to involve unpopular decisions and occasional abuse of power, but it's a fundamentally different relationship with the world than pure assertion of first-party interests. The ultimate goal of post-WWII American foreign policy has been to ensure that the rest of the world remains stable and open enough for reliable trade, from which China has also benefited tremendously.
US as world police is a mixed bag, but it is what it is. No one outside the US is really complaining that America bears the cost of its navy protecting international trade routes, for example. I'm as harsh a critic of certain US actions and policies as anyone, but modern American hegemony doesn't resemble the prior centuries of great powers running amok. The US today doesn't invade innocent countries for the purpose of stealing their land and resources or enslaving their people.
The concerns about China aren't limited to its past military actions, but also its domestic policies and stated future goals. For better or worse, China's domestic policies are quite illiberal relative to American values. This alone precludes China from being considered a clear ally of the US, and informs perceptions of what a hypothetical Chinese-led world order might look like. China gets to play the "what about America" card because the US is still generally invested in globalism, but how China might behave in a power vacuum created by a US shift to isolationism remains speculative.
I'm not saying it could never happen, but the party in power would be burning a ridiculous amount of political capital, to put it mildly. A big part of the reason President Trump even exists is the perception that Bush lied to get us into Iraq and Obama kept us there. Trump consistently ran as the "anti-war" candidate, and Biden was also known for his dovish politics.
- Trump has been building up our military presence in the area over the last few months[1]
-He's already striking boats that he claims have weapons of mass destruct... I mean drugs in them
- Trump said “I don’t think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them,” [1]
- He declared the cartels terrorist groups [2]
I believe he's going to link Marudo to the cartels and use it to justify a war to force him out of power.
Republicans, will support him. He'll lie, like he always does, and they'll believe it either due to stupidity or tribalism. The further they follow him the more painful admitting they are wrong will be.
[1]https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-won-t-congress-ove...
[2]https://www.state.gov/designation-of-international-cartels
Are you referring to 2014s invasion because of ISIS?
If that sounds lacking in nuance, well, I never claimed to believe American political discourse was particularly nuanced ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Shouldn't discussions be as nuanced as possible if change is expected?
Ideally they would be, but I haven't observed that they generally are and wouldn't make such a claim.
There are a number of frozen conflicts around the world, like North/South Korea and Cyprus. Both of those could be regarded as "civil war with external support", like Vietnam. What would be better is if those involved could recognize the situation as it actually is on the ground, and withdraw their claims and intents of actually resuming armed conflict.
Europe knows all about reigniting pointless conflicts over ancient grudges, from the Hundred Years War to the Balkans. The post-WW2 world order was an attempt to finally draw a hard line underneath that.
most of the conflicts today is created by Europe(+US). for example, the china-taiwan issue didn't resovled before is because USA Intervene. The tragedy of the Rwandan genocide originated from the artificial division of the same ethnic group during the colonial period; the India-Pakistan conflict was a deliberately left-over dispute by the colonial powers upon their withdrawal(UK); the border issues between Cambodia and Thailand(France), as well as the ongoing turmoil in the Palestinian region(UK USA), are all closely linked to historical interference by external forces(Europe).
No, it's quite common.
China was happy to invade Tibet and assimilate it's population.
Hard to believe that a government who claims all of South China sea, large parts of India (Arunachal Pradesh) does not want to expand.
Or do you think people of Arunachal Pradesh are also Chinese?
I am willing to bet all of the money I will ever make in my lifetime that China will not invade either one as long as they remain under the US nuclear umbrella.
When Tibet then broke away from China the Brits got what is now Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet.
Hence the ongoing Chinese claim but the days of any military actions are long gone.
Historical claims are meaningless and are just an excuse for expansion.
Chinese territorial claims in general are not "an excuse for expansion", they are rooted in territorial losses at the end of the 19th century and during the revolution of 1912 with the formal aim of recovering them. They also predate the PRC as you'll find that the ROC/Taiwan has the same claims for the same reason. This does not mean that China is going to go to war over them, certainly it won't go to war with India.
No need for drama or hysteria over those claims.
Then why make a claim? Claims are made to prepare the domestic audience so that when war comes there is home support for the action. It is not made lightly.
The Chinese are definitely taking action in the South China Sea. It is not just words.
That's your opinion, not reality.
Conflating the PRC vs ROC conflict with a China vs Japan conflict is just ignorant.
In the present day, neither the Taiwanese government nor Taiwanese people are in some kind of dispute with the CCP over who owns Gansu province or whatever, they just would like recognition of their already-existing sovereignty.
The point I was responding to was the misleading comment that the people of Taiwan are actually just engaged in some kind of internal dispute with the CCP, which is entirely a CCP framing of the issue. Few if any people in modern-day Taiwan believe that they are the true inheritors of the Chinese mainland. The pretense has to be upheld in order to preserve the status quo, but in practice there is no serious movement staking a claim to any part of China.
This is broadly true, not just "CCP framing". Obviously because of history and external influence there is also an "independentist" faction.
I don't see why this should be hard to accept unless the aim is indeed a "reframing" to push the independentist narrative, which does not really need it as the status quo mean de facto independence. So perhaps the aim is actually more along the lines of an anti-China narrative.
If you want to use history as some kind of justification, why don't we go all the way back to when the human race originated in Africa?
But sibling comment is correct that today the PRC and ROC are functionally two separate nations, and neither wants unification by submitting completely to the other. So the only way it's happening is with force.
- Chinese Consul-General in Osaka, Xue Jian, addressing Japan
"Good" is not a very objective term, but China does have 55 official minorities, coming from a long period of imperial expansion, so arguably it can be done.
> The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.”
Firstly, this is a troubling statement, again given that China has 55 official minorities, who are evidently failures of assimilation more than anything.
Secondly, there are other ways of imperial sovereignty: Vietnam was a Chinese dominion for a longest time, and Korea was effectively ruled from China as well.
In other words, China has a long and not very remote history of territorial expansion and old-school dependent-state imperialism. The fact that the Han have a very strong cultural identity and do not find it easy to coexist with other peoples doesn't help either: just look at the history of the relations between Britain and Ireland.
Don’t forget the history of Northern Wei, Yuan Dynasty, and Qing Dynasty – none of them were products of “Han Chinese imperialism.”
This is correct, since the Qing Dynasty was led by the Manchus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty), not by the Han Chinese.
And the general argument is not about whether there is something inherently imperialistc in the Han -- it is about whether the Han are so isolationist that this should somehow prevent China as a political entity from expanding. Well it has not prevented this before (cf. also the Tang period expansion, if we want to talk about more distant history), so I see no reason why it should prevent it now. Unless, say, the CCP cedes control to an openly Han-nationalist party, but then the last one was imperialist alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)).
Fears that China one day tries a Russian approach by saying "no way bro. We'd never try to take Georgia. Nah bro. We'd never try to take Crimea. Nah dude. We'd never try to take eastern Ukraine. Nope. We definitely aren't interested in taking Poland." aren't exactly baseless. And just like with Russia, they justify their prodding of a sovereign country as "well it's our territory" (it isn't). China already has fighter jets and ships going around the Senkaku Islands periodically. It's clear they'll take them and push further and further if they think they can get away with it.
Before being annexed by Japan one century and a half ago, the culture of Okinawa was much more strongly influenced by China than by Japan, which is why during the first few decades after being occupied by Japan there still were many in Okinawa who would have preferred to become a part of China instead of a part of Japan, but the new Japanese authorities have eventually succeeded to suppress any opposition.
I believe that there is no doubt that Okinawa should belong to Japan and not to China, but historically this was not so clear cut. If the Okinawans could have voted in the 19th century to whom they should belong, instead of being occupied by force, it is unknown which would have been their decision.
Therefore any comparisons with Botswana or Argentina are completely inappropriate for a kingdom that had strong ties with China for many centuries and which recognized the suzerainty of the Chinese emperor.
While for me as a foreigner, the similarities between the Ryukyuan languages and mainland Japanese are obvious and many features of shared cultural heritage with ancient Japan (Yamato) are also obvious, these were not at all obvious for the Japanese themselves, who, after occupying Okinawa tended to consider the Okinawans as foreign barbarians, so for a long time they were heavily discriminated in Japan.
This dual allegiance of Ryukyu, openly to China and secretly to Satsuma allowed Ryukyu to be an intermediary in some commerce between China and Japan, which officially was forbidden.
The official occupation of Ryukyu by Japan happened only in 1872, after the Meiji Restoration.
After 1609, there was no occupation of Ryukyu by Japanese. There was only a permanent threat of military intervention from Satsuma if the Ryukyuan king would have dared to act against the demands of Satsuma, which included a tribute and unfavorable commercial relationships.
And even if you goalpost shift to the Meiji Restoration, 1872 is still well before any period where Japan was required to give up any territory as a result of WW2 imperialism.
All Chinese media are emphasizing that these places do not belong to Japan, not that they belong to China. That’s the essential difference.
No, i'm the lates Kimi model
Then the Treaty of San Francisco (which didn't involve China signing or agreement or anything) said that the Allies would revert control of Okinawa to Japan, which was the Allies choice at that point given that they were in control as stipulated by the Potsdam agreement.
What's the gap between what was said and what happened? You could argue that the WW2 agreements were unfair and didn't follow historical ownership but I'm not sure which part of the agreements themselves was directly violated.
The way to do it, is to propose a UN coalition invasion. Or to quietly provide arms to the side you like more (which never backfires).
How does that make it a "necessity"? It's not for China to decide? This is the reasoning Russia uses when invading neighboring countries. To "protect" russian people and claim that <insert part of country> are russians anyway and want to get annexed (still wouldn't make it right). If someone wants to join Russia, they should move to Russia.
(Or maybe it could happen through some longer and slower political process. And the country as a whole should agree, with a lot more than 50% agreeing, to a unification.)
> The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.”
Like above, I hope you're not implying that a culturally similar people in another country #2 somehow gives country #1 power over it's sovereignity.
do your homework, taiwan also claims its china. maybe you mean its not for them to decide?
The difference is that Taiwan only exists because the losers of the Chinese Civil war ran away to it, and the winners (CCP) were not allowed by the US to finish the job. So for the CCP, Taiwan has always been a problem still left to resolve, an American thorn in their side. It was along the main reasons for them joining the Korean war, because the monumentally dumb McArthur publicly praised and supported Chiang (the leader of the losers of the civil war, the KMT), which led to CCP fears the US will use the Korean peninsula as a sprinboard to attack them and install Chiang back to power.
So while self-determination trumps those concerns for my personal view, I can totally see where China (CCP) is coming from. Especially with a very aggressive American stance against them, why would they want to keep a very friendly to the US runaway province out there?
For Americans, imagine the Confederates ran away to Puerto Rico, force assimilated the locals, and became very friendly with Russia. For the French, that a Bonaparte was ruling Corsica while being friendly with the big bad wolf (depending on the age, Brits or Russians maybe). And on and on.
My main gripe was mostly around the perceived reasoning that ethnicity or culture of some people would make it more okay to try to annex, or invade, anything.
> When it comes to Japan in particular, the deepest desire in many Chinese hearts is for Japan to start a war first—so China can finally settle the historical score once and for all. But even in that scenario, turning Japan into “part of China” is not on the table.
From GP. That is also a bit worrying to me. Who decides what's the fair "historical score"? But mostly, people shouldn't desire for war or use past wars as a reason for new wars. This is more complicated than ethnicity or culture, but it's dangerous and people should just learn to let go or it never stops.
False flag attacks are a thing and have been used many times as a pretext for an attack. Russia has done it. Russia also often uses history as an excuse for new wars. I'm sure it's always possible to dig out some rationalization. The result is mostly more suffering of innocent (who might not have even been born during the cited conflict).
Taiwan has become ethnically Chinese in 2 stages, first an immigration from the neighboring Chinese province that is a few centuries old, then the invasion of the island by Kuomintang at the end of WWII, which took the political power from the native Chinese.
So Taiwan has become a Chinese-populated territory only during the last few centuries, and the desire to unite it with mainland China is not something that can reassure China's neighbors that this is where its desire of expansion will stop.
May I ask if you actually live in one of these neighbouring countries? I do -- in fact I have lived in more than one -- and I can assure you that many/most people living in these areas outside of the Western media bubble absolutely do not share your view.
From the CCP's (and many Chinese people's) perspective:
1) the U.S. repeatedly interfered in the CCP's/KMT's attempts to resolve the civil war -- see e.g. the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises (during which the PRC shelled Taiwan), Project National Glory (the ROC's plan to reconquer the mainland) -- preventing the mainland and Taiwan from reunification;
2) the Taiwanese government has lost the civil war, and the loser doesn't get to set the terms.
Pretending that the PRC's interest in Taiwan isn't special is to ignore extremely crucial historical circumstances that are core to understanding the situation today. Regardless of what you think of the PRC's stance on reunification, their desire to reunify doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it takes ahistorical leaps of reasoning to suggest that the PRC might want to annex South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. next.
> only during the last few centuries
This is way more than enough time to drastically transform the culture of a society. Taiwan today is culturally much more similar to the PRC than it is to the West. In some aspects it is also similar to Japan, despite the fact that Japan colonised it for "only" 50 years.
The cultural distance between Taiwan and Japan, Korea and Hong Kong is less than the distance from mainland China. Aka Asian liberal democracies (or at least with strong political plurality and civil society). You're mistaking a regional difference with a commonality with the PRC, when in reality the PRC's epistemic worldview is highly distorted in comparison to virtually every other actor in the region. They don't speak for the region.
Taiwan has spent the approx 120 years on a very different political, economic, cultural track from the mainland. Taiwan diverged from the other subject of the Qing dynasty before Han nationalists began their century long project to forge a united Chinese nation. In particular, Taiwan did not go through decades of communist terror, but did experience the fruit of democracy.
I don't think what you claim the people want matters (if even true). Look at Tibet and Xinjiang
Claims to the contrary are largely historical revisionism. (As are the various claims that Tibet was culturally influenced by China - the story of Princess Wencheng bringing agricultural technologies to uncultured Tibet, as it is often taught in Chinese schools and portrayed in period dramas, is a myth that only came to popularity during the Chinese Civil War.)
Remember also that until 1951, Tibet occupied Chinese territories more often than vice versa - although given the case of Manchuria, China might actually see this as an argument in favor of Tibet being Chinese.
Historically, however, the record is rather unflattering for China in its engagements with Myanmar (formerly Burma) – China has waged four wars[0] with Myanmar and suffered a defeat to Myanmar in each instance.
[0] Or one war with four invasions – depending on the point of view.
From my Chinese friends (and Hong Kong friends) it seems to be clear that the "century of humiliation" rhetoric is getting more prominent. Which includes rationalization such as "Japan and West (and Russia) humiliated us so it's our right to revenge. Whatever they're complaining about right now is just historical rebalancing". My British friend in HK seems to be getting tired of this rhetoric thrown at her every time she meets a Chinese person.
And CCP might be drinking that nationalism koolaid and get hooked to it just as US/West and recently Japan is. It's a very useful tool for the elite to dissipate discontent and I'd belive it will only accelerate.
And it's a strong rationalization rhetoric. Whatever "historical" you claim will probably be moot. Give us a decade or two and you'd probably be here posting something along the line, with multiple citations that have accumulated during the time
Takaichi is a slightly right of centre nationalist. Pushing a mild tightening of some immigration rules to maintain the social contract around immigration, and fend off the right wing populists. Her policies amount to things like tightening foreign land ownership rules and refusing visa renewals for people not paying their health insurance or pension (which is mandatory by law for all residents).
She’s had friendly relations with SK so far and recently met with the SK President and bowed in respect to the Korean flag.
Her “provocation” of China was to state, when asked in parliament, that an armed invasion of Taiwan by China would be a case of a potential existential threat to Japan.
Which frankly is utterly obvious to anyone, including of course China. Japan hosts American military bases. If China attacked Taiwan, triggering an American repose then there would at the least be Chinese missiles aiming for Tokyo (Yokosuka) and Okinawa.
What, does the Pearl River freeze over in winter?
Noone is letting China "solve the taiwan problem" like you said.
Such inflammatory language.
If the world reacts to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan the way we have reacted to Russia invading Ukraine, China will consider that a great victory, and might be able to take Taiwan.
If the US, Japan, and Korea do not commit fully to naval interdiction and blockading China from attacking Taiwan, Taiwan is likely to fall eventually.
China is not Russia. Xi somehow is not as utterly isolated from reality as Putin is. Putin didn't even know that Ukraine would resist, and was entirely convinced that Ukrainians would welcome them. China can build new equipment, and new modern equipment at that. Russia can barely manage to bring ancient tank hulls up to 2000s level and send them to the front line. They are also running out of old hulls to do that with.
China has a sizeable and meaningful air force, modern battlespace management that was shown effective by Pakistan's use in their recent conflict.
Is the current US admin actually competent enough to protect Taiwan even if they want to?
It's a future war zone through and through, especially now that their PM is LARPing as Hirohito reincarnate.
If you mean Russia, then no.
There is NO QUESTION the US would provide a full defense of Japan against any aggressive party.
The US has multiple military bases in Japan, with 35,000+ military personnel. Japan pays the US billions every year to support the US military presence there. Japan is also a too-big-to-fail economy (4th in the world) and US trading partner. And strategically, what do you think the US "pivot to Asia" means, if not defending close US allies in the Asia-Pacific from unprovoked aggression?
For over 60 years the United States-Japan Alliance has served as the cornerstone of peace, stability, and freedom in the Indo-Pacific region. The U.S. commitment to Japan’s defense under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty of 1960 is unwavering. https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-japan/Ukraine surrendered the sharpest tool in its arsenal for those assurances, its inherited nuclear arsenal, the world’s third-largest at the time. But the loss was broader than warheads; it was the surrender of a strategic future.
America first means America first. All politicians will say one thing and do another, always check the incentives…
>Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".Even if they managed to land they would probably be pushed off pretty quickly. Japan's military is more powerful than that of Ukraine, and the Russians are already having trouble supporting troops just across the border. There's no way they would be able to support an invasion force over water. I'm skeptical the Russians could pull that off without opposition, something they would certainly have in spades.
A land invasion of mainland Japan is so unrealistic that even the US in WW2 didn't attempt it.
Knowing those two facts, we can conclude that Russia will not be invading Japan as long as it is protected by the United States. The calculus is very simple when nuclear weapons are involved.
Also, keep in mind that D-Day was the largest amphibious assault in history and all they had to do was cross the English Channel. Russia invading Hokkaido would be suicide, the US nuked Japan rather than try invading the homeland to end WW2 and we controlled every island surrounding Japan at the time.