Cheng Li-wun’s visit to China, expected to take place in April, would be the first by a sitting leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party in a decade.
The leader of Taiwan’s largest opposition party is set to visit China in April after accepting an invite from Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In a statement on Monday, Kuomintang (KMT) said its chairperson, Cheng Li-wun, was “grateful” for the invitation and had “gladly” accepted it.
Cheng “expressed hope that the two parties (the KMT and China’s Communist Party) would work together to promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations, strengthen cross-strait exchanges and cooperation, secure peace in the Taiwan Strait, and enhance the well-being of the people,” her party said.
Mate, looks like you can’t read my last paragraph and are repeating dogma
You rewrote my first paragraph by using four paragraphs but largely talked around the fact that the geographical region that we call Taiwan has a government that doesn’t fold into the PRC
Agreed that the way both governments claim to control both the mainland and Taiwan complicates things. If you want to simplify that complication take a flight from the mainland to Taiwan and if you actually go to the domestic airport and don’t pass through immigration and customs then let me know. It’s pretty direct messaging from both that they’re independent of each other. (Admittedly as I remember it, the Chinese side had a sign saying something like “International flights and Taiwan” when I was there and thats a pretty weak way to save face.)
Agreed though that your view is one way of interpreting these documents and generally agreed upon history. Strongly disagree that it’s the only interpretation or that there was anything you said that strongly prohibits (not some weak implication from a quirk of history) a faction in the PRC interpreting the geographical region of Taiwan as being too independent. That interpretation is clearly a risk to a lot of people
You’re also using circular logic: Everything you said holds because Taiwan hasn’t formally declared independence but everything you said prohibits Taiwan from declaring independence due to the risk of military force.
But lastly, I’m no longer going to be charitable: you’re defending threatening military force on a geographic region thats been functionally autonomous for 70 years if it has the audacity to formally declare itself independent and regardless of if there are political movements with momentum to do that its fucked up! There are so many bug tickets for services online from individuals that want to identify and being from Taiwan but they can’t because the PRC strong armed in ISO 3166-1. The world is fucked up and complicated so there are many disagreements but stop jamming your very one-sided view that aligns very heavily with the PRC down other people’s throats
There is a non-zero chance China has bots or staff on western media and social spaces with pro China positions to shape the battlefield for the hostile annexation of Taiwan. Taiwan is already an independent state, it does not require China’s permission to exist. There is no reason to engage with hem and help them learn how to be more convincing. Every argument you make is practice for the propaganda machine. Engagement provides training for hostile actors. Please don’t engage, don’t train their AI to better convince you of an alternate history written by the Chinese government.
Bot or not, the response was very unhinged and went from persuading to basically talking about brimstone and ashes. The effort in the poke was almost worth it
The US fought a bloody civil war due to secession. It still would not accept secession to this day and it would kill lots of people if a secessionary movements gained steam. The problem is that no other nation is going to come in and foment a secessionary movement in the US, but the US sure as fuck does that all over the world.
That’s the problem. The US created the conditions for this separation of the governance of the province. Truman decided that if China was going to help it’s Korean neighbors that the US would protect the fascist KMT and let them torture,m and mass murder anyone, and their families, that dared talk about reunification. You think that’s a legitimate situation? One where until the 90s you could be killed for even discussing reunification?
The secession of Taiwan as an independent nation cannot happen in a vacuum. It will be part of a 75 year process of being an imperial protectorate, 50 years of being a fascist dictatorship, and an active US military base. There are no conditions under which a Taiwan secession would be anything except a strategic threat to mainland China by the US military.
And the Chinese people on Taiwan know it. That’s why they are still ambiguous about it. They like being a junior partner to the psychopath empire, it makes them rich. They like being protected from all possible violence and they like being used as key military strategic location because it means they get the absolute best treatment from the empire.
But the empire will fall. It’s falling now. And so long as the empire dies in West Asia, and never actually gets a chance to attempt to mass murder the Chinese, Taiwan may yet see peace. But if the empire decides to attack China in a final bid to stay at the top of the heap, Taiwan will be treated like all other US proxies - the residents will die, the US will arm them and train them and lie to them to get them to fight and die for the empire, the US will launch attacks from residential areas and civilian complexes to force China to target them there in an attempt to turn the tide of public opinion against them.
No matter what you want to be true, Taiwan is not and cannot be independent. It is a Chinese province full of Chinese people who are under the aegis of a psychotic and dying empire. There is no path to autonomy except through One Country Two Systems. Maybe one day Taiwan will be decolonized and the indigenous population will get their island back.
But just because you want your moral conclusions to match reality doesn’t mean they do. Taiwan is a province of China according to all systems of defining what is and isn’t a province. It is not a country according to any of the systems that define what is and isn’t a country. It is not an independent nation according to any systems that define what is and isn’t a nation. It is a protectorate, it is a proxy, and it is entirely dependent on a larger country for its continued existence economically and politically.
It is a fundamentally dependent polity. The only question is who will it depend on. Today it depends on mainland China for its economic base and the West for its economic superstructure. And today it depends on the US for its military defense. This contradiction will eventually resolve, and the most peaceful resolution will be for the US to fall and for Taiwan to choose to have the PLA provide for its military defense. It will never have a military capable of defending itself without a larger country to be it’s protector.