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.
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.