Ethnically, yes, but there is a big distinction within Taiwan’s internal political dialogue about ethnic Chinese vs. politically Chinese. For instance, for over a decade, society and media there has made a big deal about three categories of identification:
So while most would no doubt call themselves ethnically Chinese, they consider themselves politically distinct, in the same way that many American colonists in the 1770s no doubt would have identified as ethnically/racially English but not politically English.
Yes but they are very unlikely to get it. Forget military measures. China could cripple Taiwan’s economy with sanctions, by seizing Taiwanese investments in China and by refusing to sell resources to Taiwan.
China and Hong Kong make up 40% of Taiwan’s exports.
Meanwhile Taiwan is only 2% of China’s Exports:
China wouldn’t even notice the sanctions, but they’d devastate the Taiwanese economy.
China also holds a lot of U.S. debt. And is a major trading partner. China could easily force an economic war with the U.S. that would cause a major recession.
Now, it would hurt China as well - but China has some advantages when it comes not not having our perspective on how happy your people need to be.
And the face thing is very important. As long as the illusion is maintained, everyone is happy. But Trump will likely continue to insult China for the next four years - at some time China may decide that the insults have been significant enough to take action. I’m betting economic.
As I understand it, there was also a major divide even among the ethnic Chinese people. When the Communists took over the mainland in 1949, the Nationalist government evacuated a lot of people to Taiwan. The people who were evacuated were loyalists to Chiang’s regime. Chiang declared martial law which lasted until 1987.
But there had been a lot of Chinese people already living in Taiwan before the evacuation. These pre-evacuation Chinese outnumbered the evacuation Chinese by about four to one. But during the martial law era, the evacuation Chinese ran the country.
I was responding to UDS’ post that “[the Taiwanese] mostly haven’t expressed a wish to form a distinct state which is not China.” I cited survey data that, yes, there **is **indeed a significant desire/sentiment for a separate state. Whether that state can be achieved or not is a separate matter.
I agree. Personally, I’d have referred it it as a “nautical drone” or a “craft” - when I saw the headline I also thought China had detained an actual crewed ship.
Brings up the interesting question about unmanned vehicles and the law in general.
Historically at sea you had crewed vessels, abandoned vessels, wrecked vessels, flotsam, and jetsam. With different laws and customs for each. With in some cases sub-rules for government-owned or military vice civilian-owned.
Now we have this new category. Purposeful unmanned devices not abandoned, not wrecked, but busy going about some task. But, like e.g. jetsam, unable to defend themselves against being picked up by any passerby.
Aerial drones are sorta similar, but with the big difference it’s a lot harder to capture one without damaging it.
In either case, capturing it is definitely interfering with it doing whatever it was up to. And it’s taking possession of somebody else’s property without their permission and almost certainly against their desires.
It’ll be interesting to see how this all develops legally and in treaties.
Let’s not forget that prior to capture the device could have been taking somebody else’s property or gathering information about that property or causing interference to that property without their permission which, just a certainly, would have been against their desires.
Agreed. I was being carefully neutral about the whole thing.
The seas consist of different regions subject to different degrees of national control. And of course not everyone agrees on where the boundaries are. But those issues aren’t novel at all.
Manned subs have been sneaking in to where they’re not welcome for about 75 yeas now. So that’s not novel either.
I haven’t bothered to read any articles to learn anything about this specific case or where it happened. I’m interested in the policy-level generalities. Clearly the high seas are a different scenario from well inside Shanghai Bay.