Ten years ago my boss, whose parents and wife were from Taiwan, and who spoke Mandarin quite a lot, and so had connections to the Taiwanese thinking and culture, said that he thought Taiwan soon would welcome a folding into China, because the powerful business interests wouldn’t mind, and might actually favor it, as China realized more that good business was good money and progress. It seems to be thus.
Suuuuure. The druthers of powerful business interests are just what drives blue-truck driving Joe Flip-Flop to the polls, especially down south in betel-nut country.
Oh, come on. Parking several hundred missiles right across the Strait? Yeah, 2 minutes is just about right.
(Not for invasion: they’ve got no hope of that. But the implicit threat to flatten all your major cities within minutes isn’t some legal technicality held in “reserve”. Otherwise, why not remove the missles, and why not cool it when Taiwan buys Patriot batteries to defend against the missiles?)
I’m confused. Are you saying that corporate money doesn’t drive elections, and that the promise of jobs isn’t important to Phong-SixPack?
Well, you’re the one putting forth the premise; can you justify it?
ETA: and what is “Phong-SixPack”?
Sort of like Joe-SixPack but with linearly interpolated normals.
That *may *be the reality, but people speaking for Taiwan discredit themselves by doing so.
After all, Taiwan has the bomb and should push come to shove a couple of big cities in China won’t have a traffic problem.
Although I’m pretty sure that economic integration is going to drive some sort of political reconcilliation within the next decade.
Not according to the Federation of American Scientists. Nor Wiki.
They’ve made various noises about restarting their program. So there could be plausible uncertainty.
You have a big billigerent neighbor, a very high number of PhD’s, “best friends forever” with fellow pariah state S. Africa (access to untraced unranium), IIRC 6 nuclear power plants, country is run by a brutish meglomanic dictator (Generalissimo Cash My Check), and you don’t build at least a couple of bomb’s for a MAD strategy? WTF? I’ve seen this plausible deniability jazz and don’t buy it for a Beijing minute.
The link btw is for extracting plutonium. That may well be true. The feasibility of getting bomb grade uranium and building a fissionable device is so high as to be a certainty.
I’m not saying that Taiwan could make China a parking lot. Probably couldn’t even make Shanghai a parking lot, but dropping one on Huaihai Lu would certainly make my property value slump. Dropping a devices in 4-5 big cities, and maybe even the Forbidden City, would have a pretty big mpact on the PRC. China would of course survive. At the same time, Taiwan would then become a radioactive parking lot, but that’s what happens in a MAD strategy. Believe what you will.
:dubious: Your satire is lost on me, as I honestly don’t know what it’s target is supposed to be. Oh well, have fun in the rest of the thread.
As mentioned earlier, Taiwan has now evolved into a fully democratic country, with all the freedom that is comparable to any other Western democratic nation. Just like everyone else, they’re very keen on doing business with China. However, I don’t see that the Taiwanese will be willing to risk a formal political merger with China under the current mainland regime. Afterall, there’s no going back once you’ve agreed to a unification. What if it doesn’t work out? If you are a Taiwanese, are you willing to put your freedom and independence at risk over some business opportunities and some vague notion of nationalism? The logical thing to do is to maintain the status quo, wait it out and see how the political situation in China shakes out.
First, “face” is very important to China. They say that Taiwan is just a province with an unruly government. For any serious relations with them, you must go along with this polite fiction. In the interest of Chinese cooperation on more important matters, most governments do; except a few 3rd world gvernments whose attitude is bought and paid for by Taipei.
The fear of splitting up is one driver for this behaviour. The fact that the Kuomintang got away and Mao could not take Taiwan is an embarrassment they would like to cover up. Like any other group east or west, the more self-important they feel the harder to admit they have lost a round.
Yes, they are terrified that some day the Taiwanese government will actually declare they are in fact not a false government of all China but a small separate country. Then this becomes a de facto separatist movement, not an internat domestic dispute. Who knows what they will do then?
As the political system loosens (it will eventually, despite the efforts of the Communist Party) and as the economic interests converge, maybe sooner or later they will come to a peaceful agreement to be another “semi-autonomous republic” within the CHinese spere, or some such politic-babble to match slowly converging nationhood.
As for Hong Kong - it was “rented” to the British for 150 years until 1997. Odds are trying to take it by force would start a war with the whole west Mao couldn’t win; OTOH, when it came time to hand it back, odds are the rest of the west would not have supported Britain if they tried to take on China in defiance of internation law and right. So it was simpler for China to wait. Fortunately, by the time 1997 rolled around, their government was relatively realistic about the need to preserve Hong Kong’s unique socio-economic advantages.
Not sure if you can really say it is a fully democratic country with a straight face. Remember the magic bullet incident? And I think the last President is in jail?
Sure, Taiwan has made very large strides from an authoritarian police state to a functioning democracy. But let’s not call it a mature fully democratic country yet. I doubt even Koxinga would make that claim (but don’t want to put words into his mouth).
[And by the way, I lived in Taiwan 3 years after the Kaoshiung riots and when it was still under military law with dissident politicians being thrown out of police buildings or sent to the Gulanyu prison. You could be rated a “black hand” and permanent exile, and I knew many of these.]
Perhaps you’re right, things are not quite perfect yet and there are still room for improvement. Perhaps the corruption charges were politically motivated. I don’t know enough to say whether the trial was fair or whether he was really guilty. (But then, politically motivated prosecutors and corrupt politicians are not entirely unheard of even in the US, are they?) However, the main point is that, despite its flaws, it is more or less a genuine democracy, and it is obvious that it is going to improve in time.
Agreed that democracy in Taiwan is on a firm footing and making good progress. Objectively I think most would rate the progress over the past 2 decades as at least a “B.”
Koxinga - this is a board dedicated to fighting ingnorance, and both Chinese and Taiwanese propaganda don’t fit that.