> Once China solves the Taiwan problem they're going to turn their sights on Korea and 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.
Chiang Kai-shek is a standard part of the world history course in the US in high school. We know why China wants Taiwan at the personal level, much of the world is just interested in that not happening.
It's a civil war like the American revolution was a civil war and France helped out.
This is the first time I've ever seen a non-Chinese person say it this way on Reddit, X, or this platform.
I must have scrolled through way too much Reddit.
Yep, it's 100% common knowledge. I distinctly remember my teacher making a point to explain why Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Jieshi were both valid transliterations in my 10th grade world history class.
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".
> 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.
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.
I agree that, in principle, the people of every territory should have the right to peaceful self-determination regardless of validity of other people's claims to territory. In practice, virtually nobody acknowledges that right, even though it's ostensibly the first article of the UN charter. The Irish had to make life hell for the English to get any concessions, Catalonia had its independence movement dismantled, Kurds are oppressed by every state they live in. The US itself is guilty of this; there was no particular reason the union of two completely opposite cultures had to be enforced, and in another timeline perhaps there was a peaceful national divorce. The hypothetical independent California was actually, in reality, an independent Confederacy of several states, and their independence movement was crushed. To that extent, I could agree China is in the wrong, but only insomuch as any other country is, and it should not be singled out as a particularly aggressive nation when it's playing by the same international norms as the rest of the world. That it wants to reclaim Taiwan is in no way indicative that it has any intention to invade Korea or Japan, as supposed upthread.
It sounds like we have some common ground, but I think you may have a misunderstanding of the present American worldview and politics.
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.
I think that the American worldview is heavily propagandised and doesn't particularly reflect reality. The post WWII-norms are not at all a story of peaceful self-determination. The decolonisation of the Phillipines was an anomaly and an outlier. At the same time that the US was letting go of the Phillipines, it was gearing up for war in Korea on behalf of its puppet military dictatorship that was, at the time, even more repressive than the North Korean one. The Dutch fought a war in an attempt to keep control of Indonesia. France fought a war for its colonial possessions, which the US joined in on. Portugal fought wars for its colonial possessions. The UK let India go only because it was utterly ravaged by WWII, and they recognised they would not likely be able to keep it by force.
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.
Even if the criticism is fair, it's still whataboutism. I agree with you that countries other than China have done bad things, including post-WWII, but not that it in any way justifies turning the streets of Taipei into a warzone.
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.
.. would be an illegal American war, yes. Like most of the American incursions into South America and violations of sovereignty of South American countries.
Yep, any war of aggression would be wildly unpopular today. Limited actions may be somewhat tolerated inasmuch as they're seen as being at the behest of the legitimate Venezuelan government in exile, but no one wants a land invasion or to see American missiles killing civilians.
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.
I don't understand why you think an invasion or widespread airstrikes would be unlikely.
- 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.
I haven't commented one way or another on the likelihood of an invasion. My claim is that an escalation from limited airstrikes to full-scale invasion would be wildly unpopular, which I stand by.
I'm not referring to any specific actions or commenting on who did what. I summarized what I've observed to be the common perception, which is that Iraq and Afghanistan were "forever wars" conducted against the informed consent of the American public, and a spectacular failure of our institutions and both party establishments.
If that sounds lacking in nuance, well, I never claimed to believe American political discourse was particularly nuanced ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think a lot of us recognize it was a civil war. The idea that it is a civil war, conducted in the present tense, is the weird and dangerous one. When was the last actual fighting, WW2?
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.
> Europe knows all about reigniting pointless conflicts over ancient grudges
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).
Korea is also permanently partitioned thanks to being played as pawns between the Former Europeans and Vodka Europeans. Europeans really managed to get their fingers in everything.
My personal experience tells me that people are happy to praise China’s achievements in technology and poverty alleviation, but when it comes to the territorial issues of Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang, a completely uniform narrative has already formed.
Every single day on Reddit I see a new map of China being Balkanized.
Tibet is not (and was not) defended by a nuclear superpower. South Korea and Japan both have United States military bases and troops stationed there.
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.
If historical claims are valid, then Mongols would be very happy to claim large swaths of land. Or if more recent claims are to be taken, then the Brits have claims over quite a large amount of countries.
Historical claims are meaningless and are just an excuse for expansion.
I did not comment on the "validity" of the claim, just explained its rationale and history.
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.
> This does not mean that China is going to go to war over them, certainly it won't go to war with India.
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 is, the constitution written by the KMT dictatorship that was awarded the island as spoils of war after the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in WW2.
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.
That's a little misrepresenting history... Taiwan was part of the Qing Empire and Japan took it in 1895 following China's defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War. China got it back after WWII.
Sure, and before the Qing armies invaded it was declared an independent kingdom by a Ming loyalist who was born in Japan to a Japanese mother, and before that there were a couple of European outposts and scattered settlers from Fujian, and before that there were indigenous peoples who themselves are part of an ethnic group that can now be found everywhere from Madagascar to New Zealand.
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.
> 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.
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.
This comment is so divorced from reality on the ground in Taiwan that it's hard to respond to. Certainly, someone can look at cherry-picked pieces of legislature or historical documents and imagine that they represent some kind of intrinsic truth, but in reality it is simply not the case that Taiwanese people understand themselves as locked in some kind of ongoing civil war with the CCP. The culture has long since moved on from 1940s era politics that even at the time were imported by a minority group from the mainland.
This is so stupid. It doesn't mean anything. History is history. What exists now is that Taiwan is an independent country with its own currency and military, and Taiwanese pay no taxes to China.
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.
> But historically, China has never been good at ruling non-Han peoples.
"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.
> "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.
Don’t forget the history of Northern Wei, Yuan Dynasty, and Qing Dynasty – none of them were products of “Han Chinese imperialism.”
Qing Dynasty annexed Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, as well as large chunks of Central Asia, and fought with Sikhs over Kashmir. Looks like a good case of imperial expansion to me.
It was not the Manchus who reconquered Tibet in the 1950s, after it had been an independent country for several decades.
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)).
I read Chinese news from China in Chinese sometimes to get a bit of language practice. It's not western media reporting that China says Okinawa isn't legitimate Japanese territory. It's Chinese state media saying Okinawa needs to be "liberated" from Japan.
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.
And they will never become part of China again, ever.
They once were, and after World War II they were supposed to be handed over to the Republic of China (Nationalist government), but the Nationalists stupidly refused. Then the United States gave them to Japan as a reward.
This completely violated the post-WWII United Nations agreements. So if the UN still wants to claim any legitimacy or relevance, these places should not belong to Japan, but they will never belong to China either.
Okinawa was as much a part of China as Botswana and Argentina were. Going back centuries, they've always spoken a japonic language so your government propaganda is a strange approach for seeding justification for invasion in the future.
The Okinawans are a branch of Japanese, but the Ryukyu kingdom was tributary to the Chinese empire before being annexed by Japan in the second half of the 19th century.
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 completely ignores a lot of history. Okinawa went from being a tributary (trade partner) of China to vassal state (occupied and controlled) by Japan in 1609. [1] What would be modern day Afghanistan and Thailand paid tribute to China as well, but for some reason, those are ignored with the Chinese claim to territory. It's simply "well the Republic of China's victory in WW2 means we get land from countries we traded with in the 1600s!", which is bizarre view of history. Frankly, it's nothing more than trying to seed the ground for opportunism, because it's a guarantee those same arguments will be used to say Vietnam, Thailand, and Afghanistan aren't independent if those become valuable lands in the future and they seem as easily seizable as small Okinawan islands.
After the war from 1609, Ryukyu remained officially a vassal of China, not of Japan, even if it became secretly also a vassal of the Satsuma domain from Japan (not of the Japanese state).
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.
Not sure where you're getting "secretly" from since there was no secret and they were openly obedient to Japan. There's nothing outside of CCP sources, and particularly no historical sources, that could even remotely claim otherwise.
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.
I never said they speak Chinese or anything like that. in ancient times they were part of China’s tributary system. The Chinese tributary system explicitly allowed different places to keep their own culture and language.
It was Japan that annexed them and then systematically destroyed the local culture.
The post-WWII agreements (Cairo Declaration, Potsdam Proclamation, San Francisco Peace Treaty framework) all stated that these places was to be stripped from Japan.
China is only using this historical fact now to pressure Japan on the propaganda and diplomatic level.
No Chinese person actually believes China should (or will) annex them.
All Chinese media are emphasizing that these places do not belong to Japan, not that they belong to China.
That’s the essential difference.
Tributary networks were a system of trade and diplomacy. It'd be like saying the Philippines belongs to Indonesia because they're in ASEAN. And saying Okinawa doesn't belong to Japan is the exact, 100% identical argument Russia used and continues to use to justify its brutal invasions of Georgia, Ukraine, and more and more countries. It's kind of bizarre how anyone who speaks English could assume this propaganda works, though I am making the giant leap in assuming I'm not talking to Deepseek right now.
What I’ve always wanted to emphasize is the post-World War II agreements. That should be the real focus, right? At least according to those treaties and agreements, these territories (Okinawa/Ryukyu, etc.) explicitly do not belong to Japan.
Okinawa has been part of Japan since before the Qing Dynasty even existed. Government operatives claim a lot of things, but thinking WW2 negates 400+ year old borders is truly wild and something no human not on a government payroll would make.
I'm a bit confused, would love to learn. The Potsdam agreement said that Japan controls is main islands (the ones right by the mainland) and the other minor islands (anything not right next to the main island) would be determine by the Allies later. This was signed by China and obviously has been followed.
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.
I respect China (in fact, in this stupid timeline more than the U.S.) but China is already huge. The whole world would be a much better place if China just chilled the fuck out and would just stop harassing border countries (I know, I know, this is true for at least two quarters of planet Earth). Let them have Taiwan if that would make them shut up, but it won't. Tributary system? Allowed to keep? Pressure Japan? How much more do you want and how long will you go back in history to justify your greed for power and territory? China is trying to look nice and they succeed in many places, they are very close to something of a heavenly kingdom in my book, but this behavior always makes me ask which face is real. The power hungry bully, or the wise emperor?
I think you’ve nailed it perfectly. China definitely has its imperialist side, but the way it operates is completely different from the US style.
I often feel China’s foreign policy is kinda “dumb” in execution, but that’s just our national character at work. Take Myanmar as an example: if we were the US, it would be simple – send in troops, install a pro-China regime, done. But we’re not America, and we can’t do that without the entire Western media tearing us apart. So China’s approach is: “You guys fight it out yourselves, whoever wins, I’ll do business with them. Just don’t touch the projects and interests I already have.”
This naturally makes ordinary people in those countries dislike China – they genuinely believe China is the root cause of many of their problems, and they think importing Western systems will let them solve everything and stand on their own. In reality, that probably won’t happen most of the time. But there’s no helping it; I don’t know what a “better” Chinese foreign policy would even look like.
All I can say is China has been really lucky – thank Trump, thank Sanae Takaichi – they’ve helped us way more than people realize.
> Take Myanmar as an example: if we were the US, it would be simple – send in troops, install a pro-China regime, done. But we’re not America, and we can’t do that without the entire Western media tearing us apart.
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).
> Taiwan is different: the vast majority of people there are ethnically Chinese, so reunification is seen as an absolute necessity.
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.
> 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.
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.
Thanks for the context. I don't really know the Taiwan situation well.
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).
The majority of the people of Taiwan are ethnically Chinese, but this is a relatively recent status. Taiwan is not an ancient part of China.
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.
> 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.
>Taiwan today is culturally much more similar to the PRC than it is to the West
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.
Are you arguing by metaphor that the Han Chinese on Taiwan are slaves to the native Taiwanese, or what? Or that slaves weren't Americans? I have no idea what your comment is trying to say.
Xinjiang and Tibet have been part of China for many periods throughout history; Japan never was.
At most, Korea was merely part of the tributary system.
There is a fundamental difference here.
Tibet, too, was only part of the tributary system. Even during the Qing dynasty, the Chinese imperial state had no effective control over central Tibet - all local rulers and judges were Tibetan, and they employed Tibetan, not Chinese, law. Outside of diplomatic circles, Tibetans at the time weren't paying any attention to Chinese culture and politics.
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.
> Take Myanmar as an example: even if China occupied it […]
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.
so i guess the Mayanmar people shouldn't blame china now.. they should build some thing like the Vietness people: we fight the chinese and we always win, lets be proud of it.
Invasion is one thing, unfavorable trade deals, deindustrialization, and political coercion is more realistic outcome yet all the more undesirable. Imperialism after all often didn't spread spread by outright conquest.
While I'd like to believe this, I also know that CCP have as of late tapped in to a dangerous remedy for the dissatisfaction of their rule(economic slowdown): Nationalistic fervor.
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
Sure, nationalism definitely serves that purpose. But please consider: in the most recent conflicts/flare-ups, the initiator has actually been Japan, not China.
Their new female prime minister is an extreme-right-wing politician who is not only provoking China, but also picking fights with South Korea and Russia at the same time, while pushing aggressively anti-immigrant and exclusionary policies.
Her approval ratings are also unusually high.
It feels pretty strange that Japan gets zero criticism for this while all the focus stays on China.
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.
The CCP has demonstrated that it’s not above killing tens of millions of its own citizens to achieve its political aims. I doubt they’d see ‘pacifying’ an occupied population as much of an issue.
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.