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.
(Thank you for acknowledging that this is a civil war — that's something you rarely see on Western forums.)