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Chinese soldiers pledge to sacrifice their lives in documentary on Taiwan invasion
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Suicide isn't patriotic. And it isn't a Chinese island; that's the point. It's a democratic, independent country that happens to be a US ally.
Not according to the US state department:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_China
Officially. That's just political framing to keep China from going ape-shit. Unofficially, though... see the Six Assurances.
This is true. The six assurances reaffirms that the United States doesn’t view Taiwan as a sovereign nation under either Taiwanese or Chinese rule. The main points it states is that the US will continue to supply Taiwan with weapons, it will not be involved with negotiations between the PRC and Taiwan, Taiwan is not a sovereign state and China is not recognized as having sovereignty over Taiwan.
So the US doesn’t think China has sovereignty over Taiwan while also saying they do not support Taiwan independence.
Basically it’s another way for the US to feed the military industrial complex while keeping the possibility of war in our back pocket without disrupting relations with our #1 trade partner.
Yup, the military industrial complex is so screwed up.
Taiwan presents a tricky and strange situation. All I'm saying is that I really do not think that the US would sit back and watch China invade without doing anything.
Of course not, but they wouldn’t intervene for the good of the Taiwanese people. It would be because of all the US assets (chip investment) wrapped up in Taiwan. Not to mention war is good for business. So both the US and Chinese populations will be at the whims of their government sending them into a meat grinder all for financial interests.
Yea they would probably sacrifice the Philippines first. Then Japan.
Fortunately…or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the United States would use Japan as a base of operations to attack China and the Philippines is basically considered a giant aircraft carrier by the military. So they would want to keep them around while Taiwan gets sacrificed…though the Philippines would be next. Sad state of affairs all around.
Tell that to literally all the European and American soldiers who say they want to die for their country, and all the bumper stickers, and all the memorials, and all of the ceremonies, and all of the rhetoric, and all of the families, and and and... Or do you not consider it suicide when Euro-centric soldiers choose to enlist and committing to fight to their death?
It's literally populated by almost entirely Chinese people, Chinese people who genocided the native inhabitants. It is quite literally part of the same land mass and water ways just like Manhattan, Galveston, and the Florida Keys. In all ways except one, it is a Chinese island.
The one way that it is NOT a Chinese island is that when the losing fuedal-fascist White Army fled to the island, the imperial fascist British and Americans interceded to protect their imperial fascist interests by ensuring that the KMT was able to stay alive and that they would be further indebted to them. The KMT then proceeded to prosecute the ruthlessly brutal White Terror on the island while the North Atlantic imperial fascists maintained diplomatic and military relationships with the island as a way of holding on to their imperialist presence in China that they obtained through violence, occupation, and the forced selling of opium.
This is the ONLY definition of "Chinese" that Taiwan is not, specifically that it is not administered by the central government of the mainland. The former central governments all administered Taiwan prior to the civil war, but this particular central government was stopped by European interventionism to advance European interests.
You are grasping at straws in trying to construct a narrow moralistic narrative that smoothly eliminates all the parts of the narrative that would fly against your moral narrative. It's not working. Reality is what it is.
I would say that suicide is not patriotic to anyone. Why do Chinese supporters always resort to whataboutism, anyway? Shitty behavior is shitty behavior, regardless.
The PRC has never owned Taiwan. Also, it doesn't matter about the ethnicity of the population because, at the end of the day, they don't want to be part of China.
But you have nothing to say to about America not allowing integration with China without launching a world war? Curious.
What a fucked up imperialist framing. The PRC doesn't own China, it is the current government of the sovereign nation of China which has included Taiwan for a very long time and still includes Taiwan. You don't say that the Democrats don't own Alabama, but you apply an idiosyncratic standard to argue that the US is justified in turning Taiwan into it's military proxy and threatening to send millions to their death over reintegration of a territory that is quite literally by all standards part of the same nation as the mainland.
You are talking about people who suffered under the White Terror for 40 years, which included torture and murder of anyone who disagrees with the KMT. The individual beliefs of the residents is a direct result not only of the indoctrination from that White Terror but from the heavy indoctrination by European propaganda for many many decades.
What matters is that there is no way from Taiwan to be independent. It will either be part of the imperial bloc and therefore a military threat to China and a base for Western imperial power projection and containment, or it will be administered as a province of China and the Europeans will be kicked out of their foot hold. This is why the conflict exists, not because the people in Taiwan care one way or the other, but because independent Taiwan is a strategic position for the European imperial order. China will integrate it because it is required for Chinese national security, which serves not merely the people of the mainland but also the people of the island. It would be tragic for the US to turn Taiwan into another meat grinder in its bid to use proxies to maintain its global oppression.
Why are you mad at me? It isn't my choice. You make some good points/observations, but I won't respond to each of them because the fact of the matter is that the US will not sit by and watch Taiwan be "reintegrated" (again, not my choice; just a fact).
Sometimes it is worthwhile to be mindful of users’ instances… dude you’re replying to is from one of those instances.
Aaaahh, gotcha. Good advice, thanks. 👍
It's also not the US's choice. The European empire, which the US inherited and evolved, is slowly but surely ending. The integration will happen, and the US won't launch a world war to stop it, because China won't launch a war to integrate, because China isn't the belligerent that the West has been trying to invent through propaganda for 2 centuries. Instead, China will continue to assert its position, demonstrate it's ability to protect Taiwan from further imperial manipulation, and wait until Taiwan is ready to experiment with "one country, two systems". China, unlike the West, can wait for a long time.
What does this even mean? You're comparing cats and dogs in an attempt to justify PRC's warrantless claim to an island they've never owned in modern history.
I think almost every independence movement is a bit like a Rorschach Test; people see in them what they want (or can).
In this discussion here you learn basically almost nothing about Taiwan, its history, or why and what its people want, but you sure learn a lot about the political worldviews of everyone who participated. Your comment here is an excellent example of that, even better than the one I replied to first.
And btw, I don't justify any claim. I'd rather support Taiwans de jure sovereignty (over the island, not over all of that 😅) if that's what its population want. And I doubt that this CCTV documentary is gonna change my mind, but still plan to watch it cuz I'm still trying to understand why most Chinese propaganda is so lame 😂
All propaganda is not good, but I'd say that Chinese-brand propaganda is fierce. I make an attempt to get news from sources outside the States because our propaganda is pretty lame as well. I should learn more about Taiwan history, though. Can anyone recommend a good book about it?
Fierce or not, it just seems weird. The relations between prc and roc cannot be that bad, and think of all the trading! There are so many ways to improve relations while still aiming for an official reunification. But hey, you know what, great idea! Let's publish some video-statements of soldiers who say they will sacrifice their lives to get back the island that we officially already hold sovereignty over! – nono, much better idea! Let's make it an eight-part series, that will make us even more popular over there!
It's like in the meme where the one guy who says something reasonable gets thrown out of the office window. (have not watched it, maybe it's also much better than I assume)
Meanwhile American propaganda is obviously much better, for example, no one questioned what happened before the stuff that happens in the black hawk down movie, or what happened after the pearl harbor movie. Comparing cats and dogs, yes, but from a simple propaganda perspective, that is just good framing, something China is really bad at, constantly.
And the US knows how to use that advantage. Americans (and most people in the West) care and know more about what probably happened to probably thousands of peaceful Chinese democracy-lovers (NSFL!), rather than why the US government bombed a whole city block in Philadelphia 2 years prior 🤷♂️
And yea, its always good to learn more! Have fun learning about the history of Taiwan, White Terror and all that. It became too much for me very quickly, so I cannot recommend anything.
Countries don't OWN their land, they are sovereign over their territory. Quite literally no government of China EVER owned Taiwan, but all governments, including this one, have been sovereign over Taiwan. It's just that Taiwan was illegally occupied by separatists and European imperial powers. The sovereignty does not inhere to the party in charge any more than the Democratic party can own Alabama or the Republican party can own the Florida Keys.