This is a poisoned pill for Biden. If he goes along with it, it will sevearly harm relations with China; if he walks it back he looks weak on China.
Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
201–210 of 212 posts
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean the KMT that set up after they were kicked out of the mainland and took Taiwan right? They also claim all of (outer) Mongolia and basically whatever the Qing dynasty had when it fell. There CPC doesn’t claim Outer Mongolia and its borders are mostly settled with a few conflicts in India and the SCS.
You are referring to the de jure claims, which Taiwan only maintains due to pressure from the PRC. If Taiwan officially cedes these claims, the PRC would respond with economic sanctions, because the PRC wants Taiwan to continue to pretend it is another faction of the same country still fighting the civil war and not an independent country.
Yes. If Taiwan decides to stop being the ROC and instead wants to be the Republic of Taiwan, that would be considered a huge escalation by the PRC. Right now, they are just two sides of a civil war, which the PRC can accept, but succession would be viewed way different.
Luckily, Taiwan can just continue with the status quo and the PRC will probably not invade it, especially when the Americans are hanging out in the Ryukyus so close by to the island.
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're only pretending. Saving face is critical when negotiating in the East. If we can let the mainland save face and it costs us little of importance, why act otherwise? Also, Taiwan itself is not unified. Around a third want to unify with the CCP.
> Around a third want to unify with the CCP. I am from Taiwan. Where does the data for your sentence come from? As far as I know, the proportion of people who want to be unified with CCP is only 2.4%. Reference: https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7804&id=6960
Isn't the KMT's position re-unification and has support of about a third of the electorate?
Though there's clearly a strong shift in the last two years.
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#204I'm curious why Pompeo is choosing to do this now, rather than a year ago. Only 11 days until the next administration, or is he still thinking about transitioning to a second Trump term?
Dozens of Hong Kong democracy activists were rounded up and imprisoned this week.
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've lived in Taiwan for a short period of time. Are you the guy that keeps spamming blogs about "TSMC, chips and how taiwan is so important to the US" to HN? > Furthermore, the Taiwanese people deserve the right to self-determination Taiwan has 20 million people. Mainland china has 1.4 billion people. I believe the "self-determination" part is already settled. > and our support if they decide to go their own way.…
> Taiwan has 20 million people. Mainland china has 1.4 billion people. I believe the "self-determination" part is already settled. What does population have to do with self determination? > Nope. Let them settle it. We shouldn't have been involved in the first place. Except they were allied with the US and deals were drawn up that should be honored. > Are you serious? One is the second largest economy in the world. T…
> What does population have to do with self determination?
Because the entire chinese population ( mainland china and taiwan ) claim taiwan is part of china.
Taiwan is called ROC( the Republic of China ) for a reason.
Using your logic, if china invaded the US and then separated oregon from the US, it would okay for oregon to "secede" from the union despite the wishes of 330 million other americans.
You do realize that secession has been ruled unconstitutional in the US right? And far greater percentage tried to secede ( civil war ).
> Except they were allied with the US and deals were drawn up that should be honored.
We were never "allied" with taiwan. The chinese who fled to taiwan were our vassals. After they lost the chinese civil war, we foolishly and greedily, intervened to keep taiwan separate from china. Sooner or later, that's gonna cost us. All anybody has to do is look at a map.
> He said in a strategic industry, which semiconductors are.
As opposed to everything else right?
> If there is TSMC spam it's probably because this is a tech forum and they is a lot of movement in the field in the last year, mostly related to the failings of Intel and the rise of TSMC.
There is this bullshit TSMC spam because there is a trade war with china and people are funding it. No different than any other propaganda campaign whether it involves suits or geopolitic issues.
http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
All the propaganda campaigns you see news, media and online are pretty much funded by some billionaire elites somewhere.
If you really cared, then you should be demanding the "taiwanese" be forced out and return taiwan to the aborigines who live there. But then we'd have to return the land back to the natives, aborigines, etc ourselves so I doubt that'll happen any time soon.
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it hard to reconcile this prospect of inevitable conflict with how genuinely easy to get along and reach mutual understanding with, all the people from China and Taiwan I have taught, lived/studied/worked with over the years have been. Maybe there's a big domestic base of nationalists that we don't get to interact with in the Anglosphere..
1. Have you explicitly asked them about their thoughts on the status of Taiwan? 2. Did they give polite noncommittal answers or their actual thoughts? In the workplace, you don't usually have coworkers interrogating other coworkers about their geopolitical views around the watercooler and basing their future professional interactions on those views.
well once in Japanese 101 a kid yelled out Taiwan is not a country when we were learning country names..
I ususlly have more tact than to ask explicitly geopolitical quwstions in the workplace. I am talking about how I dont get the same sense of intransigence from afore mentioned people as i do from say Japanese or Anglosphere
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
What could have been: If Nixon hadn't started the process, if carter hadn't recognize the communist government of China. - Offshoring/globalization may not have been the boom it is today, due to the lack of a major source of cheap/obedient labor force. In the 70s offshoring occured in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and others SE Asia countries but they didn't have enough cheap labors to continue. American companies would…
In your fictional view, you are giving America way too much credit. The Chinese would’ve come online, sooner or later. The WTO sped up the process of course, but China’s technological ascendancy was inevitable. The other theory is that if China was denied entry into the WTO, then they would’ve just created their own international trading agreement. And in 2020, they did just that, and called it the RCEP. Besides, wit…
>The Chinese would’ve come online, sooner or later. The WTO sped up the process of course, but China’s technological ascendancy was inevitable.
I dispute that anything is inevitable - China was an economic and scientific mess in the 80s and 90s, thanks to the Cultural Revolution and Communist anti-truth thought control ideology.
The US and our democratic allies had a fleeting opportunity in the 90s to collectively pressure China into making a grand bargain, where in return for permanent access to Western markets, they enact major democratic and human rights reforms - multiple political parties allowed, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent judiciary, military serves the national constitution rather than a specific political party, etc.
This is what should have happened, but in Wall St. and corporate America's rush to cash in on cheap labor and a potentially large new market, we replaced that grand bargain with wishful thinking and a rose-tinted predictions of an authoritarian regime that just a few years earlier in 1989 violently crushed a nascent effort at Democracy.
This was likely the most costly strategic mistake in US history. We spent 50yrs fighting a cold war to push back authoritarianism, and won, only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the 90s due to short-term greed. Now we'll have to fight that cold war all over again this century, against a much more formidable adversary that has been able to learn how to meld state authoritarianism with effective economic development and Orwellian technological thought control.
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I'm responding to the second edit). I think you massively underestimate the psychological effect of seeing a first-world country reduced to a third-world country if Taiwan doesn't surrender very quickly. Also, the realist concern is classic 'balance the strongest power' dynamic. I don't think China has to worry about an outright official blockade, but you'll end up with a Cold War rerun and Chinese companies being u…
Long blockade Taiwan is the forceful reunion option. Blockades are inherently an act of war. It would be calibrated attacks of military power and communication infrastructure that would leave civilian realm mostly intact. No salacious photos of cratered cities, PR would play better than unavoidable PLA paratroopers + civilian "collateral damage". Meanwhile only avenue for food + aid would be provided by PRC, each lan…
I originally wrote a long response, but it's gone so I'll keep it short:
A. Siege type pressure when one lets food in (or food is passed in anyway) have extremely poor success rate since WW2. Note that Yemen itself wasn't conquered (given the terrain and people, any idea of conquering it was laughable in the first place). Eventually PLA will either go Yemen, attack directly, or stop. All options are bad or worse than just attacking without trying a siege.
B. SK and Japan will band if threat is deemed extreme enough. Or go nuke.
C. The typically discussed invasion scenario is very tilted towards what American Marines did in WW2. A smart PLA would instead be far more aggressive on exploiting its air superiority, upto mobilizing sea assets after the air attack or even doing a Crete 1941 style attack. There are things Taiwan can do to defend, but it hasn't yet and I am not sure it's going to happen.
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how China sinks a US carrier killing thousands of US soldiers and the situation does not escalate to a nuclear exchange. Sometimes I think a whole generation has forgotten that we still live under the threat of global annihilation in under 15 minutes. The schools used to have duck and cover drills to prepare for nuclear attacks. This may have made people too afraid of the word nuclear and thus nuclear po…
Are you really sure about the global annihilation part? I'm not. The larger cities and anything near targets of strategic value will probably be gone. But otherwise? Think of all the atmospheric tests with large devices. And the "enrichment" all the coal fired power plants produce. There are people saying coal power amounts to about 50 Chernobyl EVERY FUCKING YEAR in released radioactivity into the environment! Not t…
There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of that scenario but I could use "kill off 99.9999% of living things and cause 20-50% of species to go extinct in a few years". I have a PhD in Earth Science and have studied this issue some, but atmospheric modeling is not my specialty.
If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned.
P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is.
Re: Lifting Self-Imposed Restrictions on the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you really sure about the global annihilation part? I'm not. The larger cities and anything near targets of strategic value will probably be gone. But otherwise? Think of all the atmospheric tests with large devices. And the "enrichment" all the coal fired power plants produce. There are people saying coal power amounts to about 50 Chernobyl EVERY FUCKING YEAR in released radioactivity into the environment! Not t…
There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of…
I'm aware of the possibility that is nuclear winter. OTOH, some volcano(es) could have a big burp anytime, and produce the same. (As they did several times, in the past.)