Leaving China

I have never been to China, but to me it seems that with all their faults that ultimately Deng, Jiang and Hu wanted what was best for China.

But Xi seems to care about Xi.

I think GP is delusional, but you're not seriously suggesting Latin American countries vilify the US for no reason, right?

US interventions in Latin American affairs are well documented[1].

You can't just kick the can to Spain, when the US had a much more direct and recent involvement. It doesn't seem you learned much from your time there, as this history is discussed openly and known in detail, from school children to people who actually lived it. The resentment towards the US is very well deserved, in most cases.

Regardless, this is not a thread about the US, so let's not feed GP's whataboutism, and keep acknowledging how evil China is.

[1]: https://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/hi453time.htm

I suspect many powerful people in Thailand feel the same (as many powerful families in Thailand are of Chinese decent).

Another interesting tidbit is that after a civil war in China, part of the Chinese army that lost the war fled to northern Thailand. And there they settled in the mountains [0].

From my understanding (from a Dutch man that lives nearby who used to be a travel guide in Thailand) many (Thai-)Chinese people here in northern Thailand still maintain very close ties with their families in Taiwan. Also, several villages here also have their own little "China-towns", which can be interesting places to visit.

> The soldiers' war did not end after their own "long march" from Yunnan to Möng Hsat in Burma's Shan State. The Burmese soon discovered that a foreign army was camped on their soil, and launched an offensive. The fighting continued for 12 years, and several thousand KMT soldiers were eventually evacuated to Taiwan. When China entered the Korean War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a desperate need for intelligence on China. The agency turned to the two KMT generals, who agreed to slip some soldiers back into China for intelligence-gathering missions. In return, the agency offered arms to equip the generals to retake China from their bases in the Shan State. The KMT army tried on no fewer than seven times between 1950 and 1952 to invade Yunnan, but was repeatedly driven back into the Shan State. The ending of the Korean War in 1953 was not the end of the KMT's fight against the communist Chinese and Burmese armies, which continued on for many years, supported by Washington and Taiwan and subsequently funded by the KMT's involvement in the Golden Triangle's drug trade.

>In 1961, Tuan led some 4,000 battle-weary KMT troops out of Burma to a mountainous sanctuary in Mae Salong in Thailand. In exchange for asylum, the Thai government allowed them to stay on the understanding that they would assist in policing the area against communist infiltration. As a result, most of the village's inhabitants today are ethnic Chinese and direct descendants of those KMT soldiers. At the same time, General Lee of the 3rd Regiment established his headquarters at Tham Ngob, north-west of Chiang Mai. The KMT army was renamed "Chinese Irregular Forces" (CIF) and was placed directly under the control of a special task force, code-named "04", commanded by Bangkok.

> After the soldiers reached Mae Salong, China and Thailand struck an agreement to transfer the administration of the group to the Thai government. The provincial governor of southern Thailand, Pryath Samanmit, was reassigned as the governor of Chiang Rai, to oversee the KMT division, but upon taking up his position, Samanmit was killed by communist insurgents. Soon afterwards, the KMT division was ordered to assist the Thai government in countering the advancing armies on Thailand's northern borders and the internal threat from the Communist Party of Thailand. Fierce battles were fought in the mountains of Doi Laung, Doi Yaw, Doi Phamon, and Mae Aabb, and the communist uprising was successfully countered. The bloodiest operation was launched on 10 December 1970, a five-year-long campaign that claimed over 1,000 lives, many from landmines. It was not until 1982 that the soldiers were able to give up their arms and were discharged to settle down to a normal life at Mae Salong. As a reward for their service, the Thai government gave citizenship to most of the KMT soldiers and their families.

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santikhiri

> When it happens, every Western company will suddenly have to pull out, just like they did Russia

The PR benefits of pulling out of Russia outweighed the negligible revenues these companies were earning from the country.

Saying goodbye to Taiwanese manufacturing is instead a death sentence for them, and probably for a large chunk of the western economy as a whole. China knows this, and they know how much there is to gain economically by keeping the system running.

So the end result is likely going to be – China pulls off a bloodless coup of Taiwan, and companies continue doing business there as usual.

> I had friends woken in the night and interrogated about their political beliefs, and I had friends forced to flee for speaking out about gender rights and other social issues. Oppression in China is real and effective.

> It’s difficult for me to imagine a better place to have lived for the past two decades than China.

I cannot understand how one mind could [fail to] reconcile these two statements. Obviously a place without state terrorism would be better! The author writes about political oppression as though it were merely a color of paint!