freagle

Yes, the use of force is on the table IF the US or other nation uses Taiwan to create a threat of force against the mainland.

China’s official position, consistently reiterated by Xi and other officials, is that they reserve the right to use force primarily in the context of the Taiwan issue to prevent formal Taiwanese independence or foreign interference

How would the Chinese government “take” Taiwan peacefully? The Chinese government position is very clear on Taiwan - Taiwan will come to desire integration with the Chinese government over time as relations between the mainland and the island improve (remember Taiwan was openly fascist until 1992, which is only 34 years ago) and as relations between the island and the West deteriorate.

Right now, the status of Taiwan is as ambiguous as the status of the dominance of the Western global system. When the KMT fled after their loss, all of China was totally impoverished after a century of humiliation at the hands of the imperialists. As the imperialists do, to create division, they improve the material conditions for a subset of people - in this case they invested in fascist Taiwan and developed it into an economic power, just like they did with Hong Kong. The purpose of this was to make the people living in the island prefer working with the rich imperialists over working with the very very poor communists, and of course it worked. But, as the West continues to sunset, Taiwan will get less and less economic benefit from aligning with the imperialists, and the whole dynamic will slowly, naturally change.

The problem here, as ever, is not actually the Chinese government but the Western governments.

And the majority have chosen to not decide at all.

But there are differences between formal status and de facto status.

A truly independent state has its own government and its own military. This is critical because the Chinese government has been very clear that it will not attempt to reintegrate Taiwan by force, knowing that doing so will create a terrible resistance movement that will make life bad for everyone.

But the Chinese government is also clear that if the US brings its military to Taiwan and establishes the island as a de facto or actual US military base then it will invade. If Taiwan allows the US to establish such a base there, then the locla Taiwan government is not choosing independence but vassalage.

LOL. So it matters that it was part of China, then part of Japan, but it stops mattering after that? Really?

Which country liberated Taiwan from Japan?

Who liberated Taiwan from Japan?

Who people can vote for is decided by the party, and AFAIK not everybody can become a member of the party, and participate in that decision.

Who people can vote for is decided by the party, but that decision making process involved elections within the party. You are correct that there is not universal participation in the party in China due to the requirements of becoming a party member. There are 100M citizens in the party, which is a small percentage of the population.

This is where words matter. The system is, in fact, democratic, but governing power is not universal. This is true of all democracies all over the world, including Western ones. The question becomes one of the size and influence of the franchise, not a question of whether its democratic. The size of the party in China is small, and there are efforts underway to increase it They added 1M members to the party in 2024. That’s too little, but it is openly discussed and the party is clear that both they need to expand the party and they have to prevent disruption of the revolutionary government by outside forces. It is a delicate balance when only 70 years ago they were a peasant society undergoing a civil war in which the Western imperialists were invested. It’s made much more difficult by the subsequent years in which the US destroyed Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, trained and airlifted terrorists into Tibet, built a massive drug running operation through Thailand, etc.

However, the other question about democracy is whether the demos, the people, actually can change the policies of the state, the kratos. And as it turns out, the party is incredibly responsive to the people. That’s why the people approve of the work the party is doing - because the party listens to the people. As you say:

Also only one party means only one party program, and that can never be democracy, as when people vote, there is only one party program to vote for.

This isn’t really true in one-party systems. One-party systems have factions and the factions all fight for their program within the party. It’s a governed form of conflict, and it works because it doesn’t really afford for the sorts of manipulation that we see in the West. Factions have to fight for their platform according to rules of engagement, and the platforms that rise to the top are the ones that run the party. There is accountability at the platform level in these systems. Again, unlike in the West where it is very well understood that people will campaign on a platform and then not implement any of it and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

The joke is that in the US, you can change the party but cannot change the policies, while in China you can change the policies but cannot change the party. And the question is - which one is more democratic? Is it the country where the popular will of the people is what drives the policies or is it the country where the popular will of the people only drives which people inhabit offices but where the majority of people actually oppose the policies?

That’s not a theoretical question either. Research from Princeton shows that popular opinion does not matter at all in the US. Laws pass at the same rate whether they are popular or unpopular. They also shows that the primary determinant of a law passing is whether the top 1% of wealth holders approve of it. This is not true in China. The Harvard study that showed that 95% of Chinese citizens approve of their government is because it is responsive to their needs, which means they voice their opinion and their opinion is incorporated into policies.

It’s also not a democracy if certain viewpoints are oppressed, which is very much the case in China, and which we have seen very clearly in Hong Kong.

The US outlawed the communist party, blacklisted every communist sympathizer they could find, killed black organizers, and has been oppressing viewpoints for a century, but because you can elect different parties, people think its a democracy.

As for Hong Kong, we can learn a lot about Chinese politics by examining it. The Hong Kong protests raged for weeks with protestors throwing fire bombs at police. That would never happen in the US because the US would brutally put such protests down very quickly. Chinese police, however, we given orders to disengage when things got too violent. Their role in Hong Kong was to prevent the protests from getting totally out of control, essentially to let the protestors express their anger for as long as they needed for it calm down and become more civil.

We can also learn a lot about it from the commentary of the citizens there. The people of Hong Kong that were protesting were a small minority and mostly in a specific age range between late teens and mid 30s. The elders were not protesting and in fact shunned many of their own young family members who protested. And the reason is because of the way Hong Kong “democracy” came about. Hong Kong was ripped away from China by the British as part of the British’s spoils from the Opium Wars. Brits in Hong Kong were immune to the law. They would abuse the residents without consequence, and the Chinese living there were living mean lives.

That changed when the Brits realized they would not be able to keep Hong Kong. As soon as they realized China was on the rise and intended to not renew their lease of the island, the first thing the Brits did was consider if they could force China to renew the lease by force, but the analysis was that this would be a bad idea. So instead, the Brits completely reformed Hong Kong and created a middle class, and elevated the most loyal servants of the Brits into bankers to give them huge salaries and bonuses, and they created a parliamentary democracy that they controlled and propagandized everyone through their control of the schools. And they did this specifically to make reintegration with China as hard as humanly possible.

And China knew this. And they knew they had to balance national security and the self-determination of the people of Hong Kong. They knew eventually they would come around to Chinese governance, but that they couldn’t force it. But they also knew that if they let Hong Kong be totally free it would be used as a launching point for Western terrorism and separatism, just like the Brits and Americans always do. So when China passed a law cementing the national security rules they felt were necessary, it sparked a protest, and it was couched in the language of “pro democracy” even though the Hong Kong governance structure was being left in place.

To me, that’s not totalitarianism. To me, that’s measured governance.

But yes China has some level of a very very flawed democracy, and there is a visible path for improvement within the system, when the political landscape allows for it. But as we have seen with the American flawed democracy, the powers that be may be very hesitant to yield power to a more democratic structure. In that way USA has failed for about 200 years. Hopefully the Chinese model allows for a bit more progress than we’ve seen in USA.

But these are two very different experiences. China is under siege, being surrounded by nuclear military bases. The US has no such threat. Similarly, the powers that be in the US do not listen to the people at all, and consistently have terrible approval ratings, whereas the Chinese government is constantly working on their process of listening to and addressing the needs of the people. The flaws are in no way equivalent.

But on the humanitarian side, and respect for minorities, China is still way behind. It is also a country with death penalty, which is clearly contrary to democratic values.

We can have this discussion, but it’s very fraught. The reality is that Tibetans have their own autonomous state within China, they educate their children with the Tibetan language and their culture thrives, whereas in the US Indian reservations are horrible places where traditional religions are barely hobbling along and languages are dying because of the repression. Structurally, China is far better for multiculturalism than the US is. As for the death penalty, I disagree it’s contrary to democratic values. Democracies around the world and throughout history have had the death penalty and it didn’t make them undemocratic. China’s use of the death penalty to protect the public good from people who betray the public trust is sort of wonderful compared to the fact that we fine businessmen a few million when they kill a thousand people through deliberate negligence just to make some money.

As I wrote, fascist as in authoritarian, and it is a fact, IDK why you consider facts laughable?

At this point, you’re just smearing your words together. It sounds like you’re saying Totalitarian == Fascism == Authoritarian

That’s just not how I’ve seen these words get developed. Authoritarian is the systemic use of authority to achieve goals. America is more authoritarian than China - it imprisons more of its people, it uses violence against the entire world, and it even has official decrees from the president called executive orders. China, on the other hand, does not allow the president to issue unilateral executive orders, but instead requires all such decrees to go through the structures and processes of the party. It has fewer of its people in prison, and its prisons are focused on rehabilitation instead of authoritative retribution, as evidence by its very low recidivism rates. It also hasn’t dropped a bomb since 1989.

I’m out of space. But suffice to say these words aren’t equivalent, and nearly everything you can point to about China can be applied to the US, to the UK, etc, and often in worse ways. The systems are different, they have different shapes and manifestations, but China is not somehow obviously evil compared to the West.

Taiwan is a Western-style parliamentary democracy. This is not the only way to run a democracy. China is a Communist democracy, with elections being only one of the ways that people can have influence over there governance. There’s a reason why 95% of Chinese citizens are happy with their government (these numbers come from a study Harvard conducted over 15 years and do not reflect Chinese government reports).

The idea that China is fascist is laughable.

If that’s what you believe, then it’s no wonder you think Taiwan should be independent. It’s not true, but it’s understandable.

You think the issue is Xi? From 1950 to 1992 the KMT was a fascist government on Taiwan killing political dissidents under martial law. The only reason that it wasn’t stopped is because the UK and US protected the KMT from the minute they lost the civil war.

The reason there is greater tension with Taiwan under Xi is because the US has ramped up its rhetoric, its military collaboration, and its diplomacy with Taiwan while Xi is in office. The CPC has always considered Taiwan part of China, and the KMT have always considered Taiwan part of China. The problem has always been the West intervening to create conflict and protect fascists.

Odd that you think believing that the US is a violent, terrible, evil, exploitative globe-spanning empire exporting death, destruction and poverty is equivalent to liking Trump.

everyone I disagree with is a Russian troll

Real free thinker vibes

I’m sorry, you think this sort of behavioral escalation is distinctively Trumpian? Go look up the military actions of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, etc. This is the the US - nonstop mass murder, constantly, unending, brutal, insane. Trump is just rubber stamping what the military puts in front him. He isn’t planning these things out.

HL3 when?

LoL. 80% of literally all poverty alleviation in the entire world over the last 70 years was done by the CPC. The CPC 5-year planning process led to the establishment of Chinese university dominance in at least 36 of the tracked 48 high tech fields in the world and it’s not even close - in some high tech fields China holds all of the top 10 spots. The CPC presided over literally the largest and fastest industrialization process the world has ever seen.

The dangerous narrative is that Democrats are different. The number of people killed under the Democrats is staggering. Stop propagating this narrative that somehow voting for Democrats is better.

The US runs NATO. The US decided to put Nazi officers in charge of NATO. The US came up with Operation Gladio. The US decided to expand NATO to undermine MAD and try to win nuclear war like psychopaths. The US got NATO to attack a bunch of countries not in Europe despite claiming it’s a European defense force. The US had NATO dropping Depleted Uranium in civilian areas in Yugoslavia in a so-called war for humanitarian reasons.

NATO is literally just an American nuclear military staffed with fascists and deployed in Europe with zero legal accountability, zero democratic accountability, and zero reason to exist other than to project US power in the region.

Europeans have zero fucking control over what happens.

You can’t really be serious. You think a few local elections have anything to do with Venezuela?

I got news for you. The USA has been attacking Venezuela since GWB was in office. Literally every president has done something against Venezuela since then. Most of it has been coup attempts and collective punishment to starve the Venezuelan people. But no one gives a shit because even Mamdani says shit like Venezuela is a dictatorship.

No, Americans are JUST fine with bloodshed as long as the president follows a narrative that makes the US look like heros.

I know not everything said by governments are lies, but when you see a graph with “how happy are you” and China and north Kora are at the top of the lists you gotta wonder.

I wish I could leap through the screen and shake you emphatically. Why?! Why do you gotta wonder!? Listen to your inner voice answer the question. Then continue.

No seriously. Home ownership in China and Cuba is higher than in the US. China accounts for nearly ALL global poverty alleviation. Chinese people went from living on a dollar a day to having purchasing power parity with the richest countries in the world in 70 years. That means from Grandma being born to now she has seen her family go from rice farming and dying of infections to driving an electric car. It’s quite literally stunning.

But more to the point, Harvard University spent 15 years studying Chinese sentiment about their government. Harvard. A US university, that propogated and profited from race science and the slave trade. That has graduated so many US presidents. That university spent 15 years studying Chinese citizens and determining that the Communist Party of China enjoys a 95.5% approval rating by the people in China.

That not the Chinese government saying that. That’s a Western imperial institution saying that.

As for North Korea, just think of the history. In 1953 they had no buildings and were living in caves because the Americans bombed literally every structure in the territory and then started dropping napalm on the people. They were literally living in caves to avoid the US raining fire down upon them.

And now they have a nuclear ICBM. They built an entire nuclear program and an entire rocketry program in 70 years after having every single productive capacity completely annihilated. You don’t do that without food, so they had to build their agriculture back up, while they were under the world’s worst embargo in history. They had to rebuild all of their power infrastructure. They had to rebuild all of their transportation infrastructure. They had to rebuild all of their manufacturing infrastructure.

Every single industry had to be built from rubble and they are only 70 years into it. And their people are fed, they are safe from invaders, they are safe from the Americans specifically, and they did all together as a unified society.

I would be very unhappy if my country was bombed to the raw earth, but honestly after decades of working side by side with my neighbors to rebuild my home, my village, and my country, I think I would be pretty happy.

The only reason you say that it seems fantastical that Chinese or North Korean people are happy is because you are starting from the assumption that the people live under a tyrannical government that deliberately impoverished them while they get rich and force everyone to comply with corrupt whims. That’s the propaganda story, not reality.

The reality is that corruption is everywhere in all governments, and the West loves corrupt governments because it can bribe anyone to do anything anywhere in the world. When countries like China implement anti-corruption programs, Western propagandists call it authoritarian and say it’s terrible, but it’s only terrible because the people getting purged are compromised by the West.

The reality is that Russian and Chinese spies can’t really do too much damage to the US because they don’t have the global network of terrorists, death squads, and paramilitary groups that the US has. On the reverse, US spies in China or Russia could cause massive damage because they have been working for 70 years to cultivate armed paramilitaries and terrorists to destabilize entire regions on command. So when China implements counter-intelligence and national security programs, we hear on the one hand US intelligence officials saying things like “the CPC has crippled our spy networks in China” and on the other hand we hear news reports of draconian authoritarianism for no reason other than being evil and bad. Which is it? Did China apply it’s authority to keep the country safe from the CIA’s deep and wide network of spies or does China just enjoy punishing it’s people for no reason?

Back to what started this, why do you think it makes perfectly logical sense to believe the Chinese and North Korean people couldn’t possibly be as happy as reports indicate they are? What specific things do you think make that impossible, and very importantly, how did you come to the conclusion that those specific things are true?

Because I know what I used to think. I used to think “It’s obvious! Everyone knows this! It’s all over the news all the time! Look at the great firewall, look at the social credit score, look at how they censor pooh bear!”

And what I found out was that none of that shit came from my own research. It came from the Western propaganda machine. And when I finally started to actually dig in, I found out it was just paper-thin garbage. Chinese ecommerce in China sells Winnie the Pooh kitsch just like anywhere else in the world. The social credit score is for businesses that harm the public, and while they did try it out for individuals it was so easily abused the government shut it down to protect their people.

I don’t know how to convince you. I probably can’t. But maybe this puts some doubt in your mind, or someone else who finds this thread.

I will never understand why anglos think they are more susceptible to Chinese or Russian propaganda than they are to American and British propaganda. American propaganda spans then entire globe. They run entire media companies for the USG. American and British propaganda analysts have demonstrated just how powerful Anglo propaganda machines are.

Chinese propaganda, by comparison, can only be a very recent phenomenon because 70 years ago they were a total agrarian society without any technology while the US was the most technologically advanced society on the planet.

It doesn’t take much to understand that when the CIA funds a group like The Epoch Times and the Victims of Communism that they can’t be trusted with telling the truth. But they don’t even TRY. All you have to do is look into their claims and they fall completely apart. The original authors of the book of the victims of communism have denounced their own writing as fabrication and deliberately misleading. They counted KIA Nazi soldiers as victims of communism FFS!!

No, these are not equal sides. No these are not abstractions that have equal valence. They are distinct and distinguishable historical processes. You can look at them individually, you can compare them. You will not find an equivalent of Voice of America or Radio Free Asia. You will not find an unbroken history dating back to before the Opium Wars of oligarchic manipulation of the media for the purpose of going to war and plundering. You will not find another empire that dominated 80% of the world’s population.

You imagine me some empty headed brainwashed robot but you fail to understand that I was raised on the same TV shows, video games, movies, books, and rhetoric that you were. I was taught the same false history you were and I believed it like you do. I am aware of the information you have access to and the perspective you had because I personally used to have it.

I have empathy for your position. You have none for mine.

We went through the Uyghur situation. The birthrate of Uyghurs is higher than white people in America. They didn’t forcibly sterilize tens of thousands of Uyghurs. It’s quite literally a propaganda war about Xinjiang with the US trying to paint China’s successful anti-terrorism program as a genocide in order to continue the USA’s program of training and arming terrorists in Xinjiang. Like, it’s literally a propaganda game and you’re losing because you can’t see it.

The organ harvesting propaganda comes from Falun Gong, a group that is funded by the CIA. It is further propagated by Victims of Communism journalists, again, an organization tied to the US propaganda machine. Another propaganda war that is winning the battle for your brain. No. There is no actual evidence of organ harvesting from homeless people in China. It is literally just baseless allegations.

Go find me treaties that China broke with the Tibetans or the Uyghurs. I can wait.

Because there are real material differences? What is it that you don’t understand? Fully 1/3 of indigenous children were separated from their families by the US and forced in torture schools to “get the Indian out of them”. China has done no such thing. The US administered forced hysterectomies on “undesirables”, tens of thousands of women had the uteruses just removed. China has done no such thing.

China doesn’t have a reserve system like the US. China hasn’t broken all of its treaties with the Tibetans or the Uyghurs the way the US has with indigenous nations. China didn’t hire a fascist to desecrate a sacred mountain that was stolen by breaking a treaty.

Read your history. Stop comparing American propaganda narratives and actually learn about what’s really happening. These two historical processes are incredibly materially different