- cross-posted to:
- australia@aussie.zone
- cross-posted to:
- australia@aussie.zone
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/49224731
China’s ambassador to Australia has urged Canberra to prepare for dealing with a “reunified China”, declaring Chinese people “will not forgive” countries that seek to obstruct Beijing’s push to bring Taiwan under its control.
In remarks that frame reunification as inevitable and resistance as unforgivable, Xiao Qian likened Taiwan’s status to that of Tasmania and warned that any attempt of “compromising or openly distorting” Beijing’s one-China principle would constitute a retreat from prior commitments and erode trust.
He said Australia could not keep reaping the benefits of trade with China while seeking to block reunification, signalling economic consequences for resisting Beijing’s aims.
[…]
Mr Xiao also lashed a recent [Australian] Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade statement that described China’s military and coast guard drills around Taiwan as “deeply concerning, destabilising and risk inflaming regional tensions”, and reiterated that Canberra opposed any unilateral attempt to change the status quo.
[…]
He also cautioned governments, including Australia’s, against pursuing dialogue on Taiwan unless they were committed to reunification.
[…]
None of what you said is new to me, or likely to anyone in this thread. And apart from the last two paragraphs, none of it is even controversial.
The penultimate paragraph is a bit misleading. It’s not that Taiwan is not “a legitimate national government”. It’s that its claims to be the national government of all of China were obviously bullshit for a government that had not had actual control over mainland China for over two decades at the point that UN recognition changed.
The last paragraph is true in the sense of what is official recognised, but obviously incorrect in reality. Taiwan is an independent country as a matter of fact and has been since the end of the civil war. I’m not interested in what they claim, or the PRC claims, or America claims, or even what Australia claims. It is an entirely separate country that maintains entirely separate foreign policy, separate defence force, and entirely operates its own internal affairs. In no real sense is it part of the same country. And that’s what actually matters. Anyone who claims Taiwan is not an independent country is doing so for political reasons, and their discussions on the subject should be treated with significant scepticism. At best, they’re playing a game of realpolitik. At worst they’re talking bullshit.
I know which is going on here.
That’s just not true. Independent countries are defined by consensus. If they weren’t, then Crimea and the Donbas are no longer part of Ukraine, and I doubt you hold that standard. Taiwan has less claim to independence because they literally never expressed a desire for independence.
That’s wild isn’t it. That’s the definition of chavunism. You don’t care about international law, about democratic referenda, about the history of the social construction of sovereignty, about the claims of the people in question. Nope you just care about your moral framing and everyone’s just gonna have to deal with it because it’s objectively correct.
You must be a blast at parties.
Maybe I can reason with you by analogy. Racism is a social construction, right? It was invented in a book by a Portuguese guy and through the process of history became elevated to the point where it is very real but also not based on reality. It’s made up but we still measure crime statistics and distribute money and do censuses on the basis of race, right? So in what sense is race real? Only in the sense of the socio-historical process of reifying an idea into a superstructural reality that effects human lives.
Sovereignty, nations, countries, and states are the same. They don’t exist “out there” for us to discover. Some guy wrote something down and through a socio-historical process these concepts have evolved and developed into “real” things. So there are MANY real senses in which Taiwan is not an independent country - it never declared independence, it never seceded, it isn’t recognizes internationally as one, etc. These are all the mechanisms by which we socially construct the shared legal fiction of sovereign nations.
So I know you want to say that because the PLA didn’t invade Taiwan during the civil war that therefore the didn’t get their seat and the music stopped and life is actually a game of musical chairs, but that’s actually less real than the realities of international consensus. And the international consensus is that Taiwan is not an independent country.
This is a retelling of the story that is biased towards your conclusion. It’s not precisely accurate. Taiwan did not claim to be the legitimate government of “all of China” including the mainland. The KMT faction of the country of China claimed to be the legitimate government of the country called China. That country is a social construction, internationally recognized as such. The country of China has a definition that is historically constructed and again internationally recognized. This social construct that we call the country of China includes the province of Taiwan. The KMT claimed to be the legitimate government of the country of China, like Juan Guaido claimed to be the president of Venezuela. He didn’t claim to be the president of “all of Venezuela including Miami where I am sitting now and also mainland Venezuela”. It’s a political claim about political entities. Control does not really factor into it.
At one level, you’re echoing Steven Miller when he says you can’t claim something if you can’t defend it, which he says to mean the US can take Greenland because the Danish can’t defend it. That’s equivalent to what you’re saying here, and it’s just not how the social construction of sovereignty works. We definitely still have the concept of might making right, in that if a country militarily annexes another country and holds it long enough and claims it to be part of their country the international community eventually concedes the point. But that’s not this. The KMT did not even secede, let alone claim Taiwan away from some other country. None of the conditions have been met for any claims of sovereignty.
And anyone who claims it is independent is carrying water for the US empire who wants nothing more than to continue the European project of carving away parts of China and creating conditions for civil war between Chinese people so they can fight each other and not risk American lives.
See. I can make broad claims like that too. Anyone who claims Taiwan is and independent sovereign nation is doing so for political reasons and is lying by omission, either through ignorance or maliciousness, and should be met with facts and history and eventually derision.
Blah blah blah.