Taiwan is “of course” a country and China lacks both the historical evidence and legal proof to back up its sovereignty claims, President Lai Ching-te said on Sunday in a strong rebuke to Beijing and its stepped up political and military pressure.
China says democratically-governed Taiwan is “sacred” Chinese territory that has belonged to the country since ancient times, and that the island is one of its provinces with no right to be called a state.
Lai and his government strongly reject that view, and have offered talks with China multiple times but have been rejected. China calls Lai a “separatist”.
Giving the first of 10 speeches in a series called “uniting the country”, Lai drew on Taiwan’s history, including the millennia-long connection of its indigenous people to other Austronesians, like native Hawaiians, to show what he said was Taiwan’s separate and distinct development from China.
I don’t know how it’s not always being pointed out that the island of Taiwan was never a part of China.
The legitimacy of the ROC’s claim hinges on Taiwan being part of China. The ROC was the legitimate governing body of China from 1912 to 1949.The ROC took control of Taiwan from Japan at the end of WW2. After losing the civil war, they retreat to the only place they continued to govern, the island of Taiwan.
Man, there’s got to be a way to solve the Taiwan problem. Maybe a great compromise, a grand bargain? Taiwan lets Beijing save face by admitting that the PRC has been the legitimate government of all of mainland China and Taiwan from the beginning. But at the same time, Beijing then magnanimously grants Taiwan formal independence. Moreover, such an agreement is part of a larger grand bargain involving US normalization with Cuba. The US learns to live with a Communist neighbor off their coast, and China learns to live with a highly capitalist neighbor off their coast. The US military can keep troops stationed in Taiwan, and in turn China gets to station military troops in Cuba (if the Cubans are cool with that.)
One can dream, one can dream…
Or, with my luck, we’ll end up with the nightmare monkey’s paw version of this, where the two superpowers simply arrange to deport the entire Cuban population to Taiwan and the entire Taiwanese population to Cuba, and both countries then annex their respective neighboring islands. Authoritarianism and ethnic cleansing for all, all in the name of peace!
There’s a phrase to describe what I will call “China”: 分久必合 合久必分”, which translates roughly (with context) to something like “cycle through periods of separate states and one country”.
PRC will never let go of the issue.
You are also ignoring that not everyone in Taiwan supports independence. Some support the ROC becoming the legitimate government instead of the PRC.
What? Really? Chiang Kai-shek just ran his army over to some other random country and took it over? That can’t be right…
二選一：
壹） 中華民國
貳） 台灣國
