“Yes, but history…” they will say.
And in history China used to be the opium export market of the Brits so by historic rules it has to be that again. I guess they’ll say “but that’s different”.
I think they might be using “mainland Taiwan” as a way of saying China - Taiwan is an island which China thinks is “theirs” for some reason.
SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
niceboysummer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It is literally official US policy that Taiwan is an island that is a part of China.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The politicians have to play nice and be polite. Right up until they don’t have to anymore.
The people can recognize that Taiwan is what happened to the last freely elected government of Western Taiwan, and that the CCCP are nothing more than despots and authoritarian tyrants that freely abuse their own people, and would absolutely be bullying the world, if they were actually as powerful as they claim to be.
miserablegit@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
Tbf, it was theirs - until it wasn’t. At this point, it is a bit like the British were insisting that the US was theirs.
ylph@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The history of Taiwan is quite a bit more complex than that, but the PRC (current government in mainland China) has never controlled Taiwan - it was never theirs.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1894 until 1945 when Japan was forced to hand it over to the ROC (the successor government to the Qing dynasty, which was the last time you could argue China controlled the island - the Qing managed to almost fully colonize it before losing it to the Japanese, although a lot of the mountainous parts of Taiwan were still mostly autonomous at that time and inhabited by aboriginal Taiwanese who continued to resist the Qing rule)
The ROC takeover of the island is also seen as another colonization by many Taiwanese as well - the descendants of the Qing era colonists who were mostly Hokkien speakers from Fujian, while the ROC migration in 1949 was mostly Mandarin speakers from wider China, who fairly brutally imposed their rule over the island (see 4 decades of martial law, etc.)
ROC managed to reform itself over time, and Taiwan is now a vibrant democratic country which is forging it’s new national identity where most people would prefer to be left alone to control their own affairs.
rallatsc@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
You’ve got it backwards - Taiwan (the Republic of China) actually used to control the mainland before the Chinese civil war that resulted in the modern-day government (the People’s Republic of China) taking control. Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
miserablegit@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
“Taiwan” was never the administrative centre of China, come on. Some of the Chinese ruling classes fled there after the revolution. It’s like saying the capital of Germany was always Bonn.
rallatsc@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Sorry, bad phrasing. I intended to say “The current government of Taiwan”