RapidcreekXi warned Biden during summit that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with China
Heresy_generatorUS media needs to stop using the word "reunify" to refer to the PRC's threatened imperial conquest of an island they've never controlled.
The news media needs to report on what is true and verifiable, without adding their own interpretation (except for labelled opinion pieces).
In this case, the true and verifiable fact to report is what Xi told Biden. And he probably used a word meaning “reunify”.
In this case, the true and verifiable fact to report is what Xi told Biden. And he probably used a word meaning “reunify”.
If they're using a false term that someone else used they should use quotes:
Xi warned Biden during summit that Beijing will "reunify" Taiwan with China
Iit should always be apparent there is editorialization happening tho. Kinda like [sic] -> that is obviously the author clarifying they are not misquoting or misspelling
MisterFrogWhat you’ve written is still editorialising. The way it’s written is also clear who was making the statement, Xi was. In the eyes of China it is reunifying, so no matter one’s opinion, it is their stated opinion, so seems weird to put “reunfiy” in quotations when the rest isn’t.
report what is true and verifiable
if they did that there wouldnt be much news, a lot fewer journalists, less jobs overall, and much less advertising revenue.
never gonna happen
But it’s a good yardstick to measure the news you’re reading. Always ask yourself:
“Are they reporting on something that happened? If yes, do they say who’s seen it happen?”
Way too many “news stories” nowadays boil down to “some no-one posted something on X about something they haven’t themselves witnessed”.
of an island they’ve never controlled.
Oh boy this night get me downvoted. Saying the Communist Party never controlled it is a tautology. That’s what happens when there’s a civil war that turns into a stalemate: one side does not control the land of the other side. So of course the Communist side never controlled it. This is ducking the nuance of what the actual situation is, that there was a civil war that never ended.
It’s a historical fact but how is it a tautology? Territory can change hands during a civil war as evidenced by the RoC no longer controlling China. Unless I’m misunderstanding something. Either way I don’t think that changes the point, if that’s a tautology then claiming that it can be reunified is a contradiction.
poVoqEven before that Taiwan did not belong to the rest of China.
There were some settlers from the main land, but the indigenous population always controlled most of the island and the Chinese settlers were careful not to antagonize them.
This lasted for hundreds of years, pretty much until a brief period at the end of the 19th century when the Chinese government decided to send troops to brutally subjugate the indigenous population, only to shortly after lose control of Taiwan to the Japanese.
Yep, this word is used intentionally by Xi and he knows he means “conquer the nation developed by the people that escaped his predecessors”.
The nation wasn’t developed by the people who escaped. That’s an ahistorical way of framing the issue
Taiwan was developed by the overthrown proto-fascist military junta who just lost the civil war. After taking the island, they didn’t tell the people of Taiwan that the war had been over and they were no longer China until 1991. The first labor laws outlawing slavery were introduced to the people of Taiwan in 2006. The people of Taiwan still consider themselves China (it is afterall the name they go by, not Taiwan) and full Taiwanese independence is still a minority held belief on the actual island.
Just to be clear, I am a supporter of their independence, but this is a very messy situation in which the political party who comrade the country is the same fascist party who lost the war in the first place and still maintains to the UN that they are the legitimate government of the mainland. Full separation is convenient for the West, but neither side actually wants that, they just don’t want to be ruled by either fascists or communists, and I think that is incredibly fair for all people actually involved to want.
full Taiwanese independence is still a minority held belief on the actual island
Excuse me wut
Unless they can prove otherwise, it would be naked editorializing to not call it a reunification.
China wants to maintain the status quo and believes (perhaps wrongly) that Taiwan will eventually normalize relations with China due to economic opportunities.
The US wants Taiwan to declare independence to contain the China threat, which is why the US funnels so many resources from government-funded entities like the National Endowment for Democracy to Taiwan’s DPP.
The fact that the US is taking more overt action in Taiwan today is a sign that there’s a perception in Washington that China’s status quo strategy is working.
Horseshit. That status quo has always been a Taiwan free of CCP rule. The PRC has never controlled Taiwan and their stated goal is to make it part of their country by any means necessary; that's disrupting that status quo.
Even the most shameless CCP propagandist should realize that trying to convince people of the ridiculous lie that the country promising imperial conquest of land that's never been theirs "wants to maintain the status quo" is baseless nonsense.
HubertManneyeah thats like saying hong kong normalized into china
The status quo is Taiwan having de facto independence without seeking de jure independence.
It’s not that complicated.
So, again, your assertion is horseshit. The PRC is very explicitly trying to change the status quo of Taiwan having de facto independence. We know this from repeated, unequivocal official and unofficial statements about "reunification".
Your assertion that the US is trying to change the status quo by supporting the DPP might make sense in a world where the PRC wasn't supporting the KMT to an ever greater extent; either their both equally trying to disrupt the status quo through political support or their both maintaining the status quo by supporting opposing parties.
But then, of course, suggesting either major political party in Taiwan actually supports or is proposing a change to the status quo isn't true either, is it?
The KMT supports the status quo, the DPP wants to flip it on its head.
Are you even Taiwanese?
The ROC was independent and sovereign before the PRC was even a thing. If anything it’s the autonomous mainland provinces which need to seek de jure independence from the ROC. The PRC should be thankful that the ROC by now is, by and large, willing to grant such a request (There’s some Kuomintang who’d bitch and moan but they’d get over it).
PriorityMotifI thought they were holding hands at first glance. 🥰
Illiterate DomineIt could happen. In China, among many other places, same-sex hand holding isn’t uncommon among friends and doesn’t indicate a romantic attachment. I dont imagine Biden and Xi have that kind of relationship, though.
ares35ROC is gonna take back the mainland?
FartsWithAnAccentYou mean West Taiwan?
Glory to Taiwan and their West Taiwan acquisition project!
Fun fact; actual Taiwanese people fucking loathe this meme.
Depends on the person in question. Some don’t as you’ve said some do.
Source: I’m engaged to a Taiwanese person with family back in Taiwan. Her parents would hate it, her siblings laugh.
Fun fact; actual Taiwan people fucking loathe this meme.
I thought I read like 3 weeks ago they had no interest anytime soon
Someone said after Russia’s military was shown to be a farce, that if they were China they’d be shitting their pants and immediately launch an investigation into how good their military actually was.
EndorkendChina has the advantage of actually having enough people to do the meat for the grinder approach though.
True but that doesn’t work too well to invade an island.
eventually the bodies will pile-up enough that the next batch can just walk over.
That strategy would need quite a lot of bodies given there is an ocean in the middle there.
the strait isn't that deep, and it's only about 100 miles across.
It would take around 400 million bodies to fill in a one metre wide corridor across the strait based on some napkin math. So yeah I guess it’s actually possible technically
I feel like this would be a hilariously morbid engineering thought exercise…
Chinese central command wouldn’t have the power to push such an approach, their army has a very decentralised structure due to its partisan roots.
DarkGamerChina's big problem is what they offer internationally is cheap labor and they're going through a population collapse now, like other countries that ascend economically, people have fewer kids and younger workers want better salaries and conditions, (understandably so!) This combined with the US's trade war with them has caused international companies to move a lot of production to other impoverished nations like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Mexico, among others instead of to China. China's economic miracle was because of this large pool of population that is vanishing. Sacrificing soldiers of reproductive age would accelerate this problem.
If they invade, won’t all the chip fabrication places just blow all their shit up and wipe systems? Doesn’t seem like they’ll be able to capture a whole lot aside from land and that will come at a pretty steep cost I’d imagine.
That’s a good threat if plausible.
That’s probably not a good plan, however. What you gonna do after the blowing up the plant? Emigrate, maybe, but for those who’ll stay: Congratulations, you have just blown up your job, your life and any bargaining chip you ever had.
I heard about that too. The technology produced there is too valuable to be left to invaders.
YoBuckStopsHereThey moved TSMC production facilities to Phoenix, Arizona. It’s slated to open in 2025.
[Curb Your Enthusiasm closing credits song plays]
Except they have problems finding workers. 3rd world Americans aren’t cut out for the jobs it seems like.
I think it’s mostly because it’s in Arizona… Not exactly the tech capital of the U.S…
They wanted somewhere where land and labor was cheap and neglected to consider education and water are vital for a semiconductor fab to operate.
It was a fucking stupid decision, and TSMC has been flying in Taiwanese engineers and workers in general to make up for the short comings.
More info on TSMC: youtu.be/AJGrdtKT3LM?si=M-3EWWOPcIXX8vgv
AI’s Single Point of Failure | Rob Toews | TED
They didn’t move them, they’re just building them here so we don’t have to depend on threatened foreign land for the production. pr.tsmc.com/english/news/2977
Also SMIC (China’s chip manufacturer) is now also producing 7nm chips, even though they were sanctioned in 2020. That means they either had a breakthrough in the process or they obtained and were able to repair and operate/reverse engineer the incredibly complex TSMC fabs.
Thank God they’re finally building some chip plants here. The fact that our whole economy depends on some foreign island next to a huge country that has always hustorically threatened to take it back is insane to me. Although I think we should have more manufacturing in the homeland in general. Thanks capitalism, for off shoring manufacturing for the last many decades -_-
It’s a pretty interesting story where Taiwan decided to invest enormously into chip production so they could use the economic benefits to shield themselves from China. Worked pretty well eh
It was a gamble to focus on fabrication only and not include design. It payed off but it was a gamble.
TSMC is just the end of a long supply chain of one-of-a-kind suppliers, all conveniently aligned with the West. TSMC does not make the lithography machines, the Dutch ASML is the only company that does (though they have some plants in the US now I think). Even so, ASML would be dead in the water without Swiss Zeiss optics.
The US’ strength was never autarky, but global trade. The reason the US economy is so resilient is because most US dollars are not in the US, but in reserves across the world. That means even the US currency is intertwined with global trade. If the US attempted autarky, it would collapse both the US and the world economy. That’s why Trump’s policies were beyond stupid by the way.
Zeiss is German.
7nm doesn’t need EUV, as things get smaller it doesn’t suddenly become impossible to do things with traditional lithography it just becomes harder and at some point incredibly uneconomical. They certainly ripped off the node from TSMC in some way (whether spionage or reverse-engineering), that is, the shape of the transistors and stuff but that doesn’t mean that they’re producing them in the same way.
Thing is, that would only bring them to parity for the current gen, which they would instantly fall behind on having to start everything up again and train or force people into running the modern nodes.
These fabs (and pretty much ALL fabs) depend on tech to run their processes and make their chips, which isn't made in Taiwan.
If they do it for the silicon, they'll also need to take a good chunk of West Europe.
Would it set the West back a bit? Yes, but not all that much. There are non Eastern fabs up to date and the people in Taiwan trained to operate bulk fabs are probably on a shortlist for extraction targets too.
The land is most of what they want. Taiwan is militarily strategic land, it essentially blocks all access to the Pacific.
BOMBSThe chip thing is definitely an issue. However, even if they didn’t get any chip tech or factories, they still get the island. Militarily speaking, the situation is similar to Cuba and US during the Cold War. Taking control of the island will grant them more military security. Additionally, it will grant them control over the shipping lanes in the surroundings waters, which are heavily used for international trade.
The US needs it for trade/their economy. China needs it to protect itself and gain more economic power. For these reasons, it makes sense for both China and the US to be heavily interested in controlling Taiwan. Personally, I really don’t see a likely solution to avoiding military conflict unless the powers of the two sides figure out how to resolve their antagonism, which I think is unlikely without a change in Chinese leadership.
Militarily speaking, the situation is similar to Cuba and US during the Cold War. Taking control of the island will grant them more military security.
I don’t really know if that makes a whole bunch of sense… The only country with the capabilities of attacking China is the US. The only real provocation that may spark that military conflict is an attack on Taiwan or South Korea.
Taiwan isn’t even that advantageous of a location for an invasion either way, the strait of Formosa would be a death trap for any amphibious landing. The most militarily important region for China is and always has been the Korean peninsula.
I think Chinas main motivation is that Taiwan disrupts their plans to completely control trade routes in the South China sea. Once the 9 dash line is under control and expanded to include the territorial waters of Taiwan, China will have a defacto monopoly on trade for most of eastern Asia.