Beijing doesn't care. Beijing only cares about 1 thing- internal unity. What better way to promote this than to show the strength of modern China.

China wants other countries to fear China's economic and military power, and to bow down to China's demand (or, at the very least, fearful of repercussions from China.)

I suspect that China is perfectly content with not interacting with other countries ever, as long as other countries recognizes China as the most powerful country in the world.

PS. Do you know China's netizens most popular nickname for USA? "America Empire"

I mean, that's a pretty common opinion of the US pretty much everywhere.

I guess they’d need Wikipedia and the early Internet culture to know about the Streisand effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

You'd think Winnie the Poo would know this by now.

It's no surprise, he is a bear of very little brain.

What's the end-goal?

Tibet cannot be a separate country (or in that respect, Hong Kong) very much like Quebec cannot be a separate country from Canada.

You can say that China becomes arrogant, but what exactly West expect other than a total war that rewrite much of the world nation borders?

---

Although way passed the point to convince anyone, my comment above and below conditioned on "after WW2 (breaking up any large geographical country is unlikely)".

Quebec is not the best example. There have been two referendums on this, the second of which was extremely close to passing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_sovereignty_movement

The Supreme Court of Canada went on to confirm that a referendum is a legal method for Quebec to initiate secession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_Re_Secession_of_Queb...

True. It is just hard to rewrite nation borders once it is set and done for a country of China's size. Realistically, the West probably hope of USSR type of breakdown. To me, that is extremely unlikely given the desire of the Chinese people to remain as a united group.

> To me, that is extremely unlikely given the desire of the Chinese people to remain as a united group.

Who are you grouping under auspices of "the Chinese people"? Clearly there are large groups of people within China who want nothing to do with the One China policy.

There is no telling what will happen when the economic gravy train comes to an end, especially if it were to do so in a jarring way. I suspect this is one of the reasons why Xi has become more authoritarian recently.

>True. It is just hard to rewrite nation borders once it is set and done for a country of China's size

Can you expand on that? In particular, how that justifies governing those people against their will.

it is hard to comment in this limited space without attracting a ton of downvotes. I am a futurist, and looking into 100-year from now, won't there be a united government just like what we saw in Star Trek?

The rule-based global system is a relatively new thing. if you look back pass WW2, it is obvious without the United States as the solo superpower, it is barbarian politics between countries, not so much for "rule-based system".

Thus, what many really expect to see, when they think about national self-determination, it is envisioned as many smaller countries with one superpower, that is the United States, with globally projected military power.

That is certainly possible, but there are many questions left, for example, how that many smaller countries counter-balance the desire of the United States?

Alternatively, can the E.U. be an example? It is certainly possible as well, but we have to ask, at which point, the E.U. will act more like one nation, where is the boundary?

All these discussions are orthogonal to the authoritarian discussions. I am certainly sad to see people view the Chinese as unable to pursuit their own democratic process without breaking the whole country.

> I am a futurist, and looking into 100-year from now, won't there be a united government just like what we saw in Star Trek?

No, that is extremely unlikely. Not just unlikely, I would view it as pretty much impossible.

Westerner here. I'd settle for allowing Muslims to build nice minarets on mosques in XJ without getting jailed, and for Hong Kongers to be able to choose who leads them (really choose: not from a list of candidates preselected by the Party) until 2047.

The motivation? A belief that humans are entitled to at least a modicum of political self-determination.

True. But the topic here is "One-China" policy.

The "One-China" policy is way beyond just geographical. It has very strong cultural ambitions too. You cannot talk of the geographical policies in isolation.

It is related..

They want 1 hive mind, including religion

You clearly from a country which never experienced neither local muslim's terror nor post colonial separatism.

Sudan did it. Up until that point it was the largest country in Africa.

> ...the desire of the Chinese people to remain as a united group.

You must be talking about the Han people, certainly not the Tibetans or the Uighurs. Those clearly have separatist ambitions, but they don't have the power and the support to make it happen.

As for Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau - none of these want to be united politically with the PRC either, even though they are mostly Han.

A soviet-style political breakdown could be the best thing to happen to the people of the PRC, considering that those smaller Chinese countries are very successful.

You don’t think Singapore and Malaysia are part of China too, do you?

Why can't it? It once was, why can't it be again? Especially if the people of Tibet want it to be.

[Edit: oska beat me to it, and said it better besides.]

Sure it can. Especially since Tibet is a separate country; invasion is no longer recognized as a way for a country to increase its area.

Crimea says hello

Georgia sends regards

Obviously Tibet can be a separate country (and was very recently).

And if Singapore is viable as a separate country, why not Hong Kong too?

Chinese empires have broken up many times in the past. I don't expect the fate of this current empire will be any different.

China is either the world’s 1st or 2nd largest economy, depending on how you measure it:

https://www.thebalance.com/world-s-largest-economy-3306044

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-worlds-largest-expor...

I think people are slow to realize their new position in the world.

When US and Europe shipped all that manufacturing to China, it created this problem.

Most of China’s exports are low value manufactured goods which can be made elsewhere. There’s a lot more countries in the world than there are Chinas, even if your worldview counts both of them.

That used to be the case; now the new Silicon Valley for producing anything is in Shenzhen with crazy innovation (kinda like what Japan used to be in the 80s). You can set up your own goods production there in minutes and in all kinds of quality as your budget allows. A regular Chinese now matches a regular American in quality of life as measured by typical economical metrics (adjusted for purchase parity, not in nominal value). Many US/EU companies reduced to selling stuff one can buy on Alibaba for 1/10th, just rebranded to appear US/EU-made. There are some areas Chinese can't do yet, like advanced metallurgy, which was generating quite a bit of business for US/EU, but that disadvantage is disappearing rapidly as they continue throwing money on it and invest into research.

> A regular Chinese now matches a regular American in quality of life as measured by typical economical metrics (adjusted for purchase parity, not in nominal value).

No. China’s per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity is still under US$17K. Even with perfectly flat income distribution that would be around half of US median personal income. Realistically, the gap is much more than 2×.

I was with you until

"A regular Chinese now matches a regular American in quality of life as measured by typical economical metrics (adjusted for purchase parity, not in nominal value)."

A regular Chinese in Shenzhen, maybe. I'm not sure about someone from the part of China that isn't on the coast or Beijing.

There are 300M+ urban Chinese that now have a standard of living comparable those of their Western counterparts. There are 800M+ Chinese people living in relative poverty in rural areas that bring the average and median quality of life metrics down.

So, 1/3rd instead of 1/2th.

We can manufacture elsewhere, and many companies already are. China needs us a hell of a lot more than we need China.

> China is either the world’s 1st or 2nd largest economy, depending on how you measure it

So what? Its exports account for only ~13%. According to the same data, Belgium is 2.4%. I've never even heard of anything "Made in Belgium".

Ummm....Barco for one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barco_(manufacturer)

Arms[1].

[1] https://www.fnherstal.com/

Beer

Excellent chocolates and cheese as well. Great pommes frites, but those are harder to export.

Don't forget waffles!

And not just any beer, but those amazing abbey ales.

Frozen vegetables

Diamonds

Xi doesn't care, just like Putin doesn't care.