The height of military tensions were in the late 50s, when China and Taiwan were shelling each other. In later decades, they still sometimes deliberately shelled each other as a statement to others that the China-Taiwan issue is a domestic Chinese issue. Nowadays neither side has unleashed a shot for well over 30 years.
The US has maintained the One China Policy for decades as well. Officially they haven't changed the policy, but unofficially they are trying to change it into a "Taiwan Independence Policy" without admitting that they are. This is where a lot of recent US-China tensions come from, especially on the military side.
Anything Russia does to other states has got absolutely nothing to do with it.
For example, the US clearly agreed on the One China Policy but they are now changing it. Because the US no longer values the original purpose that the One China Policy served.
So the question "will China renegade on its agreement or not?" is best answered with another question: "What is China's core interest? What purpose does an agreement serve to China?"
It is unfortunately here where big misreadings happen. Popular western understand of China says that China does things because they are "authoritarian", "expansionist", "power hungry", etc. But a true analysis of China's interest would show that one of China's core interests is territorial integrity, defined largely by the territory it had inherited from the Qing empire in 1911, and the Republic of China in 1949. China's policy on territorial integrity has not changed since 1949.
We may not always agree with China's interests. Maybe they conflict with ours. But properly understanding those interests will at the end of the day surely yield better outcomes than misreading China with stereotypes.
And talking about inheriting territory, let's not forget that the Republic of China still very much exists.
Today the Chinese govt, aka Xi and the CCP seem to be working to become the most powerful country through trying to weaken democratic governments, along with this comes increasing threatening military actions. The world is in a dangerous 10 year period as China's power increases to a maximum, dictator Xi is in charge, and pressure will increase on them as their population starts to shrink along with an increasing retired population compared to the number of workers.
This is all separate from my belief that China should be able to be free to make their own choices about their own country, they just can invade and destroy everyone else to get their own way. I feel great sadness for the Chinese people being subject to a horrible central government (yeah, they've also moved millions of people out of poverty and improved their lives, but they still ended up with a country that like the USSR now won't let people leave freely, holds foreign citizens hostile, and also records college lectures so they can see if profs talk about impure thoughts).
This is false. All of today's claims existed back in 1949 when the PRC inherited claims from the ROC. In fact the PRC today claims fewer territories than 1949 because they've given up some territory as part of diplomatic deals.
the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position.
I guess this shows how unfundamented is the current chinese territorial claim. Xinjiang was for most centuries an independent region or part of a different (usualy turkish) empire. Something similar happened with Tibet. It might make sense to include what's currently Mongolia into the chinese claim.
Regarding Xinjiang, the Xinjiang claim is older than the US's claim on its own land so it cannot be more unfundamented than the US as a nation is.
If by that you mean the US agreed that Taiwan should be a part of the PRC, that's never been true. It was just a condition of establishing relations with China that the US officially pretend that Taiwan isn't an independent nation. But everyone understood that the actual belief and policy of the US was that Taiwan has a right to independence. There hasn't been any change there.
So the US didn't officially support "Taiwan independence". After the US flipped to PRC, they opposed the PRC taking over Taiwan, but the "Taiwan independence" notion didn't exist in Taiwan at the time. The govt in Taiwan wanted to retake the mainland. The independence notion only came into existance relatively recently.
ie. The original generation that considered themselves Chinese has mostly died off, and now the younger generation who consider themselves Taiwanese are slowly taking over.
In reality, the US doesn't believe that they're the same country: the status quo is that they aren't. The fact that the US can't say as much out loud, to avoid insulting the government of the PRC, doesn't make that any less true.
I guess what I'm saying is, nobody should pretend that the the official pronouncements of the US are its actual beliefs or policy around Taiwan. Everybody knows the US supports Taiwan staying independent, and just has to dance around that in public statements. Anything it says to the contrary is a polite fiction without real world effect.
Yes, but merely looking at the agreement that China broke recently with the invasion of Hong Kong, a reasonable person would assume that there's a much higher risk of them breaking more agreements than another arbitrary country that hasn't been invading other countries recently. Said another way, most people currently will trust France to honor a pact more than they trust Russia.
...not that that somehow makes violating the agreement with and invading Hong Kong somehow morally excusable.
China seems pretty similar to Russia right now - with an authoritarian dictator planning to use military force to invade nearby countries.
You can even draw parallels between their mindsets - Putin wants to recreate the glory of the Soviet Union and views the old USSR countries as "his", just as Xi Jinping wants to recreate the glory of old China and views Hong Kong and Taiwan as his.
> So the question "will China renegade on its agreement or not?" is best answered with another question: "What is China's core interest? What purpose does an agreement serve to China?"
I don't see what purpose this statement has. It's clearly in China's core interest to be aggressive and expansionist and invade nearby countries and steal IP from other countries, but none of that is right, and none of that changes the fact that they're an aggressive enemy who pose a threat to the whole Asia region at least, if not the whole world.
While the EU, US, India, Australia are all trying to change this semi conductor status quo by building their own manufacturing facilities, it is not easy as I understand it. Am guessing it would take at least 5-10 years to have full fledged production facility in the scale the world demands if this needs to be changed. That is if really wanna be Taiwan free with semi conductors. Which I doubt the world will do. But hey with M1 and RISC-V, there is a whole new future waiting for the semi conductor industry. So who knows what will happen?!
Yeah. But with the current geopolitical environment every country is thinking about this. But like I said, ONLY IF they have the motive. Which I also mentioned that the world won't have so as to completely take Taiwan out of the equation.
> RISC-V is still years from matching ARM performance or cost, and by the time it does, a lot of it will likely be getting manufactured by TSMC.
You are probably right. Also RISC-V is used as a support module with Nvidia cards already if I am not wrong. They just are not used as standalone processors. And with M1, I meant ARM in general. But RISC-V is very promising. Like I said, who knows about the future?!
> TSMC is really good at making chips, and really good at learning how to make new kinds of chips, so any change will have to come from other fabs getting equally good.
I don't think me or any country for that matter disapproves that. But with China as it's neighbor, it's just stupid for the world to think everything will be sunshines and butterflies. It's always a good idea to deter from putting everything in one basket.
Many people in Hong Kong grasp onto useless documents like the Sino-British Declaration because their actual constitution (the basic law) gave them no assurance to match promises. That constitution always gave the PRC ability to control any and everything there to suppress anything. The appointments always came from Beijing, and it inherits a system similar to City of London where 100% of the people’s vote and representatives can only be 50% of the legislative outcome. Its hopeless - for those deathly afraid of PRC life - and always has been, and China can wait out that “50 year thing” ever so nominally, in a way that doesnt match anything remotely close to what is often repeated in the west about what “should” happen. To me, having read the basic law and prc constitution, China didnt break its agreement, and anyone grasping at the Sino British Declaration is being disingenuous, ignorant, or really that desperate. Only thing to point at is Britain for giving up on negotiations, because they failed the people of Hong Kong back in the 90s and let the basic law be good enough.
But again, look at Macau and why that area isn’t an issue in the minds of the west, its not the smaller population.
Despite rule of law being kind of a burgeoning concept in the PRC (unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to the stuff they were already going to do), China is pretty predictable and operates within some easy to understand confines.
The unrest over the potential use of an extradition bill prompted China to clamp down on nearly everything Hong Kong residents held near and dear and show how powerless the people there are in this reality.
It is also convenient to accelerate the "harmonization" of Hong Kong into the PRC system because many (depending on how you count) places in China are well to do now. They don't need Hong Kong's different system to be a bastion of economic progress, because its like 3% of the GDP now, compared to like 20% during handover.
Your comment was excellent, and helpful to me. Thanks.
I do disagree that China isn't watching US reaction through a million lenses to see how they can best increase their odds rolling over Taiwan with minimal damage. My strongest evidence? Political changes in Hong Kong.
China prefers peaceful reunification. They don't want to fight a war if they don't have to. At the same time, peaceful reunification is a core interest of China. Which means that they will go to war, but only if they believe peaceful reunification is no longer possible.
So yes they do watch the US to make calculations. But even if the US is weak, they still don't want a war as long as they believe peaceful reunification is possible.
Furthermore, Taiwanese reunification is not only a core interest, it's also possibly the most emotional one for the Chinese. Large portions of the population support reunification, and they will overthrow whichever leader lets Taiwan go.
This is why "raising the stakes" by announcing military support for Taiwan does not deter China. Quite the opposite: they encourage China to go to war, costs be damned, because such foreign support signal that peaceful reunification will become impossible.
As for Hong Kong, see my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31705632
China doesn't have to fight. They could just accept that the ROC/Taiwan is an independent country (which of course it is whether China accepts it or not). China has no obligation to start a war of conquest.
1) politicians see unifying China as their life goal for historical reasons, from Republic of China to People's Republic of China, it is something colonizers do not understand. I don't understand why people paying a high price to buy some old artifacts stolen from China back, but apparently for something, it is about pride. I believe the government would fall if they declare no interests on Taiwan.
2) strategically, Taiwan's location is important, having a foreign power influenced island (especially the US), is a lock on Chinese Navy, that's why it is called the first islands chain. China has to go beyond to protect its trade and energy routes.
Given the fact that US is all about containing China now, there will have to be a lot power play in Asia now, which is to US's advantage, since US is far, and China will suffer more from the war (trade routes and so on). I don't know how this will play out.
And yet, those ships have sailed. We aren't in this mess just because China is supposedly a bad guy, there are real relevant historical reasons why things are the way they are, and they can't be swept under a rug.
If China attacks Taiwan, it is absolutely because of China. It would, after all, but their own choice to engage in such a war of aggression.
Because that doesn't change the fact that a war against Taiwan would be a war of choice?
> Let's say China puts missles in Cuba similar to what happened during the Cuban missle crisis, and the US attacks either China or Cuba as a result. Would you then also wholly blame the US for "its own choice to engage in such a war of aggression"?
This is an odd comparison given that the US stopped Taiwan from developing nuclear weapons thus preventing a similar situation as the Cuban missle crisis in Taiwan. If that's your point, then China should _thank_ the US for its actions preventing Taiwanese nuclear "aggression" (I put it in quotes, since really they were developing it to prevent invasion so calling it "aggression" is kind of ridiculous, but I digress...). Besides, the US _removed_ its troops from Taiwan decades ago so the US threat in Taiwan has really decreased if anything.
So yeah none of those points really change the fact that China does not need to invade Taiwan and that it would wholly be war of choice. China could just continue to live with an independent Taiwan as it has for more than 70 years. That is if it chooses not to start a war of its on volition.
Some of us have difficulties in understanding the mindset: if some population wants one system, and is unavailable to be part of a different system (they would have moved, would not they), how do those "reunification supporters" on the other side believe, psychologically, that a system change is imaginable? They believe that coercion can be an effective solution? That "the others will adapt"? If so, that the new configuration will be stable (like a model of energy states)? It does not sound sound, in these ways - it may sound like "early stopping" in thoughts.
Furthermore, the Chinese sense of history is much longer. There are many examples in Chinese history in which some territory splitted off and then reunified later. So things like "the configuration won't be stable" wouldn't be Chinese thinking. To the Chinese, splitting off is the unstable configuration.
Given how the current Taiwan situation came to be, many Chinese view the Taiwan government as relatives with whom they've had a fight, and whom — after losing — bunkered down in the basement. The basement is still part of the house. They're still part of the family, so let's not be too cruel to them and seek peace. But if they no longer claim to be part of the family, then kick them out.
Don't they all consider themselves Han people? How do they configure their identity? Their ethnic and historical ties do not appear to be severable.
The people of Taiwan, just like those of Ukraine do not want to be re-absorbed.
> Quite the opposite: they encourage China to go to war, costs be damned, because such foreign support signal that peaceful reunification will become impossible.
It already is impossible. I think the world, save Beijing is moving on.
> Anything Russia does to other states has got absolutely nothing to do with it.
This is a major change in the global status quo (given that China is closely aligned with Russia now). I disagree with your parent comment on "unless Russia is humiliated".
It is yet unclear either way would increase China's appetite for Taiwan. If Russia is defeated, China may find it is necessary to reunite with Taiwan to maintain its geographical security given Russia would no longer be able to support / project support for China's military move in the future. If Russia wins, China may find it is a strategical weak point for U.S. allied forces and it is a good time to reunite with Taiwan given higher nationalism.
Again, it is yet unclear. One thing certain though: the uncertainty increased substantially following Russia's war on Ukraine.
My Taiwanese friends have also told me that China has significantly increased their concern for the future.
Ongoing PRC claims has been consistent since they were inherited from ROC days. They even fought war in SCS with NVietnam when their military was poverty tier. The reality is PRC rise in region has been EXTREMELY peaceful relative to level military expansion which itself is modest relative to GDP. All while settling 12/14 again, ROC inherited land border disputes with more concessions. PRC has done nothing particularly bellicose except defending claims she inherited, again not of her own making. The only possible except of Senkaku which again also ROC/TW claims. Japan BTW, has border (maritime) disputes with 100% of her neighbours despite being WW2 loser who should have territory constrained by treaty. Meanwhile SCS is a multiparty shit show, even then PRC managed to drop a dash line with North Vietnam when other parties made zero progress. The "peaceful" region rise of PRC is historically unprecedented.
There's a reason why western analysts has to bemoan about "grayzone" warfare... because PRC military has been extremely constraint. Even relative to ROC days when TW regularly blockaded military shipping and spent spy missions over PRC territory. TW just coping with reality that military balance has completely shifted in PRC favor. Tranch of US weapon sales to TW in 90s made TW one of the most advanced military powers in the region, but that's been chipped away to the point that TW itself is essentially hopeless regardless of level of US weapon sales.
As for being threatened by democracy, like TW broken politics and industrial stagnation outside of semiconductors is regularly memed on mainland. People don't generally look to TW as a model... or SK or JP or even US (anymore). PRC is threatened by renewed TW seccessionism weaponized by US because at the end of the day, the civil war never ended and they consider TW Chinese clay.
Meaning it's almost 0% on PRC expansionism. PRC cannot expand what they gained formally when UN recognition switched from ROC to PRC. They made no new claims in SCS. And in fact PRC reduced to 9dash from ROCs 11dash means Chinese sea claims shrunk under PRC. Big bro gave their neighbour a few feet of yard when they had good relations from being same book club (PRC to NVietnam). Just like 11/12 land border settlements where PRC ceded more land. By every objective metric China lost more territory under CCP dispute settlement. The opposite of expanisionism, and basically magnanimous by historic standards, huge country like PRC ceding so much territory to neighbours, voluntarily is proposterous. So much so that it's borderline treasonous, average Chinese would riot if they found out during negotiations, luckily this was pre internet.
In terms of land reclaimation and militarization, PRC was 5th out of 6 parties to conduct operations on their SCS features. They're just vastly better at it due to infra prowess and sheer PRC scale / resources. Only faultless actor in region is Brunai. And in terms of egregiousness, Vietnam is almost as bad, while claiming substantially more contested features. That's what I know.
Put another way: if the people of Taiwan decide that they don't want reunification, then China is going to invade and take them by force.
Make your own comments, don’t try and fail to interpret others’ comments and restate them.
"B wants stasis¹" // "Hence if A breaks it by removing doubts, B will act" - this is what was actually diplomatically declared, reminded, renewed in the past hours.
¹"stasis" - not the most proper expression of what is sought, but just to remain close to the original post in question.
They said “Put another way:” That is literally restating what the OG commenter said but with spin.
The OP said, "A will refrain from B under condition C: the general intention of A is to refrain from B".
The replying poster noted, "Admitting that A intends to refrain from B under condition C, the intention is also not to refrain from B, failing condition C".
The replying poster is correctly noting that the relation is not just "C→¬B", but "C→¬B ∧ ¬C→B".
FooBarWidget notes one half of the story; throw10920 remarks that the other half is also present. Correctly one states - reassuringly - "do not see a false extreme: B is not an absolute set intention", but the other notes that at the same time it should not be forgotten that "B is a set conditional intention". Which is what A has stated for a long time: "the reunification will happen: peacefully if possible, coercively otherwise".
The 'put another way' formula is logically imperfect but rhetorically admissible, it is in a clear context. Of course throw10920 did not "repeat" what FooBarWidget wrote, «what was said»: he proceeded in the debate from the immediately preceding move posing a new "line".
It is a "put another way" not in terms of restricting to the original poster's idea (thus re-reading it), but starting from the poster's idea in the context of given information.
Edit - either I misread or they changed it to 50s, my bad. That would he the second straight crisis.
Note that it’s policy on China is changing. Obama started to build a pacific alliance, Trump was a bull in a China shop but escalated the policy of disengagement from China. Biden has maintained Trump’s policy even though it would help with his biggest domestic problem (inflation) to reverse it, while also making clear he will defend Taiwan even if it means war with China.
The problem is that the status quo may not be acceptable to the people of Taiwan and reunification is not acceptable not even slightly wanted by the people of Taiwan. The's not really any chance of a reunification of the current China and the current Taiwan.
> Anything Russia does to other states has got absolutely nothing to do with it.
Not really, if Putin had quickly succeeded I have not doubt that WWIII would have started with a failed attempt to take Taiwan followed by WWIII. There's no scenario where A) China can take Taiwan, and B) Taiwan will accept Chinese rule. That died 70 years ago.
Ironically, Taiwan is very pro-Japan nowadays even though Japan was a colonizer in the early 20th century. Given this, it's not at all set in stone that relations will stay bad if peace endures.
What qualifications allow you to make claims with such confidence?
Greeks, if I guess correctly, had a similar barbarian problems, like the ancient Chinese rules. Superficially, the 2 share the same high-level setting, i.e., an advanced kingdom is surrounded by nomad barbarians, where the advanced kingdom has a settled society built on top of rural + makers + traders economy, with a strong top governmental body; the barbarians are living a much more primitive life, and often trade with the advanced kingdom for things they cannot produce, and often resolve to invasion and looting when the climate cycle degrades their normal life condition beyond the normal capacity of their eudrance.
I don't know about Greeks. Ancient Chinese devote significant intellectual and military thinking and resources on barbarians. Dealing with Barbarians often determine the live and death of a Chinese dynasty. For example Tang, Song, Ming were all ended by barbarians (in the general sense). And the great dynasties of Chinese history is always characterized by a military success and political subdue of barbarians. Han in the Wu Di era, Tang in the Tai Zong era. Ming in the Cheng Zu era.
They are shelling everything and rolling over the dust.
“Russia isn't fighting a campaign of attrition, it's waging a war of oblivion.”
They do still have their artillery, though, and they are trying to take Donbass. In a very piecemeal fashion, very slowly. They have learnt something from their spring failures.
The result of this war depends on how fast can the Ukrainians re-arm completely to Western weapons, including artillery. It does not make sense to send tons of heavy Western guns there, if there aren't enough trained soldiers to operate them and enough trained technicians to fix them.
This is the bottleneck, not the raw number of weapons; people tend to treat weapons as magic, but they only work in combination with skilled soldiers and a functioning supply chain.
The Ukrainians are learning fast - people generally learn fast when their country is on fire - but the process will likely take months.
According to whom and compared to what? Russia has employed maybe 20% of their military personnel and gear and are weeks, maybe days, from consolidating and absorbing the Donboss.
Keep in mind that Ukraine is the second largest military in Europe (after Russia) with their own military industrial complex, huge cache of Soviet weapons and the training and intelligence assets of NATO.
Can you name a single successful significant counter offensive (other than the Moskva) by Ukraine?
It is hilarious, if only it wasn’t so sad.
That is a shallow measure. Most modern armies have "tooth to tail" [0] ratio less than 1:5. Combat-ready units constitute a minority of the entire military personnel everywhere, and Russia has deployed most of those in Ukraine. It cannot afford to deploy all of them, as it has long borders and shores that need patrolling.
Russia no doubt has a huge cache of Soviet-era weapons, but it has already burnt through much of that cache, much like Ukraine did. Given that they are transferring T-62 to the theater, deploying ancient Kh-22 missiles and that the dud rate for both missiles and artillery shells seems to be between 10-30 per cent, it seems that they are already down to using older, less reliable stock. That does not mean that they ran out of modern stuff completely, but rather that the newer stock is depleted enough that they need to be careful about that.
For me, the humiliation consists of the current stalemate. I don't require any massive counteroffensives from the Ukrainians to see the Russian advance as a failure. They didn't manage to take freaking Kharkiv that lies just 40 km from the border and they fought three months over Mariupol, besieged from all sides.
This is just incompatible with the image of an unstoppable bear that Russia cultivated before the war.
As for the (retrofitted) T-62s, those are mostly given to the Donboss militias and a perfect tank to use in the already conquered rear. They are still armor and they still function. US also runs some old gear if you didn't know.
As for the dud rates, I'd expect that for older missiles. Their new stuff (which is more advanced than anything the US has) is less than 10%. And it's clear they're not running out any time soon despite western media claims two months ago that their weapons stocks were days from depletion.
On the other hand, the dud rate for western supplied Javalins and NLAWs is around 80% as reported by Ukrainian military personnel. And it's actually now illegal for Ukrainian troops to publicly criticize the effectiveness of western supplied weapons.
Let's stop projecting and be honest about what's actually going on.
There's Russian adage: don't say gop until you jump over. This war is far from ending and early Russian mistakes did not turned into significant issues.
I suppose they can fortify that and come back in 10 years and take the rest.
Remember when Hannibal destroyed the Roman armies? That sure was humiliating.
What happened next?
There is a huge difference between their initial expectations, and what actually happened. And now they are in too deep to undo their mistakes.
Regardless of what they said, they tried to attack the capital. That says more about whether they tried to take the capital than public statements.
You think those large amount of troops and resources, that were in the process of attempting to surround and take the capital were just sacrificed for no reason?
They spent a lot of resources on those attacks, and they didn't gain much from them.
Surely you should consider that it was a mistake, and don't think it was intentional for them to have taken such losses with little to show for it.
As in, they could have just not done a failed attack on the capital, and instead focused their troops on other regions to achieve some other goal.
However many resources they sacrificed on that attack could have been sacrificed elsewhere more effectively, which shows pretty clearly that this specific failed offensive wasn't some success and instead was a failed offensive that they had to back off on.
That... will require a significantly greater commitment from Nato allies, or the US.
Until Nato makes a greater commitment, the Chinese will (correctly) read this as a sign that in the event of a Taiwan invasion, the US will provide military support, but stop before committing troops to enforcing the status quo in the Taiwan strait.
The vast majority of human kind are neutral or pro Russia regarding the situation. Sorry, but the English speaking countries (sans India) and EU are not "the word" despite the sense of superiority and entitlement.
As for Crimea, that ain't never happening. The people there are majority Russian and Tartar and with a very small Ukrainian minority. Not only does Wikipedia tell me that, but I've talked with people there (in person).
Did 141 countries vote in favor of it with just 35 abstaining?
Follow the money, though: who is _investing_ in Russia?