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.
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.