Russia is in the exact same boat, they were running out of time and young people as well
(There are good reasons to believe that something similar wrt Putin is the primary motivation behind the war in Ukraine, BTW.)
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/04/21/asia-pacific/so...
Gotta play pedant for a second because it's important here: using the word "reunification" doesn't make any sense when discussing the PRC's imperialist desires to invade and capture Taiwan.
No matter what lense you use, the ruling government of the PRC, that being the CPC, has never ruled any territory controlled by Taiwan. There's nothing to "reunify," there's only further territory that the CPC wishes to capture and wrest control from a sovereign nation.
There's danger also in the CPC weaponizing the word "China," which is why I'm careful to refer to the country as "the PRC," as the propagandists in the CPC are happy to engage in cultural imperialism to justify their military imperialism. "Taiwan is China, the people there are Chinese (華人），the people there speak Chinese (中文 / 華語）, they are of Chinese cultural background, we need to "reunify" these Chinese people."
If there is an imperialist invasion, and the PRC succeeds, then they will turn their eyes on other nearby "Chinese countries " filled with "Chinese people" speaking the "national Chinese language."
These are all propagandic falsehoods so there's no reason we should help them out, and those of us that are in places where it's safe to do so (outside the borders of the PRC) should communicate using the correct terms.
Disclaimer: My first language is Chinese.
Taiwanese identity as Taiwanese. An ROC takeover of PRC territory would be imperialism. Luckily nobody in Taiwan has any such ambutions (that the roc constitution claims PRC territory is a political hostage taking: xi jinping has threatened a trigger invasion if Taiwan changes its constitution, even to remove the given claim).
If your first language is Mandarin but you used the unexpected and uncommon example of the ROC taking over the PRC, why do you say "Mainland" instead of "PRC" or "China?"
"Reunification" is factually the correct term for the aim of having the whole of China (mainland + Taiwan) under a single government and state. That the PRC/CCP want that to be under their control is actually irrelevant here. The term does not imply 'right' or 'wrong', either.
Of course you know all of this is if you are in Taipei.
In any case that's impossible, the kmt government that once ruled is gone. It's been replaced by a government that held the name but is Democratic, and the KMT party has been losing power ever since then. The people have clearly decided to detach themselves from that way of doing things.
Furthermore, given the identities of the people in the PRC and Taiwan, any term involving "unify" is just engaging in cultural propaganda. The taiwanese identify as taiwanese, and lately as distinctly anti-chinese (binary oppositional development is an important sociological concept, see the difference between femininity and masculinity in many cultures, or, the French vs the English cultural identities), the PRC people identify as chinese, these cultures and preference for forms of governance are too different to "unify."
If one government rules both of these people anytime soon it will have been imperialism, plain and simple.
"China" died at the end of the Qing dynasty imo, since then it's just been a couple han supremacist governments weaponizing the term to leverage nationalist sentiment. There's no more Chinese nationalism in Taiwan so it won't work here anymore (despite even older taiwanese government officials blundering around with han supremacist presumptions even today). I think it's still working in the PRC and that's why they're allowed to do cultural genocide there without much pushback from their citizens.
> Before that, Taiwan was part of the Qing empire before being invaded by the Japanese.
Anschluss is German reunification because Austria was part of the Holy Roman Empire. Ditto for the Sudetenland, and, well, why not the rest of Czechia, too.
Anyway, either we live in a civilised era where things like ethnic cleansing and genocide should be condemned, or we live in an era where it is 'bog standard to invade a place occupied by your co-ethnics'.
After WW2, ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Königsberg and Poles and Ukrainians were uprooted forcefully into the boundaries of their modern nation-states.
If wars of conquest on the basis of 'this place contains our people' become 'bog standard', the ethnic cleansing of post-WW2 Europe and the post-Soviet Balkans becomes the inevitable and logical conclusion.
And it had considerably fewer Ukrainians[1]. The Ukrainian claim to Crimea is weaker than Russia's.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Ethnic_P...
> The Ukrainian claim to Crimea is weaker than Russia's.
The Ukrainian claim to Crimea is stronger because they have a legal basis to its claim. If we return to a state of the world where claims to land are made on the basis of 'my group lives here, therefore it's ours', we will inevitably reap the consequences of post-war Europe.
On the same logic, Germany had a stronger claim to the Sudetenland than Czechoslovakia. But what did that get the Germans in the end? Complete expulsion from the Sudetenland.
I can't see an invasion happening without massive loss of life on both sides and destroying Taiwan's value. Perhaps their plan is to conduct a massive long-term blockade. This would be more in-line China's typical actions of being aggressive in diplomacy and in stretching the boundaries of international law. If they outnumber the US in the Pacific what can the US do but watch? The US almost certainly would be unwilling to fire the first shot.