this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Can you imagine China constantly patrolling around Hawaii and threatening the USA? Stirring up tensions and trying to paint the US as the aggressor?
I love how tankies excuse imperialism for their favorite dictatorships. Y'all can't even tell the difference between Taiwan and Hawaii.
Most of the dimensions along which Taiwan and Hawaii differ in their relation to the mainland regional hegemon are net positive for the tankie position.
Hawaii is much farther away from the USA mainland than Taiwan to the Chinese mainland. This makes Chinese naval exercises around the island of Taiwan much less threatening to the USA than USA naval exercises around the island of Taiwan. (Taiwan and Key West are much more comparable on distance)
The USA is illegally occupying Hawaii according to its own laws and international laws. The island of Taiwan has been part of the nation of China for centuries.
The Chinese people have been on Taiwan for centuries. White settlers have been on Hawaii for much less time.
The island of Taiwan is occupied by the loser in a civil war that the USA and UK protected and armed while they conducted a 40-year terror campaign called the White Terror where the purged all of their ideological opponents through mass murders, mass executions, and fascist oppression. The USA and UK happily protected, funded, and supported this. By contrast, the islands of Hawaii are occupied by settler colonists and the most violent and destructive military in world history while the original inhabitants of the island are still there and still trying to assert their sovereignty against the illegal occupation.
China has more experience running one country with multiple autonomous regions than any country in the history of the world. These autonomous regions have settler colonial legal structures coexisting with Chinese legal structures because China has no interest in brutal domination. By contrast, the USA brutally dominates Hawaii, denying all indigenous systems of government, and actively destroying their environment, buying up their land like cultures, and is engaged in the classic settler colonial project of indigenous genocide.
Taiwan is collaborating with the UK, Japan, and USA, all countries that have been actively attempting to dominate China and the Chinese people for centuries. There is no legitimate way to express Taiwanese secession that isn't establishing it even further as a neo-colony of violent fascists. Hawaii, on the other hand, has no history of collaboration with the enemies of the USA and return of indigenous sovereignty does not mean encirclement of the continental USA.
Essentially, if China was doing naval exercises near Hawaii it would be far less offensive than the USA doing them near Taiwan, and yet, we all know the USA would be screaming bloody murder and beating the war drums louder than ever.
The fact that you think the false equivalency is in your favor shows just how ignorant of history you are.
You missed point 7 which is that Taiwan is populated entirely by a people who already believe they're an independent country, and want to be an independent country, and have a government that is not China and operates autonomously from China.
Yeah, and America is made up of people who believe America is a Christian nation and the English think Spain is a county and the white Australians think they have a right to live on that continent at all. People believing something doesn't make it true.
Besides, if you were in a community that spent 40 years undergoing a fascist purge that murdered anyone who said anything good about the mainland or reintegration, do you think your community might exhibit some statistical bias in their beliefs about the world and their place in it?
And finally, should 1.4 billion people simply accept a nuclear missile base inches from their homes piloted by the most violent nation in the world simply because some of their fellow countrymen fell for the fascist propaganda of the most violent countries in the history of the planet? I would propose to you that the answer is no, and that "one country - two systems" is the only peaceful way forward from a game theory perspective. The other option means giving the USA and the North Atlantic exactly what they need to dominate the Asia-Pacific for another 600 years.