Sadly, common sense is nowhere to be Xi'n in mainland China.

Xi just needs to let go and back off ASAP. Both parties would surely benefit short term and most definitely in the long run. Time to move on.

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Agreed. China is incredibly practical and self-serving. They have plenty of common sense. It's morals the CCP lacks.

Hard to talk with someone when they don't think you have a right to exist

Xi personally gains by having a target and bogeyman.

That's how politics works, in authoritarian regimes and democratic ones.

See Hitler, see US politics, see Brexit.

Totally clueless about Xi and that train has already left the station.

I know this is a serious matter but I can’t help but look at the position of the white pawn on the board.

Why is it on the 1st rank? Lol

There isnt even an article. I hate these kinds of posts. It's just clickbait (I'm talking about the publication releasing this moreso than the OP posting the link on reddit, but both apply)

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People who haven't worked much or at all with Chinese nationals and only really interacted with nativized expats or second/third gen immigrants have a really hard time grasping just how pivotal face is in China.

In a contest between the most obvious, blatant reality which simply cannot be contested on any sort of factual basis and face... you have to choose face unless you're prepared to completely and irreprably destroy the relationship with that person. It's really hard to wrap your head around.

> They have plenty of common sense.

Zero Covid in '22..

China was fine with Taiwan existing before Tsai took over.

The Great Leap Forward led to one of, if not the, worst famine in China's history.

Guess who was making those decisions?

In theory it makes sense. If you limit movements altogether the disease can't spread but every action as a reaction. Zero covid hampers economic activity, people's freedoms, etc. They just keep doubling down on it. These all have consequences. So not a lot commen sense.

Honestly all China needs to do is RESPECT Taiwan and accept they're a seperate country at this point if they wont embrace democracy themselves. They're only going to make things worse in the long run expecially after what they did in Hong Kong. Whats so incomprehensible to the CCP is that their refusal to embrace democracy is the one thing that will always hold them back from ever achieving No 1 in the world. For all its faults Democracies when they work keep the idiots from the far left and right from fucking things up.

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Probably made it to the opposite side and is waiting to be promoted to a queen or knight.

China was happy to leave Taiwan be until it solved the other more pressing issues, as Taiwan was pretty non-confrontational.

But in recent years, especially after Tsai came to office, Taiwan started talking openly about independence, started pushing for international recognition etc.

Can't have that. /s

Edit: added /s, maybe that will keep the witch hunters away, who keep finding pro-China arguments where there are none.

"this is all Taiwans fault" lmfao

A lot of the sabre-rattling had to do with cementing Xi as numero uno for life. Not saying he won't keep some heat on Taiwan but a lot of the bluster in recent months was mainly to show his strong leadership in advance of the party congress.

They don’t have a lot to talk about when economic data is a mystery

Russia, a military that has been actively engaged in combat for years, cannot defeat their ill-prepared land neighbor and China wants to pretend that they are going to have their debutante ball with an amphibious assault over 2,103 km of blue water.

Good luck with that.

If they don't want to be with you, they don't want to be with you. No matter the amount of history and years you had together before.

Countries need to stop being possessive ex-significant others. Trying to force them to be with you will just push them away further, and generally into the arms of another country, as they need to protect themselves.

Our analogies are quite similar. I basically compared a possessive relationship between Taiwan and China too. Giving the same circumstances, relationships with one party feeling dominated seemingly always end up failing.

Yep, I had the feeling with your use of "time to move on". I just wanted to add onto that.

I do get that beyond this analogy, there could be the concern of the US using Taiwan to stage attacks onto mainland China, in the CPC's collective mind. However, I don't think Taiwan would have remained as pro-US in the long run if mainland China wasn't constantly talking about taking it back, having enshrined that goal into their constitution. If they could let it go, both states would gain from it, as you also alluded to. It's a huge country of over 1 billion people, with an economy shooting up to the sky, and modernizing extremely quickly nationwide. Taiwan is not worth the sanctions and worsened relationship with Western countries, the way I see it.

Taiwan, of course.

Not sure what you are trying to say.

This is definitely China responding to Taiwan's changed stance, but no-one is implying that Taiwan is doing anything wrong.

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He's not wrong, and you seem to be reading a motivation into his comment that didn't exist.

China's primary interest is in the propaganda win, they don't actually give a shit how things actually are - only how they appear.

De facto independence is one thing; having the Chinese populace witnessing blatent independence and an impotent response is something that the CCP cannot afford.

What, so I'm gonna start talking to myself now? China probably.

China doesn't know how to talk lol. Sabre rattling is all they know how to do

China's action have been hurting their image for the last year, while Taiwan has not hurt its image. Xi is pretty bad at the image thing, kind of like Trump

China's actions have been hurting their image for a very long time; we just didn't care because they make a bunch of cheap shitty goods.

They've been royally shitting the bed since the start of Covid though.

Xi has been taking advice from wallstreetbets

You mean before Xi got a good and solid hold on China? China's general attitude in resent years has been much more belligerent, I'm sure having a pro independence party in power in taiwan didn't help m, but I'm sure China would have been quite pushy anyways, Tsai won exactly because China's attitude wasn't quite "fine with Taiwan existing", she got a huge boost of popularity during elections after China went on a fit because of a taiwanese Kpop star showing a taiwanese flag.

This is just not true. The threats have always been there!

But Taiwan only changed stance in response to China trying to impose the “one county, two systems” thing on them, after them seeing how well it turned out for Hong Kong.

Hmm, I wonder how much time you spend in Taiwan to say such a thing. For those of us who were here in the 90s when the Mainlanders were lobbing missiles over Taipei, that is an oddly ignorant statement to make. If we go back decade-by-decade we learn that the Chinese have been actively bombing islands claimed by Taiwan ever since WWII ended and only stopped temporarily when threatened with nuclear annihilation.

No, the CCP has never been "fine" with Taiwan's existence. The hostility towards Tsai is mostly just down to chauvinistic bigotry. Anger about a woman in power or anything that has to do with Taiwan's politics has nothing to do with the aggression. The reason for focusing on Taiwan is completely domestic to China. The leadership in China fears its own population and needs to manufacture an external threat to justify its existence. This has nothing to do with Taiwan's politics and everything to do with the internal power struggles of the CCP which is increasingly doubling down on bad bets.

This is not a former relationship issue. During the Qing dynasty China didn’t really care about rugged distant Formosa, and initial modern development happened under the Japanese. So the historical claim is hollow. What is important is that Taiwan is in the center of the first island chain running from Japan to the Philippines, and blocking China's unrestricted access to the Pacific. They need that geopolitical location to expand their new empirical influence, the culture and history angle is just PR window-dressing.

China is full of such cool people, it's a shame its leader isn't one of them.

Ukraine could be resupplied by land, Taiwan can’t.

The entire chessboard gets worse the more you look at it.

Your take is wrong but also blaming Taiwan for chinas view that Taiwan shouldn’t exist. That you don’t realize you’re tacitly agreeing with chinas position on Taiwan is a bit telling. Taiwan is an independent country, them claiming they are independent shouldn’t illicit any reaction at all.

Is that why China fired missiles near Taiwan in 1996?

And they wouldnt keep their promises

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Taiwanese KPop star? What?

checks diplomatic response playbook those were special celebration rockets.

But they can afford locking their residence into their apartments while corrupt CCP officials sell their emergency food rations on the black market?

Pretty sure the Chinese population is more concerned with food than Taiwan.

You just stated "China was happy to leave Taiwan until it solved other more pressing issues", when it's more like "When Xi Xing Ping gained power he dismantled other factions of power in the CCP in order to change China's policies and priorities to his liking"

Self-serving sure, practical? Not really. They've poisoned most of the fresh water in China to be unusable. They've built ghost cities all over China rotting and falling down without ever being used or finished in most cases. They are destroying their economy by continually locking down major economic centers repeatedly for covid.

I would say they are ruthless, rather than practical

You are seeing what you want to see. I haven't implied any of those things.

I pointed out that this is China's reaction to Taiwan reasserting their independence. I never said that this reaction is normal, and I never said that Taiwan should stop doing what they are doing.

If anything, they should build stronger ties with the West and make their stance more clear, of they don't want to end up as Hong Kong.

Not really, no. I'm sure Hong Kong's situation contributed to it, but they started slowly changing their stance even the situation in Hong Kong started escalating.

China is becoming more and more radical, and even without Hong Kong it was becoming obvious that you need to start taking more decisive steps to keep the crazies out of your backyard.

The keyword in that sentence was "until". Meaning that they would have come after Taiwan eventually anyway.

Also the post doesn't try to imply in any way that Winnie the Pooh is not a wannabe dictator, because he obviously is.

Yeah, Korea has many kpop stars that aren't actually korean, in this case it was the group Twice, pretty famous might have heard of it, there's 5 korean members, 3 japanese, and one Taiwanese, Tzuyu who's been huge in the kpop world (At some point she was nª3 in popularity polls).

And in a tv show where they had each member hold a flag of their home country she had the Taiwanese one, and China got to accuse her of separatism, cancelled all of Twice concerts in China, and was banned from Chinese TV, she lost contracts with Huawei, and the label posted a video apology of her saying stuff like "There is only one China, the two sides of the strait are one, and I have always felt proud to be Chinese" while looking absolutely dejected, and that was right before the elections that Tsai Ying Wen won.