Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "China Warns US it Risks War over Taiwan, Deploys Record Number of Aircraft on Combat Drills" video.

  1.  @AnabelleLee100  "No. Taiwan independence is older than Chinese Communist party." That is factually incorrect. Taiwan has been part of either China or Japan since 1863 when it was acquired by the Qing Dynasty. The last time Taiwan was independent was prior to that year. It has been de facto independent from the People's Republic of China since the PRC's inception in 1949 but has been part of the Republic of China since 1945 when it was returned to China after the defeat of Japan. It has been part of China all that time. The Communist Party of China of course was founded in 1921.
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  2.  @billkrebaum  How for back are you going because it's been part of China since 1683, considerably longer than Hawaii has been part of America.
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  3.  @michaelkatz275  If they are honest and informed then they'll agree with that description. The only real caveat is that it doesn't have to be a battle. If the government running Taiwan was willing to negotiate a peaceful reunification a lot of blood and misery could be saved.
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  4.  @billkrebaum  So what are you claiming, that it's Japanese? In perpetuity lasted for less than a lifetime. Taiwan is no more Japanese than Hong Kong is British or Macau is Portuguese. And as for the old history, the Spanish and Dutch occupations were single generation holdings as well. 1683 to now with a brief Japanese occupation in the early part of last century makes Taiwan as Chinese as any US state's history makes it American. And as for the indigenous people, the indigenous people of Taiwan are Chinese in the same way that the indigenous people of New York are American, and they're probably better treated.
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  5.  @gregoryjones2457  You're right, I failed to mention Koxinga. You could draw a lot of parallels between his rule of Taiwan and the current Republican rule of Taiwan. There again though, it was less than a lifetime.
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  6.  @billkrebaum  I apologize if I misconstrued your intentions. I don't really have an argument with historians, but rather those with no proper historical understanding. As Peter Sellers showed us, people hear what they want to hear (myself included) and ignore the evidence in front of them. I'm sorry if I've put you off, I hope you won't abandon discussions because of rubes like me. I do appreciate you "Being There".
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  7.  @michaelkatz275  Here's the thing. Mexico lost that war. The people of the American southwest weren't necessarily interested in becoming Americans in the 1830s and 1840s, but the United States victory in Mexico City took that choice away from them. If China wins a war (and yes, that is a big if, though it gets ever smaller with time) in Taiwan than those living in Taiwan will have no choice but to be part of the PRC.
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  8.  @michaelkatz275  First of all, the Anglo Texans of the day were given cheap land by the Mexican government with the understanding that they would be good Mexican citizens. When these beneficiaries stabbed Mexico in the back and started agitating for independence the Mexican government took action. The same thing could happen in Taiwan. As for the events in Xinjiang, the sources for that information couldn't be more dubious. They boil down to Adrien Zenz, an anti-Chinese millennialist who works for Victims of Communism, an agency that has as its primary goal the destruction of China and other communist regimes, the World Uighur Congress, a separatist organization that parades a handful of "victims" around on speaking tours with ever-evolving stories and is funded heavily by the National Endowment for Democracy, an agency whose purpose is to fund clandestine operations targeting our global peers, and ASPI, an exceptionally hawkish Australian think tank that derives all of its funding by arms manufacturers. Does this mean that there aren't human rights abuses in Xinjiang? No, it doesn't. It just means there is no decent evidence for wide spread human rights abuses coming anywhere near the threshhold one would assume that a term like genocide would require. There are, or at least there were, reeducation centers in Xinjiang. But not every building with a wall around it is a reeducation center. In fact, walled enclosures are as common in China as hurricane fences are in the United States. The idea that there were enough reeducation centers to house a million or more individuals is completely unsupported by facts on the ground. The purpose of the reeducation centers that were in operation were to deradicalize and provide vocational education to at-risk individuals in Xinjiang. I'll except that the compulsory nature of the programs brings rise to legitimate human rights questions, but there is no evidence that these programs were used to de-ethnicize or eradicate Uighurs or any other ethnic group in Xinjiang. And there is not a scintilla of evidence for forced labor among UIghurs who might be in or may have graduated from these reeducation programs. One company, Sketchers, did a detailed investigation of their supply lines in China including those that stretched into Xinjiang and determined that there was no evidence to support claims of forced labor at any point along the chain. If Taiwan wants to point to Xinjiang as a reason not to reunify then they are doing so in bad faith. They may have reasons for not wanted to reunify, but Xinjiang is not a valid one.
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  9. I disagree. I think China is bluffing this time, but in a decade they won't be. If China is humiliated now though, the future is going to be U-G-L-Y when they finally do pull the trigger and reunify through overwhelming force in the 2030s.
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  10.  @mikeyu3243  God I hope you are wrong.
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