tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post111450844377939285..comments2024-03-12T22:31:46.500-04:00Comments on What Would Phoebe Do?: The Storm in the Taiwan Straits...Phoebe Maltz Bovyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17996039330841139883noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-1114538808996013812005-04-26T14:06:00.000-04:002005-04-26T14:06:00.000-04:00Well, my distaste for China has more to do with th...Well, my distaste for China has more to do with their rising threat to the national security of the United States than anything. A brutal record on human rights, and a bold, naked, calculating <I>realpolitik</I> foreign policy to back it up doesn't add to that image.<BR/><BR/>Communism certainly doesn't help, and certainly probably funds both of the above, but I think it's going too far to say that simply because China were to turn democratic, its threat to global stability would be eliminated. I do not truly believe in democratic peace theory, because democracies are so easily overthrown for the "more belligerent" forms of government that are supposedly more war-prone.<BR/><BR/>If China were to turn democratic, might it make unification easier? It might certainly make it harder to paint in such moral terms, but I think the Taiwanese would still have a good claim.<BR/><BR/>In any case, your questions seems to ask me to deny the basic history underlying the problem, which is in fact that conflict between democratic and communist governments. I'm not going to apologize for preferring the former.<BR/><BR/>***<BR/><BR/>It's true that many Taiwanese do consider themselves "Chinese." However, this is becoming a generational thing. This belief that Taiwanese were Chinese was in fact promulgated by the KMT government and the new population of mainlanders that fled to the island. The history of China, not Taiwan, was taught in schools, Chinese and not Taiwanese became the official language, etc. There's been some good literature on how this situation strongly resembles a colonial situation: the denial of collective memory in favor of an imposed identity.<BR/><BR/>The Taiwanese case is a difficult one, mostly because the collective history involves a country tossed to the wind, and receiving so much imposed influence (in 1895, Taiwan was became the first Japanese colony). A good capitalist doesn't believe in "false conscioiusness" arguments, and so accepts <I>prima faciae</I> the asserted Chinese identity of the Taiwanese, while post-modernists seek to look beyond the claim to the historical evens that fund it.<BR/><BR/>No one's saying there are easy answers here. But what's very clear is that many people answer the way they do in Taiwan's polls, and vote the way they do in Taiwan's elections, because they honestly fear annhilation should the island misstep. Whateveer funds people's choices, they should be free to make them without the unilateral threat of violence.Nickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14363311128428661742noreply@blogger.com