For the first time in 22 years, two German warships will sail through the Taiwan Strait, a move likely to provoke Beijing. Germany joins other Western nations in asserting freedom of navigation in the region amid China’s territorial claims over Taiwan
Nah, it was just a throwaway joke, the west obviously doesn’t intend to colonize China this time. What they did in the 19th century was egregious, though, and should be much more common knowledge than it is.
The Chinese state is a much harder nut to crack under the CCP than it was a century and a half ago under the Qing Dynasty. But there are plenty of John Bolton-esque figures in the American government who seem willing to give it the old college try.
It’s very difficult to talk about the English Empire as the world’s premier opium cartel without taking a bit of the blush off the rose of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. These historical blemishes get dusted over for a reason.
I agree, but that reflex is unfortunate because the ability to openly discuss and confront those things is what sets democracies apart from totalitarian states. You could never see that kind of frank introspection in China regarding June 4th '89, for example.
You could and did. That moment radically transformed how the Deng Administration treated independent political movements, college student activism, and old guard Maoist organizations.
The argument that Chinese politicians and scholars simply don’t acknowledge the events as happening is Western propaganda.
Cool, how long did you live there? Do you still have contacts on the mainland?
Two years, working abroad. And plenty of friends and relatives both on the mainland and in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
I must say I’m very surprised that your HK and TW people share your views. I don’t know any Hong Kongers or Taiwanese but most people I know (generally northerners, which is ironic) have more, shall we say, nuanced opinions.
I didn’t say they share my views. I’ve seen every angle of the argument and quite a few of them have different opinions.
But they argue over a shared history. Mainlanders don’t get confused when someone from Taiwan talks about Tienamen. Taiwanese people don’t stare blankly at the name Chiang Kai-Shek. Folks from Hong Kong aren’t unfamiliar with the British Occupation.
People aren’t simply ignorant of the facts. They tend to be biased due to their material conditions. If you’re a mid manager at the Houston branch of Sinopec, you didn’t get there because you were a John Bircher. Meanwhile if you’re on the payroll of the Foremost Group, you’ve got a very real financial incentive to oppose Chinese unification (but also a real incentive to oppose US tariffs on China).
Work as a contractor long enough and you’ll get all different kinds of viewpoints. They’ll be adversarial, not simply ignorant.
Obviously. My reference to Tiananmen wasn’t implying that people are ignorant of it, but rather that it can’t be discussed openly in a public forum. Write an analysis of it on Weibo that criticizes the government and see where that gets you (whereas in the US you can freely write about the war in Iraq, slavery, or whatever else strikes your fancy)
Also very true, but at least opposing viewpoints aren’t actively suppressed by the government. Equating the two is off by several orders of magnitude.