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Is there any chance of China actually launching an offensive on taiwan? Would it even be necessary?
Only if Taiwan pursues any unilateral moves. It's up to the CPC to determine whether those moves, whether allowing US military occupation, pursuing nuclear proliferation or outright secession, meets its "red line" for action.
Personally, I've always held the view that Taiwan is a big kabuki theater. Talking to geopolitically minded Chinese comrades about it gives you the impression that "Taiwan reunification" is the biggest case of inter-generational blue balls in modern history. Akin to the highly anticipated and fear-mongered, but ultimately merely rhetorical, liberation of West Berlin in the original Cold War.
Pragmatically speaking, China (or rather, socialist China) benefits from the contrast that Taiwan brings. It's the fabled, fantasized alternate "democratic free" China pursuing electoralism and all the Western hurrah words, manifested dialectically in reality. Yet all of that only evidently amounting to a population where a large portion simply wishes they were Japanese instead. All the while being poorer nowadays than many of the likes of their Shanghai or Shenzhen counterparts. It could be said that it's perhaps preferable for the CPC to maintain Taiwan as a reverse East German-style foil and that the CPC ultimately found a way to make lemonade out of lemons through the present state of the Taiwan status quo.
Geopolitically speaking, Taiwan has been relatively "worthless" historically. It says quite a lot that in spite of being a strait away from one of the oldest polities in human history, the first group to formally incorporate the island was Spain. The only use of the island is as a base against mainland China, which is why the Ming retreated to the island following the establishment of the Qing (later indeed using the island as an attack vector during the Revolt of the Three Feudatories) and the KMT followed in the Ming's footsteps. In a purely geopolitical stance, China doesn't need to necessarily possess the island itself, only merely prevent any hostile actors (the ROC itself, the West, Japan, etc.) from weaponizing the island as a dagger against the mainland.
The way that the Japanese/American-occupied Ryukyus and the Philippines' Batanes islands juts toward Taiwan like pincers means that possessing Taiwan itself without addressing the former would not fundamentally solve the issue of China's access beyond the "First Island Chain." As such, any war for Taiwan without addressing the wider regional status quo of American control would merely be kicking the can down the road from a geopolitical standpoint.
GOOD post
It's kayfabe. Both the PRC and US saber-rattle, but their strategy is anything but military. The PRC wants to economically integrate the ROC into the PRC without formal political integration, in effect turning the ROC into a SEZ. Meanwhile, the US wants and has been turning Taiwan into a poison pill that they hope the PRC will swallow. And what is the poison? "I'm not Chinese, I'm Taiwanese except sometimes I'm also Japanese" brainworms. If Taiwan gets swallowed up, those separatist brainworms will spread far quicker throughout the Mainland. And southern China is weaker on questions of national unity relative to the north, which Taiwan is very much part of both geographically and culturally.
At the end of the day, the PRC and the people of the ROC benefits most from the current status quo while the US wants an "independent" Republic of Taiwan that they can place nukes on but can live with the PRC forcefully reunifying Taiwan with the Mainland because the separatist brainworms and general cultural confusion of the average Taiwanese owing to Chen's desinofication campaign would undermine Chinese society. Plus, innocent people will inevitably die in any military campaign, so that's more fuel to the fire.
Of course, al Aqsa flood has accelerated things and the kidnapping of Maduro means the PRC needs to greatly militarize in order to protect its allies. However, the domestic population will not consent to any Chinese military intervention (outside of an invasion of Japan in order to settle old scores) without the reunification of Taiwan with the Mainland. "Why is the PLA in X country instead of liberating our compatriots in Taiwan?"
the PLA has already been in several countries without liberating Taiwan. the wars with India, the agressions against the Soviet Union and Vietnam, the anti-communist operations in Afghanistan, the MINUSMA intervention in Mali, the base in Djibouti and propably some other cases that I forgot right now.
India, the SU, Vietnam, and Afghanistan are all countries that border the PRC, so none of them were hard sales to the domestic population. Those are very different than what I had in mind when I wrote that, which is having Chinese military troops in Venezuela, a country that is for all practical purposes on the opposite side of the world from the perspective of China, ready to invade Guyana and overthrow their pro-US regime if the US tries to assassinate Maduro.
A lot of this isn't true. There's no cultural confusion. The CPC purposefully misinterpreted a poll for national propaganda reasons. There are no Taiwanese from a Chinese background that believe they aren't from a Chinese background.
From who, the KMT? They should have done that a LONG time ago!! The CPC would have full legitimacy if they took out the KMT before they could oppress the people living in Taiwan at the time. Way too much time has passed. The people of Taiwan really have zero relation to the CPC. All the CPC arguments for why Taiwan is theirs doesn't hold up. "Taiwanese are Chinese" - I guess they own Vancouver now? Or wherever there are Chinese people.
"The war never ended" ok, might is right but your war was against the KMT, who are from China. That's great, continue the war against them. They're all over 80 years old now. What's the point?
"Taiwanese are closer to the evil Japanese (who committed countless war crimes) than us so they are bad" I guess?
"Taiwan has always been a part of China" no it hasn't. Throughout imperial Chinese history Taiwan was seen as a land of disease and barbarians and of zero use to anyone.
I am all for the returning of the stuff that the KMT stole from China AND the people of Taiwan. No I don't like the DPP and how they go along with US propaganda but the alternative is to go full Yemeni and Taiwanese are way way way too comfortable for that.
“Taiwan” in its current political form is the unresolved remnant of a defeated reactionary regime, preserved by imperialist intervention. It is not a neutral “society that drifted away,” but a Cold War client structure built to block the completion of the Chinese revolution. Most of your arguments quietly erase that history.
This ignores a central fact: the CPC did not “choose” to stop at the strait. In 1950, the PLA was preparing for Taiwan operations when the US intervened directly via the Seventh Fleet after the outbreak of the Korean War. That intervention froze the civil war and militarily guaranteed the survival of the KMT regime. This is not speculation; it is openly acknowledged US policy. Without that intervention, the ROC state on Taiwan would not exist. Blaming the CPC for not completing reunification while ignoring US naval containment is ahistorical.
The CPC is not a bloodline or a cultural club. It is the ruling party of the Chinese state that emerged from a popular revolution. “Relation” here is political and historical, not sentimental. The majority population of Taiwan is Han Chinese (with roots generally in Fujian) whose families largely arrived during Ming–Qing settlement or with the KMT retreat. Their language, kinship networks, religious practices, and economic ties are overwhelmingly Chinese. That does not obligate them to “like” the CPC, but it does make the claim of “zero relation” incoherent.
More importantly, this argument quietly treats the KMT state and it's successors as the natural representative of Taiwan’s people, when in reality it was a settler regime imposed under martial law for nearly four decades, during which Taiwanese political identity was violently suppressed. The DPP did not emerge from some ancient Taiwanese nation; it emerged from contradictions within that ROC structure.
This is a category error. No serious CPC argument claims sovereignty based on ethnicity alone. The PRC’s claim is based on state succession and territorial continuity: Taiwan was returned to China after Japan’s defeat (Cairo and Potsdam Declarations), and the ROC lost the civil war. Vancouver was never part of the Chinese state. Taiwan was. Equating diaspora communities under capitalism with a disputed postwar territory is either ignorance or bad faith.
Wars are not annulled by age. The Chinese Civil War ended militarily on the mainland but was frozen internationally, not resolved. The ROC continued to claim sovereignty over all of China for decades, occupied China’s UN seat until 1971, and functioned as a forward base of US military power. The “point” is not personal vengeance against old men; it is the unresolved question of sovereignty created by imperialist containment.
This is half-true and therefore misleading. Taiwan was not always tightly administered, just as many frontier regions in premodern states were loosely governed. That does not mean it was “outside China” in the modern sense. Qing sovereignty was real, if uneven. More importantly, modern sovereignty does not rest on how much an island was romanticized by imperial officials centuries ago. In the modern age it rests on post World War II settlements and state succession. After 1945, Taiwan was returned to China. The dispute since then is not ancient history; it is Cold War geopolitics.
This is a strawman. The serious critique is not cultural affinity but colonial legacy. Japanese rule materially reshaped Taiwan in ways that the KMT later exploited, while suppressing indigenous and working-class agency. Pointing that out is not moralizing about “bad people”; it is analyzing how colonial layers produced today’s contradictions.
Good post thank you comrade. I was surprised to see so much made up speculation on the bear site
Unfortunately not unusual for people to have warped views of China and Chinese matters even in leftist spaces often due to personal or environmental reasons.
Coolusername lives in Taiwan and has understandingly ingested too much green media.
That makes sense so in this case it was a mix of the environment and personal connection leading to a twisted understanding
Don't the KMT want reunification too? Xi is possibly meeting with the leader of the KMT next month after a successful CPC-KMT think tank a few days ago. We will have to wait and see if developments come out of it
I think you need to stop watching green media.
Most likely not anytime soon. I also think they would be more inclined to do some sort of embargo and/or blockade first to show Taiwan what life without the mainland is actually like.
Right now? No. But there are opportunities that will present themselves in the coming years.
I dunno much about taiwan politics but from what I heard, anti china politics are losing power. even current dpp government supporters think curent government is too aggresive against china and dpp seems to lose to more pro-china party kmt next election. I don't think china will do any military act before next election
I have said no until today, but with Japan wanting to remilitarise I would no longer rule it out as something China would do in preparation for conflict with Japan.
How did I forget japan electing a fashie that wants to kamikaze the entire country against china smh
I don't think China will allow them to remilitarise. I believe China would go to war with Japan pre-emptively to stop it. And before they do that, they would want to secure Taiwan first.
I don't think this is even a controversial take, there is NO WAY China is allowing Japan to build up again into the kind of country that did what it did to China last time. They absolutely will not allow it.
Japan is militarized. the constitution is a rag for the US to wipe its ass with.
and if i had a grain for every militaristic escalation against China the CPC did not answer with war i'd have like, 4 heaps by now
Purchasing 147 * F35s is in a completely different league to what Japan currently is and that's just as a start.
besides that they're not going to receive that anywhere near on schedule
they already have 47, plus 200 f15s, and 80 f16s. that's a heap of modern fightercraft
i appreciate the fashy PM is expanding the "JDF" but we should include the context that the "JDF" has had a leading military arsenal for decades, one the CPC has been accounting for for decades.
I don't think she's up for it, you guys aren't taking into account that the US is telling countries what to do, or else they get the stick. Trump recently said SK wasn't doing their part against China. This is a CLEAR tell that these countries aren't acting on their own accord.
There is always a chance, yes. Especially if Taiwan or the United States make any concrete moves against the One China policy. The PRC is mostly content with the status quo regarding Taiwan, but if the status quo changes (which seems to have in recent months!) that likelihood goes up.
That is true. Hoping it doesn't get to that if anything the libs are gonna be insufferable about it.