alexvanlaar wrote:

phuketrichard wrote: ↑Sun Jan 14, 2024 10:08 am the future will be interesting for sure in Taiwan.

Beijing called him a "troublemaker" and a dangerous "separatist". Now he will be Taiwan's next president.

China's claims over Taiwan are not new - it sees the island as part of its territory and Xi Jinping has made unification a goal. But the threats have ramped up in the past year.

And yet, despite renewed warnings from China against voting for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), millions of Taiwanese headed to the polls under warm, sunny skies on Saturday to do just that.

They picked their 64-year-old vice-president, a doctor-turned politician, William Lai Ching-te, to lead Taiwan through its testy relationship with China.

It's an unprecedented third term for the DPP, a party China sees as skirting too close to its unquestionable red line - Taiwanese independence.

How Mr Lai manages Beijing, and how Beijing reacts to him, will determine his presidency.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-679 ... me=twitter

Cambodian economy will tank, if China invades Taiwan....

Freightdog wrote: ↑Mon Jan 15, 2024 7:59 am If you’re referring to China; it’s not a 5000 year old civilisation. Its history stretches back thousands of years, but it’s a mere shadow of aspects of that former civilisation, if at all.
Maybe some of the resilience of the people is evident throughout that time. But the China today is the prevailing part of what was left over from civil war, some 70 years ago, which itself is what was left over from what developed from imperial China a little over 100years ago.

orichá wrote: ↑Tue Jan 16, 2024 11:39 pm Interesting outcome for election... I was a little surprised, but not too much, as the KMT didn't really field a strong candidate. Their old establishment has basically all died off now.

I lived there in Taiwan for twenty years... I think the chance of military invasion is small. Mainly due to the deeply entwined economic reality binding Taiwan and China together practically, if not ideologically.

... Perhaps some see that interconnection as a double -edged blade; but the rhetoric of "one China" is just that -- ideological nonsense used to keep the prevailing thought patterns of the Chinese masses "patriotic, chauvinistic and uniform". Unfortunately, a lot of people in China have bought into this imaginary need to reunify with Taiwan. They are rude and racist, just like a lot of brain-washed blood-thirsty old Ruskis babushkas you see on TV calling to kill all the Ukrainians... Zzz zzz...

Anyway, if there was a war involving a large scale amphibious assault -- with missile and air support -- Taiwan would fall quickly unless it received massive aid from America in the form of actual ships and planes attacking the Chinese right away. But, I really really don't think America would act. They just aren't prepared or even capable of committing the enormous might required to rebuff the Chinese despite all their bluster about "standing by Taiwan"...

Also, of course, Xi is aware of the devastating economic effects of launching any large scale war. He won't do it unless he is suffering deeply from the same kind of "Peter the Great grand emperor complex" as Putin...

In that case, perhaps Xi is hoping that Trumpone will win reelection, affording a much better opportunity to take over Taiwan since Trump would take at least two or three weeks of doing nothing before deciding whether or not to support Taiwan militarily... By that time, of course, Taiwan would be toast and in the hands of China for sure.

The Taiwanese military is quite meagre and the soldiers are mediocre with no experience of combat of any kind. Ditto the Chinese soldiers, too... (It wasn't only the Italians who built their tanks with three speeds in reverse and only one forward gear. The Chinese kind of fight like adolescent girls, kicking and screaming, screeching, pulling hair and running away quickly. They are not all kung-fu movie artistes or the hardened warlords from a thousand years ago...)

Chiang Kai-shek was a prickly little jerk who refused to fight the Japanese when they invaded China -- as he had promised Mao he would do. In the end, he didn't much fight the commies, either. He and his clique of privileged rich Shanghai businessmen and bankers and soldiers were all much better at running away than doing anything else...

Once he arrived in Taiwan, Chiang ended up killing thousands of locals, and generally oppressing the poor Taiwanese and their language for over 40 years. Chiang's martial law system in Taiwan did not end until 1986, lol... He was a dictator, and very few people in Taiwan actually respect Chiang's phony baloney status -- pretending to represent the original Republic started by Sun Yat-sen, who was the true father of Republican China.

You ought to know, the fact is Chiang and his cronies were handed a lot of money by the United States to start building factories in the 1960s, maybe because he pretended to be a good little Christian boy and, "Blah-blah, let's stand against the commies together".

Anyways, the DPP proves that the majority of people are Taiwanese more than they are Chinese, despite the long, dull dictatorship of the KMT...