To get the topic back to Taiwan…what I never understood until I visited Taiwan was the extent to which this was an ethnic conflict between “mainlanders” who came over in 1949, declared martial law and ran the country for nearly a half century, and “native” Taiwanese, whose ancestors emigrated from Fujian province in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, intermarried with lots of aboriginals (Pacific Islanders, basically), and always had very limited connection with the mainland. THIS conflict is what is happening on Taiwan. The appropriate analogy is to imagine if the United States had had a civil war during the thirties between communists and non-communists, and the non-communists lost and established a government in exile in Peurto Rico, or Hawaii, declaring martial law and dominating the native people on one of those islands.
Neither of these two sides wants to reunite with mainland China right now. Both want to preserve the current de facto independence. The problem is the people who see themselves as Taiwanese are politically stupid. They are so eager for de jure independence, so eager to assert their non-chinese identity, that they are willing to jeopardize the de facto situation that exists right now. And these same Taiwanese are being exploited by the neocons, eager to have mainland China as a backup enemy in case the “islamo-fascist” menace resolves itself.
