Wtf you talking about?!?! They raised the conscription age to 40. I just have friends who just finished their conscription. The mass majority of us already consider ourselves independent. We have our own currency, our own government, our own laws.
Best believe if Xi bear attacks, we are stepping up to beat those China-nese scums.
That was the entire point behind the “One Country, Multiple Interpretations” status quo, though?
The KMT was opting for economic integration and the CPC was ramping down their rhetoric, then the DPP comes in, fucks around, and finds out that a global superpower does actually have military power.
Reminder that, in recent history, China only crossed the Taiwan Strait median line after the US was allowed to conduct a FONOPS through the Taiwan Strait and declared it to be international waters. Prior relations between China and Taiwan dictated that the Taiwan Strait was territorial waters with dispute over who’s territory it was - the median line was used for this interpretation.
All this is to say: the status quo is breaking down and the US is happy to push against clear Chinese red lines, just as they were happy to push against clear Russian red lines. Meanwhile, we already know what the US would do in a similar situation: we can simply look at Cuba or towards any of the governments that the US has couped in South America.
You write like you haven’t paid attention to the whole Hong Kong situation at all.
For one, Hong Kong is under a completely different system… And the entire purpose of the Hong Kong extradition treaty was to cut off a loophole that allowed murderers and rapists and drug dealers to escape persecution in China through Hong Kong. The law was incredibly narrow and only applicable to cases tried by the Supreme People’s Court (equivalent to the heavily politicized Supreme Court of the United States, but less divided for obvious reasons).
You can look through all the past cases of the SPC… find me one that would be unreasonable for extradition. Are people so keen on protecting murderers and rapists?
Conscription period used to be 3 years, then 2, then 1, then 4 months. Finally it became too obvious that 4 months is a joke, so it’s being grudgingly raised back up, but only to 1 year. Still barely time to get any proper training done; for comparison, Israel’s conscription is almost 3 years and includes women.
The Taiwan government also persistently underpays military service members. The result is that it never hits its targets for professional (non-conscript) personnel, then wrings its hands about it…
