On This Day in History: December 7

Taiwan vs. China

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The Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are not the same. One is small, the other big. One is a democracy, the other totalitarian commie. It involves decades of civil war and a place called Taiwan, but don’t call Taiwan a country if you’re in China.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: December 7, 1949--

Some refer to the situation as “contentious.” I call it way fucked up. The Chinese Civil War began in 1927 between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party. To give you an idea of the political leanings of the latter, they were supported by the fucking Nazis in the 1930s.

So, classic battle of left vs. right, with Mao Zedong leading the commies and Chiang Kai-shek running the fascist show. Not a great choice either way. Anyway, they beat the shit out of each other for a decade, then in 1937 Japan decided to beat the shit out of them both and the two warring Chinese groups said hey let’s team up because we hate Japan more than we hate each other. Continues below …

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Then Japan got double nuked and the civil war was all game on again, motherfuckers. Being that the U.S. had a massive erection for fighting communism, they sided with the fascists. But the fascists lost. “The Great Retreat” happened on December 7, 1949, when Chiang and his fascists bugged out of Nanjing and moved to Taiwan.

The fighting stopped, but the two “countries” have had their own cold war. Countries is in quotation marks because it’s “contentious.” See, both sides are fucking idiots. Wee Taiwan says they’re not just the legitimate government of that island group, but for all of China. The UN agreed with them until 1971, when they finally said come on guys she broke up with you let it go and they recognized the PRC, meanwhile expelling Taiwan because of a “One-China policy.” And despite the fact that Taiwan is a sovereign state that beginning in the 1970s stopped being authoritarian and moved toward democracy, the PRC thinks they own it.

FYI the One-China policy isn’t the same thing as the One-China principle, which is the PRC saying that mainland China and Taiwan are the same China. The principle states that both the PRC and the ROC “agree” that, as per the 1992 Consensus, only one sovereign state rules both mainland and islands. The difference is the ROC says they’re the legitimate sovereign state, and the PRC says no fuck you we’re the legit ones. Being the PRC has the largest army in the world, and history often proves might makes right, I’m leaning toward the commies on this one. Taiwan began realizing this reality in the 1990s and started downplaying such claims. Oh, and if a country wants to have diplomatic relations with the PRC, they better not recognize the ROC. The U.S. has no diplomatic ties to Taiwan; few countries do. But America has a “robust unofficial relationship” with Taiwan, because semiconductors.

My head hurts after writing this.

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