Asia-Pacific Features
Taiwan rejects China's call for formal peace talks
Oct 15, 2007, 17:09 GMT
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Older Talkback
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Give Taiwan their independance.
Free Taiwan FTW!! W0Ot for capitalism!
If Taiwan wants it's freedom, it has to fight for it.
Here's a quote from the article: 'DPP spokesman Lai Yi-chung said that Taiwan was an independent country but China refused to face this fact.'
It's not only China that refuses to face this fact. It's the entire Industrialized world and over a 150 other countries too. The only countries that recognize Taiwan as an independent country are 24 poor African, Pacific Island, and Central and South American countries. Where does Lai Yi-chung have the right to say that China refuses to face this fact, when the international community refuses to do so too?
As I mentioned above, the only way Taiwan will ever be independent is if Taiwan fights for it and prevails in a war with China. Then everyone will recognize Taiwan.
For all those screaming out, 'TAIWANESE INDEPENDENCE!' and 'CHINA SHOULD LET TAIWAN BE INDEPENDENT', would you fight for Taiwan's independence in a hypothetical war? I bet 80 to 95% of you won't, because you're arm-chair generals who won't put their money where their mouths are.
I believe if Taiwanese independence, only if it can achieve it. Until then, I still adhere to the One-China policy.
When you say status quo that is a misleading term since it means a number of things--some support status quo now and unification later, some status quo now, independence later, some status quo now, decide later and others status quo basically forever.
see esc.nccu.edu.tw/eng/data/data03-3.htm.
sl:
In a war with China, I'd fight for Taiwan, but since declaring independence doesn't bring any benefits at this point I am in the status quo, independence later camp. I support the TSU even if their electoral changes are still quite dim.
'formal peace talks'???
That reads more like offering to accept a formal surrender to the 'benevolent' Mainland Chinese Communist Party.
'Such a Deal we have for you.'
Now I wonder why the Taiwanese people didn't want to trade that Freedom thing for the slave chains of the Chinese Communist Party.
Could this headline be any more non-journalistic? President Hu's laughable mention of Taiwan during his address to the Party Congress was as far as one can get from a serious offer to talk. It sounded more like an invitation to a political mugging.
Ask any 'China hand' worth their salt and they'll say the same thing. News media ought to actually look into the history of PRC-Taiwan affairs and do some critical thinking istead of dressing up this regurgitated garbage coming out of Beijing as something newsworthy.
Taiwan is the party in this dispute that favors progress, the PRC is nothing more than a stubborn, childish regime throwing a half-decade long temper tantrum.
Formal Peace talks are fine. Lee Teng Hui offered the same thing a number of years ago, but the peace talks have to be between the government of the PRC and the government of the ROC, not talks between the government of the PRC and Taiwan as a 'local' authority which has been the demand in the past (meaning Taiwan has to first accept that there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of that one China and that China is the PRC)and or not talks between the CCP and the KMT which the PRC has offered before.
If you want talks, it has to be between the ROC and PRC and the PRC must withdraw its 800+ missiles from Fujian and drop its threats of force against Taiwan. Then talks at formally ending the Chinese Civil War is possible. But the PRC would never agree to these demands. So, yes, basically, they don't want peace talks but 'reunification' talks.
One addition and one correction on this article:
Addition:
Actually China's ruler, Hu, said that peace could only be discussed under a 'one China' principle. President Chen of Taiwan rightly said that to discuss peace under that guise would amount to a 'Treaty of Surrender'.
Important Correction:
I have seen the international press swallow whole the propaganda coming out of China that somehow Taiwan and China 'split amid a civil war in 1949.' This phrase is repeated like a mantra in almost every article I read from non-Taiwanese journalists. The facts of history are a bit different: Taiwan was not part of China or the Civil War. After 1945, Taiwan was an as-of-yet undisposed Allied-occupied territory of Japan after World War II and the claim of Japanese sovereignty over Taiwan was not relinquished until the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951. Therefore in 1949 Taiwan was still Japanese territory occupied by the Allied Powers that happened to include Chiang Kai Shek's K.M.T.(*) It also was the Japanese territory to which Chiang Kai-shek's KMT fled after loosing the Civil War in China in 1949. But it was not some Chinese territory that split amid a civil war. And in the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, Taiwan was not ceded to the Republic of China (Chiang Kai Shek's government-in-exile since he had already lost the civil war in China in 1949). Certainly the K.M.T. forcibly and illegally siezed Taiwan and ruthlessly murdered and suppressed all Taiwanese dissent. But Taiwan did not 'separate' from the mainland. Taiwan was never part of China. Half of Taiwan was part of the non-Chinese Manchu empire that included national territories other than just China, but that empire ceded Taiwan in perpetuity to Japan in 1895. The other half of Taiwan had been and continued to be home to Austronesian tribes and independent for several thousand years until it was finally conquered by the Japanese in the early 1900's. So in the history of the world up to the present, China has never legally or legitimately had any kind of sovereignty over Taiwan.
* Incidently, the K.M.T. also received the surrender of Japanese troups but then occupied parts of northern Burma and failed to give them up with the conclusion of peace. KMT generals and connected Bamboo United KMT Mafia were responsible for a lot of the opium and heroine drug trade coming out of the Golden Triangle. No one claims that these areas 'split' from China amid a civil war in 1949.
Thank you for information!
:)
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