Zeng

I agree with you that Taiwan problem is linked with rest of China’s problem with all its neighbors. Reuniting Taiwan is not for the economic reason. We don’t ask them for even a dollar from their tax. They are doing fine to invest into our economy just like now. Reuniting Taiwan is for the national security reason, the utmost national interest, which is why we don’t have option here to back off. That is why we pre-declared war to Taiwan’s official independent announcement by Anti-Secession Law. Today, if Taiwan officially announces independence; Chinese government has the obligation to start or resume the war with them by the Law. Any Chinese government dictatorship or democracy can’t give away from this position.

With this kind of determination as well as the culture, philosophy connections, I personally believe that Taiwan will reunite with mainland China. The problem is only the time.

I wish that mainland China and Taiwan could have reunified last year. But that didn’t happen. It doesn’t happen today, and will not happen in the near future because we don’t have the capability to do it and we don’t want to fight without enough preparation for a guaranteed victory. In fact, we don’t even want to fight at all if there is even smallest chance we don’t need to fight.

Our brilliant ancestor Sun Tzu told us around 2500 years ago in his “The Art of War”, forcing you opponents surrender without fighting is the top top strategy. I think that if we have the patient, we totally have the opportunity to pursue this top top strategy in a period of 50 years or so.

To make the unification, we need to win the heart and mind of the people not like Americans going to Iraq with just the bigger guns. They have found out that even with their biggest gun in the world, they put themselves in a big mess. We should be smarter than that.

In Taiwan, there are people ok for the future reunification, there are people swing the position, there are people strong for independent. We need to improve ourselves first to give the people who pro-future unification the confidence. We need to show our sincerity of self-improvement and tolerance to attract the people with swing position. We need to build our army for those who are strongly against reunification. All this need several generations to achieve.

Just looking at the WAB, you will think that it is horrible to live in China under communist oppressive regime. This kind of propaganda still has lot of market around the world. We also indeed have lot of problems. Not all their accusations are false. By open our door, today, millions of people from Taiwan come to work in mainland China voluntarily under the “supposedly” oppressive regime. Millions of foreigners come to work in China voluntarily under the communist rule. In recent years, record of number of oversea Chinese comes back China to pursue their carriers that even made them hard to find a job today. This is the best way to tell the world how we are improving and progressing.

But we should always remember that we still have lot of problems that are not so attractive to the others. We still block some internet access. We still don’t give the degree of freedom of speech comparable to many other countries. We still don’t have a very transparent jurisdiction system. We still don’t always put everyone in front of the law equally. We still have unacceptable corruption. Our poorest people still worries their next meal. We still pollute our environment with unbelievable speed. We are still much poorer than many other countries. Many of our Chinese people still don’t have the degree of education to be polite to each other, to tolerant each other and to care about the public environment and issues.

Even many of our Chinese leave China for a better life in other countries. My family suffered greatly during culture revolution. My elementary school time experiencing hunger and we steal each other’s food. I have much better life in foreign countries and facing a lot less obstacles to do things I want. But I still love China because of the culture connection. For us, we love China and don’t expect it pays back. But we can't expect others to love China in the similar way. To make China a truly loveable country to more people, we need many generations of hard work.

Things are not always going in the way we wish it goes. Lot of time it went the opposite direction. I wish that I could be a billionaire but that didn’t happen. We wish Taiwan back, someone else wish it goes further away. Both of us can’t get exactly what we want. Sometime you have to accept a middle way solution at specific time frame. The middle way solution now is the status quo and can be considered to be a win-win solution for both sides.

Let me repeat, we don’t have a good way to get Taiwan back today. We don’t have either the economic power or military ability to do it without hurting ourselves seriously. We also don’t have good enough political, social and economic systems to attract them. In fact, they have better systems than ours.

If you don’t have any way to do it now, how can you do it? The answer is waiting for the time you get those power, ability and attractive systems.

I don’t agree the problem is getting harder and harder to solve. The power balance is tilting toward us. For each year passing by, our comparative disadvantage is decreasing and our comparative advantage is increasing over most of the countries in the world.

Be confident, we can live today without Taiwan, and we will get it back in the future.

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