Thread: Taiwan-centric textbook curriculum about to be introduced

bonehead,

Anywoo, as in most countries, there is a difference in ideologies between the average citizen and the country's leadership so inserting 1,1 billion Chinese is a bit dramatic don't you think?

no more dramatic than your assertion. as for ideologies, if anything, the chinese people are more nationalistic, and more hawkish, than the government itself.

the question is, what made them this way? will one answer this with a racist belief that this is this some sort of racial quality of the chinese (as i have heard some assert)? or is this CCP propaganda, as others have maintained? yet if it was CCP propaganda, how does one explain that the vast majority of the tiananmen protesters, including the ones whom were actively for the overthrow of the CCP, fully embraced the vision of a china including both taiwan and tibet (and were willing to fight and stand behind the CCP for it)?

there's a lot of contradictions and questions here, and only complex analysis can allow us to understand the issue. saying "china likes to piss on other countries" is sort of an empty statement...and most asians will not agree with you if you told them that it was china, and not another particular island nation i could name, that pissed on other countries.

Tianamen square is all the proof the world needs to know that the chinese people are not in sync with the goverment.From pretty much all of the chinese I have had face-to-face encounters with the consencus was that The take over of Tibet was deplorable. There was no strategic gain, mononetary windfall, just a goverment's will to make a smaller country capitulate.

Taiwan was seen as the losers of a war that somehow escaped punishment and was always outside of the chinese communist regime. The "freedoms" in Taiwan were what many chinese people aspired to but would not have under the communist yoke. Ofcourse the chinese goverment never wanted its own people to see chinese people prospering without the communist doctrine and because of that Taiwan was a threat. Later when Taiwan prospered economically there was envy. Now that China has a robust economy there is nothing to be envious of. There is no threat and still China is holding a grudge. It is time for China to let Tiawan go. Everyone sees this but China. I can see China letting Taiwan go, but it has to do so on Chinese terms so they can "save face", and that is all about ego.

bonehead,

interesting! in all my time in both china and taiwan, i have come across people with your opinions, certainly, but they are within a very, very small minority (in both places). i'll go through some of these points with my own experiences.

Tianamen square is all the proof the world needs to know that the chinese people are not in sync with the goverment.

yes...and no. tiananmen is now almost 20 years past, and certainly the CCP still fears its legacy. however, the very proof that we can't look at tiananmen as THE example of relations between the people and the CCP is that, well...the CCP never got overthrown in the end. and is now enjoying a far increased legitimacy than they did in the aftermath of 6/4, or even before.

From pretty much all of the chinese I have had face-to-face encounters with the consencus was that The take over of Tibet was deplorable.

in all my travels in the area, i have never heard this from a single han chinese. from some, but far from all tibetans (surprising, even to me). for the chinese, tibet was not taken over but liberated from a brutal theocracy, an assertion not entirely without merit. at most they will say that there are problems with how things are done in the TAR. but they do not question the legitimacy of chinese control.

Taiwan was seen as the losers of a war that somehow escaped punishment and was always outside of the chinese communist regime.

not punishment. if you look at previous chinese wars, and ESPECIALLY the civil war, the focus was never on punishment but on "turning" the other side. the reason why the CCP won increasingly more military victories by 1948 and 1949 was because of its success in capturing and turning entire armies to their side to fight for them, as opposed to destruction. propaganda posters of the period urged the liberation of, and not the destruction/punishment of, taiwan.

There is no threat and still China is holding a grudge.

look at the reception and political package that lien chan (KMT chairman at the time) got when he went to china with his delegation in 2005. there were crowds enthusiastically cheering everywhere, waving KMT flags. china offered normalization of tourism and signed deals to import more of taiwan's famous produce, fruit. this does not really say "grudge" to me- especially not when the CCP views its erst-while civil war enemy, the KMT, as its new best friend. times have changed indeed.

Everyone sees this but China.

and that would include the majority of the population on the Republic of China . while taiwan enjoys and would certainly like to keep self-rule, a large majority of the populace believes that "taiwanese culture" is NOT separate from "chinese culture". in case you have forgotten, the KMT, one of the two major parties on taiwan, advocates eventual reunification.

Originally Posted by Zhang Fei

Highlighting what others have done is important. Otherwise, history becomes a matter of highlighting all the good things that come to mind when you think about China and pointing out all the bad things when you think about Japan. What Chinese and Japanese empire-builders did is a matter of historical record. Looking up Chinese massacres isn't all that tough*. The problem is that you haven't looked very hard. I understand that your Chinese background leads you to be defensive about China. Let me suggest that you look beyond that background and truly join the West by closely examining the sins of your ethnic forebears as Westerners have done with respect to theirs.

* Simple logic ought to have suggested to you that a country China's size - with no record of democratic rule and a mishmash of hundreds of spoken languages - can only have been welded together using extreme violence and cruelty.

Tsai Wei-chun on history as analysis vs history as tribalistic point-scoring:

So past Chinese history and China having many spoken languages and customs excuses Japanese war crimes?

I'm not defensive about China. I'm offended by Japan's war crimes and their lack of remorse.

I'm the first one to be offended by the current Chinese regime, if they continue to be commies.

It confuses me why you continue to be defensive about Japan when their war crime records are irrefutable and intolerably cruel.

I like the Germans. They are man enough to raise their hands and say "we're sorry, we did it, it was our fault." We cannot forget their crimes, but we can forgive them. Japanese and people like you are completely different.