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It's what true comrades do.
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Oct 1, 2019 13:53
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Pirate Radar posted:https://twitter.com/huxijin_gt/status/1178859815688261633?s=21 Just a couple of legs short of being the final weapon.
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Oct 1, 2019 13:54
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Pirate Radar posted:https://twitter.com/huxijin_gt/status/1178859815688261633?s=21
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Oct 1, 2019 14:00
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The DF stands for Dong Feng btw
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Oct 1, 2019 14:06
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Hu is a bit of a size queen.
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Oct 1, 2019 14:36
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I have a good grasp on history, but as I'm not a leftist a bunch of the subtleties of the arguments used here can go over my head. I'm sure there are other threads or books to up my leftist game but forgive a leading question - Taiwan seems nice? Taiwan has been full capitalist for much much longer then the mainland, and also it's a way better place to live, seems nicer way nicer then then where I live. I expect, having never lived there. Seems like they have real liberty, last time I was over there there were a bunch of peaceful pro mainland protesters, worst they got was they were being frowned at by locals. This thread is hella hostile so I assume there are strong feelings about this but I haven't read much hate here about plucky Taiwan which seems to break the pattern.
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Oct 1, 2019 14:49
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Spectral_beard posted:I have a good grasp on history, but as I'm not a leftist a bunch of the subtleties of the arguments used here can go over my head. I'm sure there are other threads or books to up my leftist game but forgive a leading question - Taiwan seems nice? Taiwan has been full capitalist for much much longer then the mainland, and also it's a way better place to live, seems nicer way nicer then then where I live. I expect, having never lived there. Seems like they have real liberty, last time I was over there there were a bunch of peaceful pro mainland protesters, worst they got was they were being frowned at by locals. This thread is hella hostile so I assume there are strong feelings about this but I haven't read much hate here about plucky Taiwan which seems to break the pattern. Taiwan is turbo capitalist hellscape that looks friendly on the outside but is shady as hell. Case in point, many of the worst mainland sweatshop labour abuses (suicide nets and the rest) have been at Taiwan-owned businesses e.g. foxconn E: coming from the position of mainland also being shady as hell 90% of the time
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Oct 1, 2019 14:54
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Even if you don’t want to get into the Taiwan/China comparison you can say that Taiwan is nice compared to some other countries, it has things like an affordable, reasonably good healthcare system and is arguably the most tolerant place in Asia with regards to gay rights, but it’s still not great. Workplace culture and working conditions are often quite bad; overwork and burnout are common in office jobs and industries like fishing and construction use a lot of imported labor from less developed Asian nations and uses it up nearly however it wants because of the inequalities inherent to that. And as mentioned, Foxconn is a Taiwanese firm, and while they’re a notable offender they’re just the one everyone knows the name of rather than being the only one doing what they do.
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Oct 1, 2019 15:14
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Pirate Radar posted:Even if you don’t want to get into the Taiwan/China comparison you can say that Taiwan is nice compared to some other countries, it has things like an affordable, reasonably good healthcare system and is arguably the most tolerant place in Asia with regards to gay rights, but it’s still not great. Honestly though, this is true of most somewhat wealthy countries, pretty much all of which can be called capitalist. The United States is the outlier and exception in this case. Because ultimately socialized/universal health care is not just just way more affordable for individuals and beneficial to society it's also waaaaay cheaper to maintain for the government, the US spends ludicrous amounts of money on its healthcare system and on subsidizing hospitals and insurance companies, yet health care is still more expensive by an order of magnitute compared to other first world countries.
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Oct 1, 2019 15:20
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Taiwan was also a military dictatorship for a long time.
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Oct 1, 2019 15:59
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Raenir Salazar posted:Taiwan was also a military dictatorship for a long time.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:03
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Grouchio posted:There are suprisingly few books on Cold War Taiwan in my university's 200k ebook library. Any recommendations? Sadly I'm not aware of anything. One of my main sources was Susan Shirk's Inside the People's Republic and interested enough in Taiwan to look into it.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:05
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Last time I was there the guy said there wasn't much resentment over the Japanese occupation which was stunning to me. Tells me either the Japanese were some how better or, more likely, their own post Japan leaders were worse. Thanks for these responses by the way they are quite informative.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:07
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Grouchio posted:There are suprisingly few books on Cold War Taiwan in my university's 200k ebook library. Any recommendations? All these are in English. A very short introduction would be Steve Goldstein's China and Taiwan. If you're looking for something more in-depth, I was assigned a collection of essays edited by Murray Rubenstein called Taiwan: A New History. If you want a primary source from an American perspective about some of the nastier parts of the KMT's early history in Taiwan, try Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr. It includes a first-hand account of the 2/28 incident.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:20
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Spectral_beard posted:Last time I was there the guy said there wasn't much resentment over the Japanese occupation which was stunning to me. Tells me either the Japanese were some how better or, more likely, their own post Japan leaders were worse. Thanks for these responses by the way they are quite informative. A key difference with Taiwan vs. other Japanese colonies was that Taiwan was administered by civilian authorities as “part of Japan” (not an equal part of course) whereas other places like Korea and Manchuria were seen as more removed, and administered by the Japanese military. The worst stories you’ve heard about the Japanese empire probably came from those places. There absolutely were abuses in Taiwan (particularly against Taiwanese aboriginal tribes) but over the 50 years of Japanese administration many Taiwanese people had basically gotten used to their status, people commonly learned Japanese, etc. Then in 1945 the island suddenly became part of the Republic of China and the KMT showed up and there was a lot of friction because of the adjustment. The contrast was noticeable for a whole generation of people.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:21
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Raenir Salazar posted:Taiwan was also a military dictatorship for a long time. And worth mentioning about this is that the dictator’s party is still one of the major national parties, he’s still on the money, and there’s still a big Lincoln Memorial-style statue of him in his hagiographic memorial hall in the middle of Taipei, not to mention other smaller statues of him scattered around the country. There used to be more, but various local governments have moved to take him out of their schools and parks, and so a particular park in a pro-KMT area has agreed to take some of them, creating a dictator’s memorial garden with hundreds of Chiang statues (just the interesting ones I think, most were mass-produced crap and just get melted down for bronze again after being removed).
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Oct 1, 2019 16:39
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This is a funny thing about Taiwan:quote:Until 2008, the office of "Sacrificial Official to Confucius" had the same ranking and remuneration as that of a cabinet minister in the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:42
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Pirate Radar posted:And worth mentioning about this is that the dictator’s party is still one of the major national parties, he’s still on the money, and there’s still a big Lincoln Memorial-style statue of him in his hagiographic memorial hall in the middle of Taipei, not to mention other smaller statues of him scattered around the country. There used to be more, but various local governments have moved to take him out of their schools and parks, and so a particular park in a pro-KMT area has agreed to take some of them, creating a dictator’s memorial garden with hundreds of Chiang statues (just the interesting ones I think, most were mass-produced crap and just get melted down for bronze again after being removed). It's not much difference from Spain and Franco,and other shittier European countries.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:44
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Kassad posted:This is a funny thing about Taiwan: It's about as dumb as Remembrancer of London, still a real position.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:51
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Oh, also his great-grandson is currently a member of the legislature. E: so I guess that’s an Italy comparison for you. Or I don’t know, is there a little Franco still running around Spain?
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Oct 1, 2019 16:54
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Pirate Radar posted:Even if you don’t want to get into the Taiwan/China comparison you can say that Taiwan is nice compared to some other countries, it has things like an affordable, reasonably good healthcare system and is arguably the most tolerant place in Asia with regards to gay rights, but it’s still not great. Workplace culture and working conditions are often quite bad; overwork and burnout are common in office jobs and industries like fishing and construction use a lot of imported labor from less developed Asian nations and uses it up nearly however it wants because of the inequalities inherent to that. And as mentioned, Foxconn is a Taiwanese firm, and while they’re a notable offender they’re just the one everyone knows the name of rather than being the only one doing what they do. Taiwan also has an enormous finance/insurance industry for its size. They're the second-biggest foreign owner of US mortgage-backed financial securities - because of their huge current account surplus. The numbers are more than a little frightening. Pirate Radar posted:KMT stuff Martial law only ended in 1987, and the "Temporary Provisions against Communist Rebellion" were only formally repealed in 1991. And for the presidential elections next January, that same party nominated the candidate who was a more vocal advocate of improving ties with the mainland. That said, I've heard he's had a rough time with the party's older establishment. He had to backtrack after what's been going on in Hong Kong. His polling has been rough for the past few months, though, and I don't think he's even had a lead since May.
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Oct 1, 2019 17:19
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On the subject of Chiang and the KMT, having read the book Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter (about China in WW2) a thing that's mentioned there (I think it was in the foreword) is that in the last 10 or 20 years or so there's been a gradual process of rehabilitation of the reputation of Chiang's and the KMT's role in the war against Japan in the PRC, from one where the nationalists were portrayed as collaborators who avoided fighting the Japanese to a much more favorable portrayal of them as flawed, but committed to the patriotic struggle. Anyone know anything more on this to elaborate on it?
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Oct 1, 2019 17:42
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Little boldie has no chance. KMT should have let Terry "Slave Driver" Guo run on the business first platform. In 2024 he would be too old.
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Oct 1, 2019 18:28
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tino posted:It's not much difference from Spain and Franco,and other shittier European countries. https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/09/30/inenglish/1569848035_487891.html lemme know when they dump chiang's body where it belongs
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Oct 1, 2019 18:33
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Jeoh posted:https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/09/30/inenglish/1569848035_487891.html Yeah I heard about that. I don't care about using dead body to boost your side of the voters. Is Spain going to return the conquistador gold or something?
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Oct 1, 2019 18:42
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Randarkman posted:On the subject of Chiang and the KMT, having read the book Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter (about China in WW2) a thing that's mentioned there (I think it was in the foreword) is that in the last 10 or 20 years or so there's been a gradual process of rehabilitation of the reputation of Chiang's and the KMT's role in the war against Japan in the PRC, from one where the nationalists were portrayed as collaborators who avoided fighting the Japanese to a much more favorable portrayal of them as flawed, but committed to the patriotic struggle. Anyone know anything more on this to elaborate on it? I know in the 2009 movie Founding of a Republic, he was portrayed as less of an outlandishly evil villain and slightly more of a patriotic person who was misled by corrupt advisors. Some historians like Yang Tianshi published more positive books about Chiang, focusing on his patriotism and resistance to Japan around the same time. Off the top of my head, this was around the same time as Beijing's attempts to improve relations with Taiwan, but also around the time that some folks in the DPP were demanding a real reckoning with his legacy. I don't have any citations off the top of my head, though.
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Oct 1, 2019 19:14
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A very important detail of Taiwan having been a military dictatorship is that they also just kinda stopped being a military dictatorship. Chiang Kai-shek's son (the one who went and did communism in the USSR and married a Belorussian lady, not the one who went and did Nazism in Germany) Chiang Ching-kuo started liberalizing and then his successor Lee Teng-hui just said "okay time for free and fair elections" with zero bloodshed. I had thought that was the only time in history where a dictatorship bloodlessly democratized of its own volition but someone recently told me it happened in Chile too? My Chilean history isn't very good. Spain has also been argued but I don't think it counts since Franco only did it posthumously. In Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui just let multiparty elections happen. He then proceeded to win them pretty handily (China got very mad. Third Taiwan Strait Crisis-level mad). Taiwan is far from perfect. It has a lot of problems with income inequality and housing affordability. But as a liberal democracy it's doing pretty well, and stands there to show every time someone says China can't handle democracy because of values or a big population or something it's all just racism. Taiwan in 1980 was in pretty much the same position China is now, politically. We should be so lucky that the Chinese Communist Party will also peacefully accede to multiparty elections.
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Oct 1, 2019 20:06
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I think Spain counts almost as much as the Republic of China ( ) does, it wasn't Chiang or his wife that democratized the place either. Franco expected Juan Carlos (RIP) to keep fashing, that's why he picked him. Whoops!
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Oct 1, 2019 21:13
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There’s no Taiwanese equivalent to Carrero Blanco getting blown halfway to the stratosphere by the ETA, either, or to the failed coup of 1981. But yes, the relatively bloodless nature of Taiwan’s transition to democracy is noticeable.
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Oct 2, 2019 00:21
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Pirate Radar posted:There’s no Taiwanese equivalent to Carrero Blanco getting blown halfway to the stratosphere by the ETA, either, or to the failed coup of 1981. But yes, the relatively bloodless nature of Taiwan’s transition to democracy is noticeable. Blanco's not really relevant to post-Franco democratization except insofar as the shithead would definitely have caused problems for it if his car hadn't been blasted over a building, but yeah, iirc the Taiwanese authoritarians didn't try to overthrow Lee. possibly because he was more or less acceptable to them and won the free ish and fair ish election, vs the descent of Spain into the lawless communist anarchy so many brave men murdered so many defenseless civilians to oppose
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Oct 2, 2019 00:31
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It should be noted too that Lee Teng-Hui was born in Japanese colonial Taiwan and is now a supporter of the pan-Green candidates. He was kind of a trojan horse but 1996 was such a time period that if a country was going to peacefully transition, it was a safe time period regardless of PRC saber rattling. The Nationalists had always had the stated intention of bringing back democratic elections and it wasn't just a farce like it was and still is in a lot of authoritarian, single party countries. While that might mean nothing in practice, there was at least a long held belief that democracy was the end goal when the time was right. Qing-Kuo kind of saved the KMT by reorganizing it under the same model of the Communist Party Soviet Union in the 50's but it was well known by the 60's, even admitted by Kai-shek in private, that they were never going to take back the mainland. A civil war would have probably just alienated their allies, the US and Japan, during a period of American global hegemony and rolled out the welcome mat for the PLA to invade. It's pretty accepted that Taiwan would not be able to hold out today but in the 90's the estimates was months. Not to get into Clancy chat but I'm sure the generals were aware of that and weren't willing to go back to the degradation they grew up under in the 40's and 50's.
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Oct 2, 2019 01:57
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Bloodnose posted:Taiwan is far from perfect. It has a lot of problems with income inequality and housing affordability. But as a liberal democracy it's doing pretty well, and stands there to show every time someone says China can't handle democracy because of values or a big population or something it's all just racism. Taiwan in 1980 was in pretty much the same position China is now, politically. We should be so lucky that the Chinese Communist Party will also peacefully accede to multiparty elections. My read is that this is the important part. Mainland China/the CCP doesn’t just want to do their own thing, they want to be the authority over all ethnic Chinese worldwide, which is honestly a decent roadmap for world domination in some ways, and an actual functional democracy like Taiwan, for all its issues and the various headaches of capitalism, is threat to that far beyond the actual threat Taiwan poses directly as a nation state. Someday I feel the CCP is liable to go after Singapore as well, though to be honest they can probably just buy enough influence to use it as they need, and moreover Singapore isn’t really much of a democracy anyway, for all that’s served them well so far.
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Oct 2, 2019 03:16
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Lee Teng-Hui flat out thinks he is Japanese and wants to be a Japanese. But regarding TW turning democracy in the 80s, most of the countries who were part of the America's military alliance and part of the globalization supply chain had to adopt the Washington Consensus anyway. Taiwan was no different from South Korea or a bunch of SEA countries. It would have turned democracy without Lee Teng-Hui. America was a much more confident country in the 80s, at least vast majority of the Americans believed in the power of democracy and free market. Notice how Turkey was a pretty democratic country but slowly turn authoritarian in the last 10 years, and it pretty much has to get out of the Washington Consensus both in military alliance and value system to continue this authoritarian path. I wouldn't be surprised if Turkey leave NATO in a few years. tino fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Oct 2, 2019 |
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Oct 2, 2019 03:17
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sincx fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2019 04:58
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uh. . . Turkey has always had a rather. . . uneasy relationship with democracy. They had military coups in 1960, 71, and 80 and a soft coup in which the military basically forced the PM to resign in 1997. If in the last decade Turkey has seemed to swing away from Democracy it's only because it was swinging hard towards being more democratic in the 00s. Washington liberalism may not be knocking down ex-Soviet ally after ex-Soviet ally the way it was in the nineties and early aughts, but it's hard to argue its really lost much ground in the meanwhile. The IMF and Worldbank basically won and much more liberal economic and political systems prevail across South America and Africa than did in the eighties, and there's really no indication that that status quo is going to change, or that China or anyone else even really wants to change it. For example over the past year Ethiopia has committed to becoming more liberal and adopt more traits of western democracy, and they're probably closer to China than anyone. Sudan is also friendly with China and they've also tentatively committed themselves to democratization, although who knows if they will actually follow through. I think it's clear the Washington consensus is still globally hegemonic, and if it's being rolled back anywhere it's advancing faster everywhere else.
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Oct 2, 2019 05:20
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I think Spain counts almost as much as the Republic of China ( It was not guaranteed that Lee Deng Hui was going to keep his position when Chiang Ching Kuo died; there was a huge power struggle between the older factions and the younger, 2nd gen KMT folk on what was going to happen in 88/89. And you can see the changes that happened with the Wild Lily movement in 90: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Lily_student_movement Lee went out to talk to protestors himself. I've seen clips of a Taiwanese documentary about it but I don't think there is an English version. I have a couple links to share about that time period when I get off my phone and back to a computer. The Rubenstein book mentioned earlier is probably the best book studying all of Taiwanese history, going back hundreds of years. edit: https://medium.com/commonwealth-magazine/lifting-martial-law-and-opening-up-taiwan-a0965ccca511 There is something to be said as well about the government system the Japanese put in place during its 50 year colonial rule. It greatly varied based on whichever general/poobah they sent in until the 1930s when they really started cracking down. GoutPatrol fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Oct 2, 2019 |
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Oct 2, 2019 05:51
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For more general history of the island I’ve heard good things about Taiwan’s 400 Year History by the late Su Beng, who wrote the book during his exile in Japan after a failed plot to assassinate Chiang.
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Oct 2, 2019 05:56
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The international PR campaign the CCP is running over HK is going swimmingly: https://twitter.com/yskevinhuang/status/1179250578666471424?s=19
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Oct 3, 2019 01:25
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GoutPatrol posted:It was not guaranteed that Lee Deng Hui was going to keep his position when Chiang Ching Kuo died; there was a huge power struggle between the older factions and the younger, 2nd gen KMT folk on what was going to happen in 88/89. I am extremely in for more posting about this period of Chinese (  ) history.
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Oct 3, 2019 01:44
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I am extremely in for more posting about this period of Chinese ( We can probably take it to a different thread to avoid cluttering up this one.
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Oct 3, 2019 01:58
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