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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Taiwan considers themselves to be Chinese (and the legitimate Chinese government at that), but nobody else does. Possession matters.

I’m not sure this supports the point you’re trying to make.

It is obviously true that (modulo a small population of foreigners and Taiwanese aboriginals) virtually all inhabitants of Taiwan today are descended from people who came from China. And if you’ve ever paid a visit to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, you’d know that there’s a very real sense in which the people of present-day Taiwan are the heirs to, and the custodians of, the Chinese civilizational patrimony. Perhaps not uniquely so—the overseas Chinese of Malaysia and Singapore, and of course the mainland Chinese, have similar claims, with varying degrees of plausibility—but then again, no one said that the Romanians or the inhabitants of minor outlying islands in the Aegean were the only surviving Sons of Romulus, either.

The difference is that the PRC only really cares about the KMTs dispute of continuity of government from the 1911 Xinhai revolution, which is the theoretical successor to the Imperial China polity and its associated territorial claims. Cultural successors to different time/regions of China include the San Francisco and Flushing Chinatowns which practice the Cantonese ways of the 1800s, the Thai Chinese who practice a syncretic Thai-Teochew pattern of especially gaudy taoism (other southeast Asians are migrants who hold little affection for the mainland), and even the Joseon who at one point proclaimed they were the successors/avengers of Ming China following the Manchu conquest of the Han. Yet all of these are unimportant to the PRC because no one else claims legitimacy over the mainland.

The KMT are in fact colonizers in the truest sense, being a foreign people (KMT nationalist government, soldiers and displaced Nanjing intellectuals) that displaced the local power structures and cultures (Ainu/Japanese colonial subjects+local bureaucrats) while acting as a disputed successor to a foreign regime that had not ruled over Taiwanese for half a century. These putonghua speaking nobles ran roughshod over the minnanyu speaking islanders who cared not for the squabbles of the mainland. That the KMT was entertaining thoughts of reclaiming mainland China through an Operation Revival style invasion of the Inner Sphere was the maim reason for the continual dispute between the PRC and ROC.

Fast forward about 60 years and a LOT of cultural upheavals roiling the world, and the PRC obsession with the ROC seems less like actual intra-Chinese dynastic succession politics that basically characterized the vast majority of Chinese imperial history and more a consequence of a heavily interconnected world with a force of first resort actually able to project power to its vassals. The eastern roman themes draped the livery of Constantinople on their standards, but no levy of Aleppo trained with a Hellenic muster. By contrast the Taiwanese Armed Forces practically beg to be placed under the command and responsibility of their US friends, for force competency and blame absolution purposes. Whether this assessment is accurate or even shared by the PRC is unknown, but it certainly seems that Taiwans irredentist claims to the Qing holdings would not be maintained if Taiwan did not have the US 7th fleet nearby.

Sure I would agree that the people in Taiwan are descended from the Chinese (as the Byzantines were from the Romans). But that doesn't make them Chinese, any more than Australians are English because most of the population is descended from English convicts. Like I said, possession matters. Perhaps the first generation or even second generation of the Byzantines after the fall of Rome could legitimately claim to be Roman. But at some point, it doesn't hold water any more.