Not so fast there TJ. "Oh, it's just a domestic" isn't good enough. And also, something written on paper by bygone people, long ago died, does not obligate a person born into the 21st century to go along with it. Many laws have languished on the books, over-looked and from a bygone time, applying to a world that no longer exists.
One of my favourites was Russia moaning like a fleet of Koreans moaning about CDMA royalties when USA USA USA attacked and defeated Saddam Hussein [in cahoots with a coalition of illegal warmongering by Blair and others]. Iraq owed Russia umpty $billions. USA and the new Iraq regime told Russia too bad.
I agree that Iraq after the war didn't owe Russia anything. Russia loaned the money to Saddam, who used it to build palaces, pay his palace guard, and attack anyone to whom he took a dislike. I do not think a Kurdish victim of Saddam should be obligated to repay loans he incurred. On the contrary, the Kurds could reasonably accuse Russia of funding an evil-doing criminal and the liability of doing so.
Dragging up the Long March, Kuomintang, and let's throw in Japan owning Taiwan too = just another hop in the island chain south of Japan, and how about the actual owners prior to both the mainlanders and Japanese en.wikipedia.org And I'm in there too as my mother was born in China so I must own it, as do my grandsons whose father's family is from southern China and hence more Taiwanese-owning than those northern Manchurian Mongol bastards.
These days, "civil wars" are neither civil nor reasonably nobody else's business. "You stay out of it while I mutilate these people who I want to attack, rob, murder, enslave, boss" is not much of an argument. Generally other people will stay out of it, but that's more a practical matter than an ethical decision.
I could do nothing about the mass murder in Srebenica which was obviously coming when the UN guy was pushed aside with Serbs taking charge of the UN "safe zone". Neither could I prevent the hideous hacking in Rwanda when the Hutus went postal on the Tutsis [and presumably anyone else they felt like attacking].
China apparently has in their old Mao books a document saying "All of your Formosa are belong to me". It's not surprising that our bygone heroic warrior for freedom and being the boss General Chiang Kai Cheque had in his rule book "All of China is mine, all mine".
Rather than be bound by such out of date books, I recommend we let bygones be bygones and consider what "We the Living" think is a good idea.
Look to a sensible future, rather than a hideous past of dog eat dog, human eat dog, Devil take the hindmost.
"I have a piece of paper from the 19th century that says you have to do what I say and give me all your money" is not really persuasive in the 21st century. Nor sensible. Even the vaunted and worshipped USA constitution has been metaphorically shredded. Roe vs Wade has done switcheroo to Wade vs Roe and now civil war is erupting.
"You stay out of it" is already way too late. Many people [one in particular I know well] now refuse to buy anything at all Made in China if they can possibly help it and that's not even due to the plans to mass murder into goose-stepping totalitarian rule of Taiwan. One of my uncles went to his grave refusing to buy anything from Japan [due to their cruel and hideous WWII activities] - though one of his cousins living nearby in Tauranga married a Japanese lady.
China is way too big, way too threatening, too totalitarian, to leave to do what it likes, based on some flimsy paperwork from a bygone time. The world is a very little place nowadays. When my ancestors sailed to Nortolk Island, NZ, China as children and young people, it was months of hazardous journey to worlds that were self-sufficient and essentially independent, though already the industrial revolution was spreading globalization at rapidly increasing pace. Now, mirved ICBMs are minutes away, airliners are hours away, and huge ships move megatons in days and weeks in an absurdly complex weave of interconnection and co-dependency, with people having moved around the world in their hundreds of millions and maybe billions. The old genetic tribal self-contained borders have long-faded. Heck, even 100 years ago Eugene wasn't so good at mandarin as english. Gandhi was an english speaking lawyer from South Africa.
I consider Hong Kong and Taiwan and China my business. I claim right of return for self and grandsons - our ancestors fled from the violent thugs warring and killing, back in the day. Unfortunately, of course that's a silly claim, as we can't rewind those times, which were already hopelessly complex at the time.
Where to from here is the issue.
Just exactly why does Emperor Pooh Xi want to totalitarianize Taiwan? A piece of paper from Kuomintang times? I go further and say Hong Kong should not necessarily be part of China because of a lease made by English and somebody in China in the 19th century. Committing many millions of people in Hong Kong in the 21st century to an ancient agreement when nearly nobody lived there and the co-signatories are very very long-gone, and the agreement wasn't really voluntary anyway as the British were bullying bastards with not universal VVV, not long out of the opium trade war, the Taiping carnage was not long-resolved, and the lease was dodgy with the temporary ruler of part of China. Agreements in the 19th century were more like surrender treaties, or strategies, than happily mutually beneficial agreements.
After yet another civil war in China, Chairman Mao said "Hey look what I found in the archives = it says I own Hong Kong and Taiwan and Polynesia and Japan and that of course includes Hawaii and New Zealand [all descended from south east China back in the day]. Not only that, our Dear Leader Genghis Khan owned all the way to Istanbul, Hungary and down to India. Woohoo, I rule the world!".
"Power grows out of the barrel of a gun" is sort of true, but so last century, and even then didn't work out so well for the proponents and hordes of their countrymen. Slaves don't work under the gun as well as they do when not enslaved and doing willing work. Zelensky wanted to enslave the easterners and Crimeans. Russians said nyet. Xi wants to enslave Taiwanese. I say Nah.... bad idea.
Recommendation to Emperor Xi - get something more useful to do than attacking people who want to run their own lives outside your clutches. Make yourself so attractive that they want to sign up, just as Great Britain aka United Kingdom, did to the EEC and thence EU in recent decades. Now unsigned and Brexited.
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