Yeah, I’m not one for droning on and on 
But meant to say the USS Ronald Reagan Strike group most likely sent a pretty clear message. Be crazy to start a fight when you see these guys coming down the street 
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For sure. I suppose what I keep eluding to in my posts but dont say directly is this:
You can walk down the street like the biggest toughest mother fucker on earth. showing your chest and strutting your massive cock. for what? only escalation without any meaningful change. Which leads to the question, why?
Alternatively, things will ACTUALLY change far sooner and surer with a pen and paper, rather than murder threats and.pissing contests. If the US inked official ties with Taiwan, this shit would of been over by now. Long ago! Like a bandage left unchanged and wet, the infection is now septic. 2 options. put in way more work to fix what you already had infinite chances to fix before with relative ease. Or, cut the limb.
Inking these ties will absolutely escalatete things. But, there is a huge difference between ink and bullets. bullets have no positive results. ink does. Once the ink is laid down, it is not reversible. the escalation will also be ink, lip service etc and scary macro photos as I posted above. If anything, other countries will lay down ink as well on this issue because they will be less frightened of the boogeyman. China will beat their chest and rock their cocks, but that’s about it.
This is rather obvious. and once one gets past all the fear mongering (chests and cocks) it is actually quite simple and not dangerous.
That said, the world seems absolutely bent on waiting, funding the CCP and PLA to make sure they are strong enough to counter the world before we actually try ink. It is so beyond fucking retarded it seems intentional.
@Explant - Yeah, I think I get your point. All the saber-rattling does is raise tensions.
But, I think the biggest stumbling block is not China’s size or importance, but the fact they are on the UN’s security council.
From what I understand, Taiwan will never be recognized unless the full security council votes them into the UN. And China, of course, wont agree to that.
So, I think the USA is forced to send their biggest dick down there (The Ronald Reagan strike force). Not to start a war but more to say, “Now let’s not do anything stupid boys”.
It’s in no-ones interest to start a war down there. It would trigger a world-wide recession. And I think that is what the US (with its big ship) is trying to prevent.
The latest installment of this love affair has been the electrifying visit of the Kyoto Tachibana Senior High School Band, which performed at numerous venues including at this year’s October 10 celebrations.
A look at any number of the photos in the following Focus Taiwan photo essay cements this basic truth: Taiwanese and Japanese really like each other!
Guy
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Can’t blame them. Japanese marching bands are really good. Hell even their elementary schools are crazy good. Compared to the other bands we heard during the celebration…it makes sense they were invited lol
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Who doesn’t like Anime and H Cuppu!
What’s H Cuppu?
Yay for Japan - Taiwan relations forever! Happy happy joy joy!
Because even though the Japanese were brutal they also offered opportunity. Loads of Taiwanese were given scholarships to attend Japanese universities. Also the Japanese never tried to squash Hokklo and Hokkien languages.
Then the KMT came along. And took credit for what the locals built under Japanese rule. Quickly followed by the white terror era.
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Let’s also remember that Japanese military were brutal, but the educated elites were mostly very liberal and preferred democracy and equality. Japanese Governor-generals to Taiwan can be separated into 3 stages.
Between 1895 to 1918, all governor-generals were career military, and they tried to fight everyone and found Taiwan useless and a waste of money.
From 1919 to 1932, every Governor-general was career bureaucrat, and they invested in Taiwan’s agriculture and industrial capabilities, and made Taiwan relatively very wealthy in Asia. They even allowed elections and sought to desegregate Aboriginals, Hans, and Japanese.
Then WW2 began as the military took charge back home in Japan. From 1936 to 1945, we’ve got crappy military governor-generals again. They started doing things like forcing everyone to adopt a Japanese name, banning Taigi news papers, and banning Taigi theater.
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Other terrible things during this late colonial period included coercing Indigenous men to join the Japanese Imperial Army, to be sent off to the Pacific theater with predictably grim results.
We should also not overlook the so-called “comfort women” system, which did not exclude women in Taiwan, as these folks keep fighting for us to remember:
Guy
Any more on this? How did this work?
From the accounts I’ve seen, most Indigenous men were actually pretty eager to join the war effort, especially around 1942. More indigenous men showed up than the spots opened in those early recruitment.
Edit: Just found the data. In the 1941 recruitment, the Japanese were looking for 500 indigenous men, mainly to act as movers. 5000 showed up instead. The indigenous men weren’t really put into fighting until February of 1942, when they were sent to Bataan to take American positions. When those men returned to Taiwan, they were treated as heroes, given police positions, and a decent reward, which became even a bigger draw for other indigenous men.
Don’t really see any specific account that said they were forced to join. For the Han Taiwanese, you could say some were coaxed to join, especially towards the end of the war, when food was rationed and scarce, having someone in the military would increase the amount rationed.
Japanese also got along very well with the indigenous peoples in Wulai and Hualien, with many Indigenous people still naming their children with Japanese names till this day. For example, Amis people in A’Tolan naming their kids Haruko, but pronounce it like an Amis word, trilling the r, and turning the o into an u.
I’ve found even the elderly natives, the ones who speak Japanese better than Mandarin, don’t always have a negative perception of Japan either.
My source is this 2022 book from the University of Hawai’i Press:
In Chapter 2 “Military Service, Citizenship, and Loyalites,” the author writes on page 19 (I am keying this in manually):
From March 1942, Indigenous men [in Taiwan] were recruited for labor and later for military service in the Takasago Volunteer Corps [note euphemistic naming here] . . . and other special units. They were included in compulsory drafts in Taiwan in late 1944 and 1945.
Following this point, a lot of testimony and ethnographic / historical details appears in this book, which is clearly written to reclaim Indigenous (and not imperial or settler colonial) perspectives on what is commonly called “World War II.”
Guy
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Yeah, pretty much everyone was drafted in late 1944 and 1945 though. The book doesn’t exactly provide proof for coercion.
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On note 27 on page 207 of that book, the author provides four published sources to support the claim. Sorry I am at work but I can key these sources in manually for you; copy and paste is not possible with the JStor version I am accessing:
Y. Chen 2001, Huang 2001, Shimomura 2006, Ts’ai 2005.
I should add that this book is a kind of revisionist interpretive history; it synthesizes research findings across a wide range of locations and is not an attempt to do “primary research” in Taiwan; it instead brings together what other scholars have found.
Guy
Looks interesting, thanks.
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Yeah, but I’d I’d say that a draft is coercion by definition. I’d be interested if indigenous Taiwanese were singled out in some way, but not so much if simply drafted along with everyone else. It was an all-out war.
The thing with the all out drafts in late 1944 and 1945 was it was too late to train and deploy them outside of Taiwan.