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C A Jeska's avatar

You are not my representative; you are district adjacent. I would like to think of you as my representative, though, because as you know, the lines are constantly moving around us here in NC. Thank you for your thoughtful newsletters. I hope you are not the only one doing this. The clear, precise and linear nature of the writing and the context provided is invaluable. I learned three things I didn't know about the Taiwan situation in this edition, and I usually think I'm reasonably well informed.

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Samuel Bickett's avatar

Thanks for educating on this, Jeff. One additional layer that’s important but rarely is spoken of in US policy circles: those 2 million Mainlanders who set up a government in Taiwan after fleeing the communists--there were already millions of people on the island. The new arrivals took over, imposed a dictatorship, forced Taiwanese people to speak a different language and adopt a different culture, and demanded they see themselves as “Chinese.” They were colonized by these American allies just as they had been colonized by the Japanese before them, the Dutch before the Japanese, and the Spanish before the Dutch. Now, the PRC wants to colonize them once again.

Taiwan has been a democracy for about 30 years, but this element is critical to understanding Taiwan and the will of the Taiwanese people. To most in Taiwan, it’s not just the PRC’s claims to China that are wrong. Even the concept of Taiwan being a separate Chinese society is wrong--Taiwan is and always has been Taiwanese, and it’s time for the world to recognize that.

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