How to avoid war with China?
How to avoid war with China?
For those of us, unfortunately, in the imperial core, what steps should we take to stop a US war with China over Taiwan? I've honestly been pretty scared since the war in Ukraine started knowing that China is next. We must avoid this at all costs to save the thousands of Chinese lives that will be sacrificed by the west in their bid to reestablish a unipolar world.
While I'm not discounting the achievements of the anti-war movement in support of Vietnam, the war still waged on for years. The same with Iraq. What should be done differently?
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Vietnam: the majority of the people of Vietnam didn't want the US there, the US was interfering in a civil war it shouldn't be meddling in.
Iraq: same thing, the US wasn't wanted and didn't have a reason to meddle.
Taiwan: the people of Taiwan don't want China there and China shouldn't invade. No one should invade.
People have a right to self determination. If China doesn't control Taiwan and the people of Taiwan want to keep the same government they have, then they should be allowed to. China invading Taiwan would be an unjustified imperialist act. Taiwan has a right to call upon its allies and friends for help if invaded and the alliances and friendships should be honored by those allies.
Taiwan: the people of Taiwan don't want China there and China shouldn't invade.
Not to link dump below, but I think the history of the civil war and specifically the White Terror give necessary context. China (as the ROC) already invaded Taiwan.
"The KMT lost the Chinese Civil War and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. However, Chiang Kai-shek intended to eventually return to mainland China and retake control of it. In order to do this, the KMT attempted to "sinicize" the Taiwanese people.[19][20][21][22] KMT's Taiwan Garrison Commander Chen Yi stated that after 50 years of Japanese rule, "Taiwanese customs, thought, and language would have to gradually return to that of the Chinese people".[23] The KMT believed that a centrally controlled curriculum would forge a unified national sentiment in Taiwan. They also believed education would help build a martial spirit and stimulate enough military, economic, political, and cultural strength not only to survive, but also to recover the mainland.[24]".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_people
40 years of martial law and something like 20,000 executions were enacted in order to build the public opinion they have now.
Please note that I agree with your main point (China should not militarily invade Taiwan), but I do support China's stated goal of peaceful reunification
I believe that regardless of what happened in the past, the only thing that matters is what current Taiwanese people want.
Events are not isolated in time; past events make future events possible, while future events are determined by the past. If you condemn the events leading to the status quo, then it's necessarily the case that you should not take the status quo as any sort of ethical baseline. That is, the current inhabitants of the island must not be exposed to war, and they will obviously decide their fate with their actions, but I don't find a reason to believe that their government deserves any special status regarding the island.
If you condemn the events leading to the status quo, then it’s necessarily the case that you should not take the status quo as any sort of ethical baseline.
That's quite impractical since all nations and their borders were established as a result of unethical conquest. This can be used as a justification for an unending cycle of violence.
Exactly. Every change to the world order has people in favor and against, and can have a multitude of effects deep into the future. If one carefully considers them, one can subjectively label some change as good, some as bad, a few violence justified, most condemnable. But setting some arbitrary point in history as the stop point is unsound from a justice standpoint.
My POV is that old events whose participants are dead stop being relevant for future moral actions. We should prefer justice for the living as opposed to justice for the already dead.
But those events have consequences for the living right now. If you're in poverty while someone else is rich because their ancestors stole from yours, then the current situation is unfair. You could of course simply equate all past actions to a sort of "ambient" condition, presumably outside the realm of ethics, but that would not necessarily have the effect of negating them:
- Thinking in terms of rights, if you have the right to inherit (literally or effectively) wealth from the past, then that should be conditional to also inheriting any ethical considerations associated to that wealth.
- At any rate, there's no reason to believe ethics doesn't apply to ambient conditions. E.g., if I become seriously ill for reasons outside my control, society should compensate and take care of me. This comes naturally in the form of welfare, or partially as insurance.
The problem is that it's all a huge "what if" amenable for any narrative you want. In the end it provides justification for the never ending cycle of violence on people having no personal guilt.
Forcing people to be responsible for more than their immediate actions (e.g., also for guaranteeing other people's rights, justice for everybody, etc.) is only concerned with what people should be expected to do. A cycle of violence is not any more justified than it would be in any other situation. For example, I can use violence to defend myself from immediate aggression; if I include an unjust status quo in my reasoning, then I might also use violence to free myself from the consequences of past violence, but that would not create a "cycle" wherein a stable, nonviolent state cannot be reached, since every "allowed" instance of violence would still only be associated one-to-one with an equivalent instance of "disallowed" violence.
I'll give a more concrete example. If someone is trying to rob me, let's suppose it is lawful to use threats to protect my personal property. Now, if my family's wealth was robbed long ago, I would have a right to recover it, and whoever has it now would have an obligation to return it. If they refuse, then they are essentially under the same ethical case as if they were directly robbing it from me, so it would be lawful for me to threaten them too. If they escalate, that would be unethical, so it is simply impossible to justify any cycle of violence.
Forcing people to be responsible for more than their immediate actions
What you're saying is that children should carry the responsibility for the acts of their ancestors.
if I include an unjust status quo in my reasoning, then I might also use violence to free myself from the consequences of past violence, but that would not create a “cycle” wherein a stable, nonviolent state cannot be reached, since every “allowed” instance of violence would still only be associated one-to-one with an equivalent instance of “disallowed” violence.
Who's the judge of whether it's "allowed" violence? If we say that the status quo of Franco-German relationship is built on the past injustice, and that this should be fixed, who will count all the past centuries of wars and massacres and calculate the outstanding balance?
Because if you let it both sides do it for themselves, then they both will naturally come to the conclusion that they've been unjustly treated and that the other side has to pay for that. In the end it will be the stronger one, not the morally correct one, who wins. For a time, then the sides will switch => cycle of violence is IMHO unavoidable if you hold the opinion that past sins are never forgotten.
Now, if my family’s wealth was robbed long ago, I would have a right to recover it
History is basically never so nicely clear-cut. I mean, have you studied your family tree and made sure that all of that family wealth was gathered via perfectly moral means? What if it turns out that your grand grandfather was a soldier who brought home some gold of dubious origins?
The White Terror ended in 1987, and involved the genocide of the native peoples of Formosa.
It doesn't seem honest to refer to "public opinion" while ignoring the events that shaped that opinion.
The only people in Taiwan with the right to self determination are the Taiwanese Indigenous peoples and Taiwan's proletariat. And because of the constant state of western interference and propaganda upon the populace in Taiwan, much like South Korea, the are more barriers to understanding that being apart of the PRC, like Hong Kong and Macau, is a good thing in the long run.
While The White Terror did end, we must recognize that the ROC itself is still a western backed colonially dominated capitalist regime, and is therefore illegitimate.
The only people in Taiwan with the right to self determination are the Taiwanese Indigenous peoples and Taiwan’s proletariat.
There are no indigenous peoples in Taiwan. We all come from Africa.
Having established the extreme, where do you cut the line who can exert self-determination? Most inhabitants of Taiwan were born in Taiwan, on what ground can't they decide their fate?
It is more complicated than other examples of indignity because of Taiwan's unique history of colonial dominance, that being that it isn't a settler colonial project. The Han people there are not there with the explicit purpose of the eradication of the island's indigenous peoples. This is why I include the island's mostly Han proletariat as having, to an extent, to say in self determination. This situation is a lot less cut and dry than a settler colonial state like Israel, where the settler proletariat, due to their settler status, does not have any say in the self-determination and state of Palestine, only the Palestinians do.