China’s CCP Continues Doubling Down On ‘Reunification’ Of Taiwan

There was a time, before Mao’s revolution, where China was a single political entity. The overthrown government sought sanctuary in Taiwan, and Mao never took it, but his heirs claim it as theirs anyway.

As those of us who watched the fall of Hong Kong during Covid, or old enough to remember what the iconic ‘Tank Man’ photo from Tiananmen Square was a news item and not a history story, the concept of ‘consent of the governed’ carries NO caché with China’s ruling party.

As we stepped into the new year, Xi made it abundantly clear that he not only sees Taiwan as a rogue territory that rightfully belongs to China, but that he stands ready to remedy that *ahem* ‘problem’.

Per the South China Morning Post:

Xi also mentioned Taiwan, describing the island’s reunification with the mainland as an “unstoppable trend”.
“The people on both sides of the strait are bound by blood ties thicker than water,” he said.
The People’s Liberation Army conducted large-scale military drills surrounding the island on Monday and Tuesday, in what it said was a stern warning to separatist forces. — SCMP

Fast forward just a couple of days, and you see a news story that seems very much connected to that announcement.

China will take punitive actions against three Taiwanese for their involvement in separatist activities related to “Taiwan independence”, its Taiwan Affairs Office said on Wednesday.
One of the people was named as an accomplice in separatist activities and will be held accountable for life.
Two of the others, as well as their relatives, will be banned from entering the mainland, Hong Kong and Macau, the office’s spokesperson Chen Binhua told reporters at a weekly news briefing.
Chen said the purpose of the actions against a small number of “Taiwan independence diehards” is to “fundamentally safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity”, and that it was not aimed at Taiwanese in general. —Reuters

With the news of the day now established, let’s consider its possible implications.

China is playing a very high-stakes poker game where global reliance on Taiwan’s enormous productivity is at the center of supply chains the world over. The current state of relative independence favors the global markets, and pulling it completely into the CCP’s control, as they did with Hong Kong, is very much at the center of Xi’s policy objectives. First, for the immediate benefit of the wealth it makes available to the Chinese economic planners, but even more importantly, for the leverage Taiwan would give over the global markets.

The leverage is no secret. Any country that speaks out against Xi’s agenda will be frozen out of key markets.

Again, we remind our readers that Taiwan successfully resisted Mao’s communist revolution, served as an enclave of refuge to which the previous government fled, and grew to become an enormously successful producer of top technology. The island nation has been living by its own customs and not the ones Mao and his comparatively small cabal of heirs in the ruling communist party enforced on the remainder of the Chinese population without any fear of accountability.

China’s ruling party is the same group that forcibly removed elected leaders in Hong Kong despite a contract with Hong Kong citizens that they would continue under the democratic system until a date certain, July 1, 2047.

China’s ruling party is ALSO the group conducting ‘large-scale military drills’ surrounding an island the CCP has never ruled, and is now actively arresting ‘dissenters’.

There was a time, not so long ago, when both Democrats (like Pelosi), and Republicans (like Ted Cruz) took great interest in reminding the world that Taiwan is not an island that has been integrated into the CCP’s network of control — despite common ethnicity and history dating back to before the revolution.

An obvious parallel is that Pyongyang is not presently under the authority of unified Korea’s original capital, found in modern-day Seoul. Shared language, history, family, and customs notwithstanding, the war redrew historical lines. Subsequent cultural influences took North and South Korea in different directions.

At the risk of invoking an even more charged example, Russia’s decades-long efforts to absorb Ukraine, (and yes, other parts of the former USSR) are also couched in political language of ‘reunification’ and repatriation of russian nationals living on the other side of a border. That alleged ‘reunification’ effort, as we have since seen, has come at the cost of untold hundreds of thousands (possibly more?) of human lives, not to mention the second-order effects to belligerents and their allies on both sides.

As China takes increasingly aggressive stances on asserting its claim on Taiwan, the wider world will watch to see to what degree those past examples of bilateral support for Taiwan’s independence hold up… or crumble under pressure.

For the record…? While we’re on the topic of Chinese imperial expansionism?

ClashDaily is proud to say that we did not remain silent when China came for Hong Kong. Even if that probably put us on the wrong side of Silicon Valley’s ‘fact checkers’ — along with all the OTHER reasons they took active steps to silence us.

Here is a small, chronological sample of our reporting as it touched on Hong Kong (without citing any of our other reporting on, say, crackdowns on Christians and other faiths, the enslaved Uyghurs, spycraft and reckless foreign policy, or a laundry list of their dirty dealing during the pandemic):

• Sep 24 2019: American Leftist Scolds Hong Kong Protesters For Loving Freedom Too Much
• October 1: 2019: HONG KONG: On The 70th Anniversary Of Chinese Communism, A Student Protester Was Shot With A Live Round
• November 25, 2019: HONG KONG: Election Returns Give Big Middle Finger To Communist China
• May 18, 2020: China Stages Coup In Hong Kong–Pro-Democracy Politicians Are Physically Removed From Legislature (VIDEO)
• May 25, 2020: China Moves On Hong Kong, Effectively Overturns ‘One Country, Two Systems’
• June 10, 2020: CCP CRACKDOWN: 53 Pro-Democracy Activists Arrested In Hong Kong
• June 24, 2020: Hey Leftists: Will You Make Your Voices Heard For The Oppressed Citizens Of Hong Kong?
• July 15, 2020: NBA Shamed Into Allowing Fans To Buy ‘Free Hong Kong’ Jerseys
• Apr 20, 2021: How Is CCP Vandalizing A Newspaper In Hong Kong A Dire Warning To America?
• Aug 3, 2020: TAIWAN: China Encircles Island Nation With Military In Response To Pelosi Visit

That latter half of the April 20 story about how China has been throwing its weight around to control media is as relevant now as it ever was. Maybe even more so than when it was first written.

Western media was too busy talking about the ongoing pandemic death counts quickly followed by a story about race riots in 2020’s Summer of Love™ to say much about the fall of Hong Kong.

[On that note, since certain big names in Silicon Valley have been playing the long game with Conservative alternate media, including suppressing advertiser revenue, shutting down social media accounts, and redirecting emails of faithful readers to the spam folder to decimate the reach of sites like ours, be sure to bookmark the site, click the bell on the site, or ‘white list’ our name on the mailing list. And share establishment-noncompliant content to like-minded friends and relations.]