The majority of the people of Taiwan are ethnically Chinese, but this is a relatively recent status. Taiwan is not an ancient part of China.

Taiwan has become ethnically Chinese in 2 stages, first an immigration from the neighboring Chinese province that is a few centuries old, then the invasion of the island by Kuomintang at the end of WWII, which took the political power from the native Chinese.

So Taiwan has become a Chinese-populated territory only during the last few centuries, and the desire to unite it with mainland China is not something that can reassure China's neighbors that this is where its desire of expansion will stop.

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eagleislandsong 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> not something that can reassure China's neighbors that this is where its desire of expansion will stop

May I ask if you actually live in one of these neighbouring countries? I do -- in fact I have lived in more than one -- and I can assure you that many/most people living in these areas outside of the Western media bubble absolutely do not share your view.

From the CCP's (and many Chinese people's) perspective:

1) the U.S. repeatedly interfered in the CCP's/KMT's attempts to resolve the civil war -- see e.g. the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises (during which the PRC shelled Taiwan), Project National Glory (the ROC's plan to reconquer the mainland) -- preventing the mainland and Taiwan from reunification;

2) the Taiwanese government has lost the civil war, and the loser doesn't get to set the terms.

Pretending that the PRC's interest in Taiwan isn't special is to ignore extremely crucial historical circumstances that are core to understanding the situation today. Regardless of what you think of the PRC's stance on reunification, their desire to reunify doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it takes ahistorical leaps of reasoning to suggest that the PRC might want to annex South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. next.

> only during the last few centuries

This is way more than enough time to drastically transform the culture of a society. Taiwan today is culturally much more similar to the PRC than it is to the West. In some aspects it is also similar to Japan, despite the fact that Japan colonised it for "only" 50 years.

	▲	corimaith 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Taiwan today is culturally much more similar to the PRC than it is to the West The cultural distance between Taiwan and Japan, Korea and Hong Kong is less than the distance from mainland China. Aka Asian liberal democracies (or at least with strong political plurality and civil society). You're mistaking a regional difference with a commonality with the PRC, when in reality the PRC's epistemic worldview is highly distorted in comparison to virtually every other actor in the region. They don't speak for the region.

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yanhangyhy 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

During the American Civil War, the majority of the population in the Deep South states were actually Black slaves

	▲	loeg 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Are you arguing by metaphor that the Han Chinese on Taiwan are slaves to the native Taiwanese, or what? Or that slaves weren't Americans? I have no idea what your comment is trying to say.

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mafribe 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly.

Taiwan has spent the approx 120 years on a very different political, economic, cultural track from the mainland. Taiwan diverged from the other subject of the Qing dynasty before Han nationalists began their century long project to forge a united Chinese nation. In particular, Taiwan did not go through decades of communist terror, but did experience the fruit of democracy.