China launched its most extensive war games around Taiwan on Monday to showcase Beijing’s ability to cut off the island from outside support in a conflict, testing Taipei’s resolve to defend itself and its arsenal of U.S.-made weapons.
The Eastern Theatre Command said it had deployed troops, warships, fighter jets and artillery for its “Justice Mission 2025” exercises to encircle the democratically governed island, conduct live fire and simulated strikes on land and sea targets, and drills to blockade Taiwan’s main ports.
The live-firing exercises will continue on Tuesday across a record seven zones designated by China’s Maritime Safety Administration, making the drills the largest to date by total coverage and in areas closer to Taiwan than previous exercises. The military had initially said artillery firing would be confined to five zones.
You missed my point. Regarding the HRE, the point wasn’t that it’s sole histotical original location was the Holy See but rather that it is one of the few remaining city-states in the world. Regarding the Ottoman empire, the people were Turks but they were organized into various tribes, many of whom were nomadic or being displaced by conflict with e.g. the Mongols. A specific tribe which had settled down for about a century was not the entire Turkic nation, and no one would call their 150-year settlement a nation-state. They became the Ottoman Empire around the time they took Constantinople, and did not establish a Westphalian nation-state, so the idea that the modern nation-state of Turkey would be the same state as The Ottoman Empire doesn’t make sense. I agree that saying the Ottoman empire is equivalent with the a city-state located in Instanbul is not correct. My point was that your questions have answers that can be distilled from analyzing history. Should the nature of society collapse back to city-states, along with all the conquest-driven empire building, I think a city-state in Instanbul could claim inheritance to the Ottoman Empire, given a bunch of other conditions, and I think other city-states and their empires would likely recognize them.
Regarding China - you are correct, it is not a nation-state in the narrowest definition of the word as used by the Westphalian system as it was originally articulated. But by the same standard the US is not nation-state, nor is Canada, nor is any country in the Western hemisphere except maybe Haiti. So while you are technically correct about a very specific narrow definition of China’s status as a nation-state, you are fundamentally incorrect that it does not participate in the social construction of nation-statehood. It is a nation-state in the same way the the US, Russia, and India are nation states, despite them not actually meeting the exact criteria of a nation-state in the strictest sense of the word. This is important because international “law” and relations does not see a mechnical difference between a nation-state and a civilization-state, nor between a nation-state and a settler colonial state, nor between a nation-state and a plurinational-state. Maybe one day the world will operate differently regarding these things, and if it does I would assume the claims of China as a civilization state would carry significantly more international weight than the claims of the settler colonies in the US, Canada, Australia, etc.
Hmm. This is a tangled mess of a sentence. Nation-states are quite socialist. Lenin’s work on the national question is very socialist. The idea of national self-determination, that is the self-determination of a nation of people not of a nation-state, is quite foundational to socialist politics. Nation-states are a clear mechanism for national self-determination in the current global order.
The CPC has been keen to avoid the narrative of being a nation-state, that’s true, because they are working on a narrative that is older than most of the systems that invented the nation-state system. But Europeans conquered the globe and this is the system China finds itself in. It has very few claims if it is not recognized as a nation-state (however inaccurate) by the majority of the world’s governments. From the lens of the European governments and the UN, China is a nation, and it is a nation-state, and they deal with it on those terms. The Han on the island of Taiwan are not a distinct nation from China and the government of the island of Taiwan claims to be the same nation-state that the government of the mainland claims to be. There is only one nation-state, from the perspective of the North Atlantic world order, that is being claimed by both parties. There are not claims of the existence of 2 distinct nation-states (again, of the form understood by the current North Atlantic world order) except by Western chauvinistic citizens with no power except to rage at the immorality of others to avoid the immorality they are a part of.
If nation-state talks sounds nationalistic and imperialist, it’s because it comes from the European nationalistic imperialism that has been subjugating the world for the last 600 years and subjugated 80% of the world’s population at its height. We’re still coming down from that. Decolonizing, as it were. Part of that is refusing to play into the hands of the imperialist North Atlantic on the topic of Taiwan. And not for nothing, it seems clear that both the leaders in Beijing and the leaders in Taipei understand this which is why they are using the language they are and why they are making the claims they are and why they are NOT doing many of the things Westerners think they are doing or should be doing.
Nation-states are nationalist/imperialist in nature because they often violate the concept of self-determination. It is by definition the amalgamation of various similar cultures and peoples by enforcing a shared identity (and making those who don’t conform to it do so anyway). The Taiwanese population does not want to be ruled by the PRC for example, yet the PRC claims legitimate governance over the island anyway based on these nationalist claims. Similarly, the Spanish suppress the Catalan identity, the French assimilated the Bretons and the Alsatians, etc… It is this enforced unification of people that is not a very socialist viewpoint, people should want to unify on their own accord.
Yes, and it is this enforced unification that Lenin specifically addressed in the socialist context. The Catalan are a nation. The Bretons and Alsatians are nations.
The Han Chinese of Taiwan are not a nation unto themselves. The concept of Taiwanese identity was manufactured around the same time the Hong Konger identity was manufactured. Both were manufactured around the time the Brits and Americans realized that they couldn’t keep running the world with direct subjugation. Hong Kong and Taiwan got democracy within a year of each other. Would seem like an interesting connection until you realize they’re both under the deep influence of the UK and US. Taiwanese is not a nationality nor is it an ethnicity. There is a nation on the island of Taiwan. They are indigenous to the island. There is no conversation about that nation claiming sovereignty over the island.
Regardless of whether you think they are nations, they do apparently consider themselves one. And the right to self-determination does suggest the CPC should stay out. You can argue all about how it came to be this way, but ultimately it’s irrelevant; it’s there to now, so acting militarily against these people is an injustice.
Sorry, “who” considers themselves a nation? The Han Chinese living on the island of Taiwan. No. I don’t think you’ll find that opinion to be very popular nor very defensible. You wouldn’t say New Yorkers consider themselves a nation just because they have developed an identity called “New Yorker”. The Hong Konger identity is not a national one. Nor is the Taiwanese identity.
The right to self-determination suggests that the CPC should give nations the right to secede through a popular voting mechanism. That would be the nation of Tibet and the nation of Xinjiang. Taiwan, not being a nation, does not have a special status that would allow it to secede. Further, as a protectorate of the US and Britain, it would not be independent and self-determined much like Iran was not independent self-determined after the US overthrew their democratically elected government.
How it came about is precisely as relevant as the discussion of Israel’s claim to the land, why Palestine isn’t considered a nation-state today, why the US prison system incarcerated black people at higher rates than white people, why wealth is distributed the way it is, etc.
I know Americans like to argue that history doesn’t matter, but let me tell you about how that came about - America was founded by genocidaires who literally prayed thanksgivings to their God after slaughtering entire villages of the native inhabitants of the land, then built the entire country through mass slave labor, which was not merely kidnapping but also forced breeding programs. As late as 1980 they were forcibly removing the culture from indigenous children in brutal boarding schools. As late as 1970 they were forcibly sterilizing black and brown women by removing their uteruses. They are so misogynistic that a doctor invented a way to lobotomize women with an ice pick through their eye socket which “didn’t mar their pretty faces” so they would stop resisting their husbands.
I know you want to say history doesn’t matter, but it does. You can keep saying it, but it won’t make it true. And you don’t live like it’s true either. Your claims to what you own, the lands you walk on, the freedom of movement you have and where you have, those are all historical in nature. You don’t imagine that you have to reassert your claims to the public park system in your city every few years, do you?