It Could Happen Here - You Are Being Lied To About Taiwan

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Welcome to Taiwan 101, a corrective to the piles of lies fed to leftists about Taiwan by malicious nationalists to conscript them into their imperialist project.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The thing that's happening here is that once again, like a bunch of random American politicians are going to Taiwan. And this time they didn't announce they were going apparently because announcing they were going last time went great so yeah this is this is this is what we're talking about today and uh with with me is james hello james how are you doing all right i'm wonderful and i'm splendid oh okay so we have to talk about taiwan and i think like people who've listened to me on this show for a while know that like so like

okay a lot of my family is from taiwan i don't like talking about taiwan very much um i i think i've talked about taiwanese politics in detail exactly once on this show when I was forced to for the Liguana Woods shooting. And like, I would really prefer not to like, it's not something I particularly enjoy talking about, which is, you know, a big part of what we haven't. But unfortunately, I can't continue not to talk about it because the American left, and this is true of not just the American left, it's true of the British left, this is true of the the left kind of writ large is being systematically lied to about taiwan by a group of incredibly malicious nationalists who are attempting to rally support for their like incredibly violent and bizarre imperial delusions and unfortunately it's working so i'm instead of that i'm going to give what i'm going to call taiwan 101 and and I'm calling it Taiwan 101 even though this is going to be like an hour long because this is as far as I could cut this whole thing down

like Taiwanese politics is genuinely complicated as part of the reason I don't like talking about it and people who are giving you simple answers to what's happening in Taiwan are lying to you this is as best I can do and this is like the length of a bastards episode so nice i'm excited yeah so welcome to taiwan 101 um the beginning of taiwan 101 is that taiwan is a series of islands off the coast of china and yes there are a bunch of islands nobody talks

about this like because again 90 of the people who talk who talk about Taiwan couldn't find their own ass on a map. So there's a bunch of islands. There's one big one. There's a lot of smaller ones. Now, one of the sort of fundamental principles of not just being on the left, but being a decent person is self-determination. And self-determination on a very basic level is that people have the right to choose how they want to live. And in a more immediate political context, they have the right to choose how they want to organize their government and who they do and don't want to be ruled by. So, okay, what do the actual numbers in Taiwan say? Well, okay, we have recent polling from the national chengchi university's election study

center which says that a grand total of 6.6 percent of taiwan's population wants unification with china the overwhelming majority of people in taiwan 81.2 percent want to just maintain the status quo which yeah i guess i should so the status quo right now is that like china claims that it is the sole legitimate government of taiwan um taiwan like technically legally claims that they are the sole legitimate government of china nobody actually believes that anymore like you if if you scoured the entirety of taiwan you might find six dudes in a bunker who still believe that like they're the real government of china like the the actual status quo is that taiwan is basically de facto is is like this taiwan is de facto a self-governing

polity that has elections and stuff and yeah everyone gets incredibly mad about this most people want to preserve the status quo um in inside of the 82 percent of people who want to maintain the status quo you have you know it's like like 25 basically for for three different options i basically so there's very similar numbers of people who either want to like decide the formal status of taiwan like is an independent country as a part of china they either want to kick it down the road some of them want to keep the status quo indefinitely and some of them want to move towards full independence like later on but overwhelmingly what people want in taiwan is

for nothing to happen now if this were a sane and rational world that would be the end of the episode right taiwan doesn't want to be ruled by china like okay well that's okay that's the right they have the right to self-determination that's it case closed end of story it literally doesn't matter what what the chinese government thinks about whether it should control taiwan because again taiwan doesn't want to be ruled by china and like as a british person, I maybe, I maybe ought to like not contribute further to that discussion. Yeah.

You know, I mean, and I mean, you know, there's, there's, there's this whole thing that exists, right. Where, uh, when, when, when you force your rule on another population, it is called imperialism. Yes. It is generally considered to be bad. And anyway, the other thing is it's still bad. Even if everyone inside the imperial power thinks that it's good. Like if every person in the U S suddenly decided tomorrow that they wanted to invade cuba like it wouldn't make it morally

right because people in cuba don't want to be ruled by the u.s which we've done before but yeah it's true yeah this is partially why i picked cuba as example because we really did this we really did like kill an enormous number of people trying to yeah based on bullshit that people made up and uh portrayed as news that was at best speculation so yeah but you know as we can tell by the fact that the u.s has invaded cuba we do not live in a sane irrational world we live in hell and this means that i have a talk about a bunch of just absolutely bullshit arguments that a bunch of nationalist dipshits made up to justify imperialism so all right this is where we start going into taiwanese history um so the starting point of any actual history of taiwan that's worth a single shit is taiwan's indigenous population

and it is incredibly important to understand from the outset the indigenous population of taiwan is not chinese they are not ethnically chinese they are not lingu Chinese. They are not ethnically Chinese. They are not linguistically Chinese. They are not culturally Chinese. They are not any of these things. By literally any definition of the word Chinese, you can imagine they are not Chinese. This population, this indigenous population is Austronesian.

Austronesian people are a population that stretches basically from like, it's an enormous group of people across the Pacific, stretches from like Madagascar all the way to like hawaii and that that that those are the people who who who live in taiwan and have lived on taiwan for 6 000 years and you know if if you read like ccpa accounts of taiwanese history right you'll see them they won't talk about the fact that they're again there's been an indigenous population that has lived in in taiwan for 6 000

years um what you'll see references to are like in like the sui and like sung dynasties people like sent troops to taiwan and the cc people will be like oh yeah no they they uh they they they they govern taiwan and they ruled it it was a part of china in like ancient times like this is all bullshit like basically what would happen is periodically every like few hundred years some chinese leader would be like we should send some people to that island and they went there and were like this sucks and they all left but you know yeah and and you know like okay so like these guys they're like okay this thing this thing sucks they leave and the indigenous population continues going like you know goes back to do like their normal thing right like this is the the the actual history of who has controlled taiwan for almost its entire history is that it was controlled

by indigenous population but in in 1624 colonial powers start getting more involved and the dutch sees control of taiwan well okay so the dutch take most of taiwan there's a part of taiwan in the north that's ruled by the spanish and they do like a bunch of just like horrible like unspeakable crimes to the indigenous population before they're ran out by like basically like a fragment of the dying like chinese ming dynasty and so yeah so in 1662, this guy whose name, okay, so he has like a name that he's known by in the West that I genuinely have no idea how to pronounce because this,

the name that he's known by in the West, I think is a Dutch translation of his title and not like his name is baffling. I, okay. Like the, I think the, the Mandarin version of his title is something like.

The Dutch somehow turned that into, uh, I think the Mandarin version of his title is something like Guoxingyi. The Dutch somehow turned that into what I'm going to interpret as Koxinga. Like, it's baffling. It doesn't make any sense. Their transliteration is nonsense. But yeah, so there's this guy. You'll see his name written as like Koxinga. And he's described alternately as sort of like, you know, you'll see his name written as like koh shinga um and he's described alternately

as sort of like you know you'll see some descriptions of him which will be like he is a loyalist ming general um and that's kind of true like sort of uh you will also see descriptions of him uh that call him a pirate warlord which is like also true and you you will also see nationalists like chinese nationalists celebrate him as like an anti-colonial hero and call him like running out the dutch is like the liberation of taiwan and like that's not true um like to the extent to which this is not true like i've i've i've i've i've seen people like from taiwan like who do stuff with the indigenous population like i've seen them call i've seen them call him Taiwan's Christopher Columbus. So this is how this is going.

Wait, so are we saying that changing from one colonial power to another is not liberation? No, it turns out. Fascinating. Yeah, you can tell it's not liberation because a bunch of people actually do believe that, hey, it's going to be less bad

for us under this guy than it is going to be for the dutch it is kind of less bad like there are a bunch of indigenous people who go who fight with uh show koshin gun like you know and he he helps they help him defeat the dutch but uh what he does instead of like you know freeing the people there is he maintains the dutch colonial system while basically just seizing taiwan to run his court from and you know like dutch colonial rule okay so like dutch colonial rule is over but what is replaced by is the rule of an independent pirate warlord state okay this sounds fun i mean it kind of is like i mean there's this whole so okay so the kind of background of this is that like the in the 1600s the ming dynasty is falling apart the ming dynasty had ruled china since

they overthrew the mongols basically and but like they're they're imploding there's a bunch of revolutions going on uh they're they are in the process of getting eventually getting knocked off by um the qing dynasty who are a group of people from manchuria who we will be getting to in a second yeah and this guy's like technically a ming general but he's sort of not and he's he's doing this sort of pilot warlord stuff but then he like he sets up it like his own dynasty like very short-lived dynasty there and this is the first time that there's been like actual political control of taiwan by any kind of chinese entity right like the the like the weird dipshit armies that like china was sending in like the sung dynasty like they don't they don't actually like set up a government right like they're just kind of there for a bit they

leave this is the first time like they actually conquer the island and rule it as like a political and even then it's kind of a half-ass conquest like there's a lot of places they kind of just like they're just like yeah okay we're just not gonna bother with this but yeah and you know again like this is the first time this has happened, and it's not like the Chinese state, right? It's a pirate warlord, and his descendants get knocked off by the Qing Dynasty in 1683. And this is the first time a real Chinese government has controlled Taiwan, because by 1683, the Qing Dynasty has finished taking over all of China or all of what used to be like the main dynasty in China. And this is the period that Chinese nationalists would point to and say like, no, no, no, really, really hold on, hold on. Taiwan actually is part of China because we conquered it in like 1683, which, you know. Oh, wow.

Okay. Yeah. It's like, oh, no, no. This is part of taiwan's china since ancient times yeah this place we conquered in 1683 which ignores also again the previous 5400 years where taiwan was ruled by indigenous people it's it's baffling nationalist brainwaves stuff yep that has worked historically for other countries notably this one and the one i'm from

but it doesn't make it right yeah well and then you'll get people arguing this is like well how like uh like how how is this different from the u.s it's like well here's the thing i am a leftist and and i i am capable of understanding that multiple things can be bad at the same time especially when they're bad in the same way yes like wow hey maybe these are all settler colonies we should destroy them okay but we should actually talk about the Qing dynasty a bit because a lot of what Chinese nationalism

draws from is the sort of imperial expansion of the Qing dynasty even though the Qing are not like a Han Chinese dynasty they're like ethnically they're from a different ethnic group but yeah I mean it's the the Qing Dynasty is a Manchu dynasty ruled by the people at like the Manchus out of Manchuria. But I think like insofar as people think about the Qing Dynasty, they tend to think about like the late Qing Dynasty.

Like this is like, you know, like the 1800s Qing Dynasty is a disaster, right? Like they lose the Opium Wars. They get beat by Japan. This is the whole sort of century of humiliation thing, has a lot to do with, like, Qing imperial decline. But, you know, that's, like, the 1800s Qing.

The 1700s Qing, especially the 1600s Qing, is an incredibly dynamic and, you know, incredibly militant and expansionist empire. Here's, I'm gonna read a passage from the book Taiwan's imagined geographies. Having annexed Taiwan in 1684, the Qing turned its attention to Central Asia, pacifying the Mongols and bringing Eastern Turkestan and Lhasa, the capital of Tibet,

under Qing rule. The Qing further expanded its control in South and Southwest China, subjugating various non-Chinese peoples of this reason to Qing domination. At its height in the 18th century, Qing influence extended into Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and Nepal, all of which came under the suzerainty of the empire. By 1860, the Qing had achieved the incredible feat of doubling the size of the empire's territory, bringing various non-Chinese frontier people under its rule. The impact of Qing expansionism was thus tremendous, as the Qing not only redefined the territorial boundaries of China, but also refashioned China as a multi-ethnic realm, shifting the traditional border between

Chinese Hua and barbarian yi in doing so the qing created an image of china that is vastly different from that of the ming and i i think i think it's really important to understand what kind of empire this is which is to say that the qing dynasty is an incredibly brutal colonial power, even like by the standards of like the, you know, okay. Like all of the, okay. Chinese dynastic history is not pretty, right? Like this is, you know, it's an empire, right? It's an empire.

It's ruled by an emperor. It kind of sucks. Like it's not, it's not good per se, but like even by the standards of like Chinese dynasty, the Qing are incredibly militant and incredibly expansionist. For example, Xinjiang, which is a province that the Qing conquered. It used to be inhabited by Mongol-speaking people until the Qing just exterminated them all and settled the entire land

with Han and Uyghur ethnic groups. This history points to something that's important to understand when we talk about China, Taiwan, and the US, which is that what we're talking about is three settler colonies. And I think people might be like, wait, what do you mean China is a settler colony? And I'm just going to read this passage from the book Sovereignty, Frontiers of Possibility, which is by Julia Evans, Anna Genovese, Alexander Riley, and Patrick Wolfe. julia evans anna genevese alexander riley and patrick wolf and yes that is that patrick wolf who was like the who was basically the godfather of settler colonial studies and one of the most

important like academics are trying to like in terms of like advancing the analysis of settler colonialism like the palestinian conflict but here's here here's what he has to say about china and this is kind of a long passage but like i want to include an explanation of what settler colonialism is because i've kind of just been tossing it around. Yeah. Analytically, the case of Palestine reveals that the relationship between the external and internal dimensions of sovereignty is not a priori but contingent. Settler colonization converts external into internal, rendering indigenous sovereignties either non-existent or domesticated. Annexation does the same thing, only it is illegal.

The difference, again, is sovereignty. To annex is to practice settler colonialism in sovereign territory. Thus, the frontier is aligned in time as well as in space. Spatially, the frontier delimits unconquered native territory. Temporally, it marks the conversion of outside into inside. It renders externality a thing of the past. In the global conquest of settler colonialism, therefore, the internal and external dimensions represent the state of play. The ultimate prize is state formation with internationally recognized territorial sovereignty. Once the settler takeover is complete, the native realm becomes a thing of the past, superseded and detoxified, reduced to persisting in the settler's terms. Since, in the case of Palestine, this process

remains incomplete, the situation can still go either, or potentially any, way. At the international level, this uncertainty is reflected in the ambivalent status of Palestinian sovereignty, which remains simultaneously both acknowledged and questioned. Locally, the states involved in the resolution of such international uncertainties could not be higher. Tibet represents a case in point. Despite significant informal deference to Tibet's national separateness, its incorporation into the People's Republic of China is not seriously questioned at the diplomatic level. Tibetan representation at the United Nations remains unimaginable. Yet even Tibetans might count their blessings when they compare their situation to that of Uyghurs, who, like them, are being officially colonized by Han settlers in the

so-called autonomous region called Xinjiang, a Chinese appellation that could have been scripted in 16th century Europe. It means new land. Being so much more firmly domesticated within the chinese state however weaker solvency remains remote from global concern now now obviously okay this was written before like xinjiang became like a global news story and also i yeah i i i i i i question wolf's translation of the word a little bit like i think i think new frontier is probably a slightly better translation but yeah like you can see what's at work here right like wolf's argument is that like yeah like the like china is running two settler colonies like the the internal status of which is like even more internationally fucked than most other

settler colonies, which is incredibly grim. I think we don't... I don't know why we've been so slow to see settler colonialism in these contiguous empires. I like here as well. Go ahead. I think part of what's happening here...

I think there's sort of a different dynamic with looking at this with Russia, but I think with China, it's like, people are just, like, it's really, really hard to get people to understand that colonialism and imperialism are things that, like, non-white people can do. Yes. And I think this goes back to the sort of like Qing dynasty discussion, right? Which is that like, yeah, you know, the way that people on the left understand the Qing dynasty is through the sort of nationalist lens looking at like the 1800s. And so they miss the whole part where they're doing all the settler colony stuff. But like what happens to them basically is that like, you know, it's like they're, it's kind of like the Ottomans, right? Where like their empire suddenly runs into like newer, better, more violent and more efficient empires but like that doesn't mean that like they weren't also empires like it's yeah and then when people do work that out

sometimes like people and when we talk about like uh settler colonialism in the u.s sometimes uh like when folks are forced to retreat from the the first position and that like that the u.s is not a settler colony they'll then fall back on well they're indigenous empires beforehand as if that somehow justifies yeah it's like it does not right and like yeah you know like and and i think this is the thing with tibet too where it's like yeah the the the the pre-existing tibetan government was not good like i'm, I'm not going to defend like that government. It sucks. I,

I would also point out that the whole work we're going to stop the slave trade thing is one of the things explicitly in, in the, in the tree that was signed at the conference of Berlin. That was the thing that they claimed that, that like that, that was the thing that the European powers claimed they were doing when they invaded Africa.

So like when they split Africa up between the colonial power. So like, you know, okay. I mean, also it's, you know, okay. I mean, also it's, you know, this,

this is getting slightly off topic, but it's also worth noting that like there, there, there wasn't, there was actually a communist movement like in Tibet that wasn't the CCP and the CCP killed them all. So that's great and fun. That's never happened before with totalitarian communist powers.

Yeah. It's, it's never happen again. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get the u.s and china to like two different extents right like i don't know like

china has parts like there are parts of china where it's like very hard like it's not a settler state it's just like their states but there are parts of china that definitely are a settler state and there's the u.s which is like entirely a settler state and then taiwan is also to a settler state although it's like post-independence taiwan is the least violent of them which is like not like a i don't know you're not winning much of a price by being less violent than i china and the u.s but like you know it is true a good body count between those two yeah but you know but but i think this brings us back to like the ching the ching occupation of taiwan which is that the the ching occupation of taiwan is china's first of like

first new settler colony the qing administrators they divide the indigenous population into quote cooked and raw savages um those are their words that literally that's what i call them like it is why because they're really racist like like i mean this is like this is like a very old thing and sort of like sort of chinese imperial discourse right is like you have this difference between like barbarians and like chinese people and like savages and non-savages like this this is like this is how these people think right and it's not good like i don't know i don't know like how many more ways i can can try to explain to people

who have been telling them Chinese nationalist stuff for so long that it's like, this also was not good? Guys. And again, it's something the US has done. The UK, there's classic imperialism, right? We talk about civilized tribes in the US, martial races in the British Empire. Yeah.

I'm going to read a passage from Taiwan's imagined geography. Indeed, as Qing writers began to construct the Taiwan indigenies as two distinct groups, negative traits that had been formerly associated with, quote, the Taiwan savages as a whole began to be mapped on the wild or raw savages. Where earlier texts claimed, for example, that the savages, quote, by nature like to kill, or, quote, were, quote, stubborn and stupid,

now writers attributed these characteristics to the raw savages alone. Headhunting, a notorious practice that the earliest sources had associated with the natives of Taiwan and other Pacific islands, also came to be seen as a raw savage practice. By the early 18th century, travel writers increasingly emphasized the violent

and murderous behavior of the raw savages. The expansion of the Han Chinese population at this time caused an exhalation of conflict between Chinese settlers and the indigenes over land and other resources. Hostile indigenes were thus becoming a real threat to the safety of Han Chinese settlers. Although some writers blamed inter-ethnic conflict on troublemaking Han Chinese settlers, many Qing literati attributed the belligerence of the raw savages to their inherent bloodthirsty nature. Good stuff. Yeah, it's real classic empire shit like a textbook shit yeah and you know you can see that there's this whole nationalist myth that like you'll read if you read

modern people like talking about this or they'll be like oh the indigenous population of chinese government got along so great it is completely bullshit this is an incredibly racist settler state and it stays an incredibly racist settler state when the Japanese take over Taiwan in 1895. And the Japanese occupation is even worse than the Qing occupation of indigenous people in a lot of ways. It's a real shit show. There's a huge massacre they do in the 30s. Yeah. And, okay, we should also mention at this point.

So I've been focusing a lot on the indigenous population because almost everyone who tells the story from all sides doesn't talk about them ever because it's incredibly inconvenient to like everyone's narrative that there were people here for literally 6,000 years. Basically, since the Dutch showed up in the mid-1600s, there have been increasing numbers of Chinese settlers. And as the Qing occupation sort of wears on, the number of Chinese settlers increases and increases and increases. And it gets to the point where – kind of close to what we have today where the indigenous population of Taiwan is like 2% of the population, which is pretty close to what the indigenous population percent of the population of the u.s is for example yeah and we're sorry i'm not going to it's okay yeah i'm gonna talk about elizabeth warren but oh god oh god you know actually fuck it i will talk about elizabeth warren in the middle of this because fucking go yeah because her whole thing of like, like pretending to be indigenous was also fun because like she has a cookbook and the cookbook.

Pow wow chow. Yeah. Yeah. That claims both her and her husband are indigenous. And then in that is like maybe the most incomprehensibly awful, like example of Chinese cooking I've ever seen in my life, which he apparently stole from like another cookbook. And it really like just cascading levels of racism from like another cookbook and it's really like

just cascading levels of racism all the way down and it's oh god it's fine it's all fine all the settler colonies are bad their politics are all also always bad because again like being a settler colony inherently makes your politics awful because yeah and representing yourself as an indigenous person to gain personal advantage in a settler colony when you are not one is ongoing act of colonialism yeah genuinely horrific stuff like yeah don't do it so having said that so okay we have to talk about the han population there's like different like subgroups of the han population who are have different ethnicities speak different rate like speak different languages because han is like a very large sort of category and like inside of han chinese there's like people

who are haka there's a whole bunch of different groups um and i guess the one thing that's worth mentioning is that a lot of the like you'll hear people talk about Taiwanese as its own language. And there are a bunch of people who were Hanbo who don't speak Mandarin. And so a lot of people in Taiwan speak Taiwanese, which is a sort of Hakka-ish language. Well, okay. What's the most technically accurate way of saying this? It is a language that is developed on Taiwan, like in Taiwan by people who speak Hakka.

And it's basically pretty close to that, yeah. And we're not going to get into super granular detail about these ways of immigration. But basically, like, one of the things that happens is that among these sort of Han settlers, there becomes this sort of like Taiwanese identity of like Taiwanese identity of like them being Taiwanese, like specifically as a thing. And when, when the Japanese lose

World War II, the Nationalist Party or the KMT just like occupies Taiwan. But this is a real problem because again, most of the people don't want to be ruled by the KMT because the KMT like absolutely suck. If you want me to hear me like go deeper into them uh go listen to my bastards episode in the world anti-communist league uh the short version is that the kmt is a genocidal like anti-communist death squad party run by an organized crime outfit that's led by shank i check and you know like they suck like really like absolutely horrible people. And as the KMT starts to lose the civil war to Mao, more and more KMT supporters and also people just running from the war start fleeing to Taiwan.

And this develops a massive – you get this massive tension between the Han people who had already been there and the KMT and their new supporters, their new settler immigrant population. their new sort of like settler immigrant population and this boils over into what's called the february 28th incident or the 228 incident um basically what happens so a kmt cop like attacks a woman who was like selling cigarettes on the street illegally because the kmt like i i really also kept like they're so unbelievably corrupt and so like they have all these like monopolies where it's like okay like there's a guy who has like the opium monopoly or like a guy who has like the cigarette monopoly right and unless you're running through that monopoly you can't sell like cigarettes yeah and so it's something that i think will be familiar to people who like like have followed the number of people in the u.s who've been killed for uh selling cigarettes illegally yeah so the the

cops start like beating this woman over the head with their with his pistol and everyone around them gets incredibly pissed off and there's these giant protests um and the kmt responds to the protest by shooting into the crowd and wow yeah i mean so there's another side of this i should mention like briefly which is that like part of what's happening here is like there's a there's another side of this I should mention like briefly, which is that like part of what's happening here is like there's a kind of ugly like basically race riot that starts happening at the beginning of this where like people like the sort of like Han Taiwanese population like starts just like attacking like any random like any random people from like the KMT generation just like they find on the street they start attacking and killing and like that sucks um it is also just unbelievably less violent than what happens next which is at the kmt like well okay so so there's sort of this race riot thing and then there's like there's a full-scale revolution and the taiwanese population like seizes control of base of like almost the entire island like the entirety of the main island and they start demanding like democratic rights and stuff

like you know a free press and free assembly and like the protection of the indigenous population although i should also mention that like nobody really in taiwan like treats the indigenous population well like it was bad enough like my seven-year-old mom was like oh my god why is everyone treating these people so badly like it's but you know okay so they they they do this thing they have this revolution and then the kmt like just sends the army to the island they kill something like 20 000 people in a week um like they are like they are they are cutting people's face like they are like cutting parts of people's faces off with knives. It is unbelievably brutal. And this begins 38 years of martial law.

The subsequent Camti police state tortures tens of thousands of people and rules Taiwan with an iron fist until the late 80s. And this is where things get really messy, right? and this is where things get really messy, right? Because up until 1942, nobody in China, and this included both the KMT and the CCP, until 1942, neither of them actually claimed that Taiwan was part of China. But then in 1942, both of them start claiming that Taiwan is part of China.

Ah, great. Yeah, and so when the K kmt flees to taiwan both the ccp and the kmt both claim to be a legitimate government of china and b to be the legitimate government of taiwan and it's a disaster like the kmt is nuts like my they again like they they they they made my like seven-year-old mom sing songs about how they were one day they were going to reclaim the motherland like wow these people suck yeah yeah there's some of them still in myanmar or maybe perhaps not now but like i've heard from them from friends who are a little older who were there that there are a bunch of kmt like

living in parts of myanmar and tourists would go pay to visit them yeah like that's it's a thing like yeah they're like they they they most of the people flee that flee to taiwan but like they they break in a number of different directions and there's like a bunch of weird rump states they set up they get knocked off eventually it's a it's a whole mess but in taiwan like they have this problem which is that like okay so there's like water in between china and taiwan and if you want to get troops over it you have to have those troops cross the water and this is a real problem for like an invasion so what ends up happening is a series

so like okay so you have the kmt and the ccp like staring each other down across these islands and the product of this is what's called the three Taiwan Straits crises. So basically in the CCP starts selling Taiwan between in, in 1940, 1954, 1955, they start selling like Taiwan. And then they do it again at 58 in like the KMT shelves them back.

And, you know, there's a couple of points where it looks like they're going to invade, but then the U S like move supplies, the KMT to like keep the CCP from invading. And, you know, the result of of points where it looks like they're going to invade but then the u.s like moves supplies the kmt to like keep the ccp from invading and you know the result of this is this like i think incredibly psychologically revealing move after like the 1958 crisis which 1958 crisis ends with the kmt and the ccp agreeing to shell each other on opposite days because and i cannot emphasize this enough this entire conflict is profoundly bullshit and

was foisted upon taiwan by a bunch of peddly squabbling chinese nationalists how big is that distance we're talking about like they're sending shells over there in the 50s so it's probably not vast well i mean part of what's happening is so it's 100 miles 110 miles but what what's happening here is like they're they basically like have set up on outposts and different islands in between like the big island and uh the shore so they're like they're on these islands shelling each other like they they drafted my grandpa and like sent him to one of these places and that's and then he came back and was like fuck this we're out and so like that that's

where my family's in the u.s because he's like we're not doing this shit again this sucks yeah i was like i'm not gonna be i'm not gonna be cannon fodder for these like weird nationalist psychos so okay so what the sort of result of this though is that the kmt gets the backing of the u.s and the kmt becomes in taiwan is the like the legitimately internationally recognized government um like of all of china from the end of the civil war until like the 70s yeah occupies the un seat right yeah yeah has the UN seat. Actually, we'll get into that in... You know what? We can do it here. So one of the things that happens here is that...

Okay, so, like, the US really, really does not want the CCP to have the UN seat. And one of the things they try to do is they offer Nehru's India, like, the seat on... What's it called? Why am I blanking on the name of the thing National Security Council Security Council yeah yeah yeah the UN Security Council like they they they they offer India a seat of the Security Council and Nehru is like no I'm not gonna take this I'm not gonna take this this is China's seat on the council like I'm not gonna take this and then uh Mao repays him by invading India in 1963. Wait, is it 1960 or 1964?

I couldn't fucking tell. This is not on my script. I am off. I am off script. Oh, 1962. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So this goes great for Nehru.

Mao just invades and the Indians lose the war very badly. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. of china so the ccp fights a war with the soviets in 1969 which and this war gets called the the sino-soviet border conflict but like this is like a pretty much a real war like there are like chinese and soviet divisions shelling each other like a lot of people die um like i i i don't know if i've told the story on this podcast before my my favorite part of this whole thing is that the Soviets start like war gaming. Can they defeat China in a nuclear war? And they figure out that they can't because the Chinese population is so dispersed that even if they nuke all of China, they can't kill everyone and they'll lose the war in human wave attacks.

So the Soviets start developing this strategy of like having like a line of nuclear landmines across the the soviet chinese borders so that the human wave attacks can't get through because they like this this conflict is nuts like both china and the ussr are trying to get the us to ally with them to like do do a preemptive nuclear strike on on the other side like it's crazy amazing and and this like completes the sino-soviet split and the us like really really wants to make sure that the Sino-Soviet split sticks. And so the US starts negotiating with China basically to bring China to the – well, okay. There's two ways of looking at it. One is that they just want to separate the Chinese from the Soviets.

The other way of looking at it is that they want to bring China fully over to the American side of the Cold War. And I think the latter approach actually works right um so uh in in in 1979 the u.s recognizes the ccp as a legitimate government of china uh several months later china invades vietnam uh in in defense of the khmer rouge uh which the u.s was also backing so yeah um and and this is where we get into some more diplomatic bullshit. Okay, so China maintains something called the One China Principle. The One China Principle holds that the CCP is the only government of China and that it rules Taiwan. The one China policy is – it does not take a stance either way on who the government of Taiwan is. What it does is it acknowledges that China claims that it rules Taiwan. And you will see nationalists lie about this constantly. They will say things like the US recognizes Taiwan as part of China under the one-child policy. Blah, blah, blah action is a violation of the one china policy and that's not true right what actually happened is the u.s the u.s technical term for this is called strategic ambiguity and you know so they have this thing like they don't they don't formally recognize either side as a legitimate government of taiwan they recognize that this is what china says about taiwan uh they don't actually recognize but they they have no formal position on whether the ccp actually rules taiwan what they have is a recognition that that china believes this and again this is all

diplomatic bullshit it's part of why i hate like talking about this because like again the the lives of literally tens of billions of people are being governed by like diplomats saying doing like that kind of shit because it sucks yeah so that's that that's that's the one child policy thing which is not one shot jesus the one china policy which is not the same thing as the one china principle um yeah and so like all the while while this is going on the ccp and the kmt are in this massive race to see you can kill the most communists. The CCP kills about a million communists during the Cultural Revolution and then invades Vietnam to kill even more communists. The KMT, not to be outdone by their former comrades across the border, the KMT is training death squads in Honduras and helping the Guatemalan government do the Guatemalan genocide. It's really grim stuff. And the product of this whole thing is the complete ideological collapse of the Chinese Communist Party as a party that does communism, and then the political military collapse of the KMT. so the the but by i mean it's kind of i had it sort of has already stopped by the 80s but by the 1990s the ccp substantively has stopped being a communist party by any sense of the word like they're just capitalists and they're you know they're out there making money and by by the

late 2000s even like you know there had been a faction of what's called sort of the chinese new left that had thought that like they could you know they could they could you know this is still a communist party we can still change china from the inside those guys are like liquidated completely like they're just gone um and you know and so but you know and by like now right like it's just it's just it's just capitalists and meanwhile in taiwan in the 80s and 90s there's there's increasing resistance to the kmts like one party like death squad like one party state and their whole death squad like reclaim the motherland politics everyone like starts to hate them. And this is where things get really weird. Because on the one hand, the KMT is incredibly anti-communist. But on the other hand, they are the political faction that

wants to tie Taiwan to China. And this means that as they're sort of ruthlessly suppressing communists and leftists, they're also vehemently independ independence and so like they kill a bunch of anti-independence organizers um which is like not not not how anyone like talks about this conflict because it's too weird so in in there's all these sort of weird political things going on um in in 1987 the kmt ends the martial law that they had been enforced since the february 28th incident and the kmt like disarms right they disarm they're not as in like okay the the kmt used to be a party that would like assassinate people for writing unauthorized like assassinate americans on american soil for writing unauthorized biographies biographies of like shank i shek and they kind of stopped being that like they disarm they're not really in the drug trade anymore.

Caveats, don't quote me on that. But they're not the party they were in the 80s. That's sort of the important thing. They lose to one party dictatorship. And you get the sort of transition to democracy that ends in the first free presidential elections in Taiwanese history in 1996. And this, right before this, you get the third Taiwan Straits crisis where the president of Taiwan goes to the US and China reacts to this

by having an enormous temper tantrum and starts doing military exercises. They start simulating an invasion of Taiwan. They start shooting rockets at the coast. They'll have these rockets that land like just off the coast and oh it's edgy yeah and event this ends when the u.s moves like two carrier groups uh into the pacific and the crisis ends but like okay there's a few things i would say here one is that like okay so on the one hand this is the ccp having a temper tantrum right on the other hand like it really and this is a thing

that i think most americans have never experienced right because the u.s is not a country that like gets attacked right uh having another country firing missiles at you fucking sucks like psychologically it is awful like we saw how insane the u.s went like the like the first time it had actually been attacked since like world war ii when 9-11 happened like you know you saw how just absolutely batshit the u.s goes right like yeah okay if you are a person in taiwan right which like a lot of my family is and you are constantly having another country shooting rockets at you like it sucks like and i and i want people to like like sort of just like think about that for a second because like i i think a lot of what how how this crisis and how this

whole thing is talked about on the left is as a sort of like abstract thing that's like you know it's instead of abstract principles right and not stuff that's happening to real people who are like watching missiles fucking fall into the ocean and right you know like and what we're watching another country like preparing to kill them and this sucks um one of the other things that's worth noting here is that like part of what's going on in terms of the hardening of china taiwan relations is tiananmen square happened um and the reason this matters is that so one of the things that like stabilizes i guess relations between taiwan and china in part is the fact that i they're both incredibly economic closely economically connected

to the u.s um and this is because all of like all china taiwan and uh and china are all capitalist countries and so their ruling classes are all completely interdependent like people people talk a lot about pelosi like investing in a bunch of uh like chip manufacturing companies in taiwan and that's true but she also has a bunch of like chip manufacturing companies in Taiwan. And that's true. But she also has a bunch of investments in China because again, capitalists, single ruling class, they all,

they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they,

they, they, they, they, they, they, all of your logistics lines run through each other, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah. I, I, I, I will insert a note here.

There's not in the script at any time. You hear someone talk about like the U S decoupling with their economy from China. They're, they are full of shit. Do not like everything they're saying, everything they're about to say is a lie it does not happen it has not happened it will not happen like they're lying um yeah this is important um even at the height of trump's bullshit yeah yeah like like there was kind of an attempt to and it didn't work because like you

know you can okay like there are some things you can offer to mexico right but like most like china china has a a unique combination of a like a really good energy grid for the most part i mean okay there have been times where it's gotten overtaxed but like it compared to most other developing countries it has a really good energy grid it has a population in which i actually doing union organizing is illegal and it has a population that you know like gets forced to work incredibly long hours right yeah and the combination of those three things makes it a makes it you know a place where if you're an american capitalist if you're a taiwanese capitalist and that's actually part of this too is that like part part of the reason there's so much like hatred for taiwan instead of china among people who you wouldn't expect it to

be is that like there's there's a lot of people in china whose only experience of taiwan is working for like fucking foxconn and like working in just in hell conditions for like for a taiwanese capitalist and you know and that that's very easy to transform into nationalist sentiment and it sucks but yeah but you know like okay so like there's the u.s has an incentive just to stabilize u.s chinese relations in part because it's economically, like, tied to both of these countries. But when something goes really wrong in U.S.-China relations, like, for example, after Tiananmen, where, you know, I think it's also worth noting, like, from the period, like, basically from when China invades Vietnam and even a bit before that, from when Chinaades vietnam in in 1979 up until tiananmen uh u.s china relations are really good like the u.s is seen as like an ally against the evil soviet evil empire like this and you know but tiananmen makes things go really badly because

like the the only thing an american ally can possibly do that will sour the american press on them is to shoot a bunch of students in front of the american press corps like that that's literally the only thing you could possibly do like you can you can do actual genocides and the u.s press corps won't care but if you shoot a bunch of students right in front of you they will get very mad and you know sometimes we've we've avoided doing that in myanmar yeah yeah i mean it yeah it's it, it's grim. Lots of, yeah. But the consequence of this is like, yeah, when something goes really wrong in US-China relations, China starts doing sabler rattling at Taiwan. And the effects of this on Taiwanese politics and also just sort of what's been happening inside of Taiwan is really weird. So the KMT who have been have been again like the militantly anti-communist

party for half essentially for half a century are suddenly the faction that wants closer ties with the ccp and the product of this is that the kmt and the smaller like hardcore pro-unification parties become known as the pan blues the pan blues are the people who like want closer relations with with china and don't want close relations with the West. It's like the US, et cetera, et cetera. And their opposition group is a progressive opposition group, which is composed of the groups that oppose the KMT's military dictatorship. And these groups form – well, okay. They form a couple of parties.

The first party they form, which is the biggest one by far, is called the Democratic Progressive Party or the DPP. And the DPP and its allies, which include some leftist parties, I think like the green parties in this coalition. There's also these smaller radical pro-independence parties. They became known as the pan-greens. to this day this is like the main dividing line in taiwanese politics you have the conservative pan blues who favor closer relations with china and the pan green progressives who favor like closer relations with democracies and also i think importantly the the pan greens had this kind of like are the people who are in favor of like there being a distinct taiwanese national identity and the pan blues are kind of more suspect of that because again like you know their base is the kmt right they want closer ties with china and closer ties with china means not having like a distinct taiwanese identity that's separate from china and okay i'm enormously

oversimplifying this and people who are experts in this will like this part of it will be like it's more complicated than that and it is this is this is the simplest explanation i could give you that people will understand like i i i i was like i was debating whether i even wanted to talk about like the pan blue like closer ties with china versus pan green like closer ties with the west thing at all because it's confusing and people probably won't remember it but yeah i mean you know if you want to understand taiwanese politics at all like this is the line you have to take. No, I think it's important to at least throw out the terms

that people are going to hear if they're going to engage in any discussion beyond what Haz has tweeted. Yeah. And I'm going to lay my cards on the table so people don't understand my political position on this. My political position is one that pisses off literally everyone, which is that I'm'm not like a dpp supporter like i'm not one of the sort of like progressive like groups i'm not in the sort of like i'm not really kind of like in the sort of

like i want independence camp i'm not really like a dpp person i don't i i don't know like but i'm also not a kmt person like because the KMT are capitalist reactionaries but I also like okay like I'm gonna do my critique of the DPP and then I'm gonna sort of walk it back a little bit I think the Taiwanese progressives in general are way

too close to the American security state for me to want anything to do with them and the ones who aren't like okay the Taiwanese left like jesus christ get your shit together taiwan's most famous anarchist is literally a government minister like this is how fucked the taiwanese left is like uh like like these people oh god i'm enormously frustrated by it like people couldn't develop like a left to the people couldn't develop a national class analysis you beat them over the head with a copy of capital um and okay like i think like taiwanese progressives will point out

and i think this is fair that it's very easy to criticize like allying with the u.s when it's not your ass in the firing line of chinese rockets which is true it is much easier to criticize the u.s when the when the rifles being pointed in your face are american rifles than when it's you know chinese soldiers pointing chinese rifles and this is a big part of why taiwanese politics are so fucked um things get reduced to this sort of like democracy versus authoritarian u.s versus china like taiwanese identity versus chinese identity to lesser extent like binary but it's like okay like my family is taiwanese but like i was born here i grew up here and you know i know i know what

american democracy looks like it's the army hiring eric prince to slaughter iraqi civilians in baghdad and you know i also know what you know i have a bunch of family in china too i know what chinese authoritarianism looks like it's the ccp hiring eric prince to build training bases for mass internment uh camp guards in xinjiang like you know okay and the only actual like political solution that will ever get anywhere is to fight both of them a position that is extremely unpopular literally everywhere and like you know i i i think they're like the progressives have a good argument that you know this isn't this isn't a line they have the luxury of taking right because they they they have they have an immediate enemy and they're going to do whatever they have to to not get invaded and that

means allying with people who like i want to overthrow and see liquidated as a class and like i i i understand why they think that i also am not them so yeah this is this is this is me laying my cards on the table and i think also like this goes back to the whole settler state question, which is this sort of unresolved political question in the US, Taiwan, and China. No actual major political force has committed itself to destroying the settler state and returning indigenous sovereignty to indigenous people. And you can't have any kind of liberatory politics in a settler state without that. And you can't have like any kind of liberatory politics in a settler state without that. But on the other hand, like, okay, the actual politics of Taiwanese indigenous people is really complicated. Like it doesn't work in the same way that like indigenous politics in the U.S. does, for example, like different tribes. I mean, and this is also true in the U.S., but like different tribes have different relations to sort of indigenous nationalism.

of indigenous nationalism like and another thing that that's true about um the that that that that that's true about taiwanese indigenous people is that a lot of them vote for the kmt and they do this for a couple of reasons one of which is because the kmt has this like really really powerful and extensive patronage network that they've been running for literally like basically since they got onto the island they've been running this patronage network and this allowed them to do like real incredibly intense and powerful base building in indigenous communities right like they're like the gdp are the people who like distribute like okay they have like a center and right you go there and they get they they give you like food right like they this this is the place where you get your like sesame oil right and then also there's the second layer of the patriots network

right it's like if you want to get a job, you join the KMT. And so they have these really deep sort of political roots in that sense. And then also the KMT does this thing where they're like, hey, look, the DPP is doing settler nationalism. Like, hey, these are the people who colonized you. Like, fuck them. Like, you should ally with us instead, which is true. Like, it is true. And like, I think, I don't know, like it it is true and like i think i don't know like taiwanese

progressives kind of like tap dance around this but like yeah like it is true that the sort of like han taiwanese identity is a sort of settler nationalism but like also this is true of the kmt as well like the kmt are also a settler nationalism like you know like they conquered the island and ruled as, you know, okay. And you'll try, you'll also see people who will take this argument and try to argue that indigenous people voting for the KMT means that indigenous people support China invading Taiwan. And this is just comically wrong.

Like they're just, they are lying to you. Indigenous people in Taiwan, like literally everyone else in Taiwan do not support being ruled by China. And the argument that a Chinese occupation of Taiwan is somehow less of a settler state than the current system is just like comically propaganda bullshit and yeah china yeah has not been kind yeah i'm gonna get into like this a little bit too right which is okay so like i've been trying to be fair and balanced here right like i i have been giving you my critique of Taiwanese progressivism. This is going to piss off a lot of people.

But having said all of this, China invading Taiwan would be really, really, really bad. I cannot emphasize enough how bad this would be. Okay, so Taiwan is like a regular settler bourgeois democracy with all of the sort of good and bad things about bourgeois democracies, which we're all familiar with, right we understand what what a settler democracy is um to be fair the modern taiwanese government is like infinitely less violent than the modern american government like like the i i looked at something like the the the the prison population

in like relative population in taiwan is like i think it's like an eighth of the america of what the american prison population is right like it's it's not like you know okay it's like taiwan is not like a sort of like it's like taiwan is not a socialist state right but it's also like you know better than the u.s which is an incredibly low bar that like you could trip and fall over but like you know okay it's better than the u.s um yeah you know it's closer to like sweden or something in terms of violence which i think is also a good uh comparison because sweden also has an indigenous population called the sami and i i'd all swedish leftists will i studiously never admit that they exist or talk

about them at all so okay again this is not a stateless class of society but it's also like like since since the kmt has been disarmed like this is not one of like the world's great purveyors of violence right like it's not the u.s um china on the other hand is a ferociously reactionary capitalist settler dictatorship and this is something that americans have very little experience with um for a long time people argued that okay like if if china like if taiwan became a part of china taiwan would get some kind of relationship similar to what hong kong has where like there were free elections and union organizing and free speech is legal but you know 2019 happened yeah right you know it was even in taiwan like the i'm sorry even in hong kong right the extent to which like you know like union organizing and free association

and free press existed were like and again like hong kong also and i want to point this out like the ccp has been strengthening this the entire time they were there hong kong is the only place on earth where corporations have the right to vote and they vote for the ccp like it's so okay this is this is great but you know 2019 happens right and guess what now hong kong has national security law which allows the government to arrest you literally for posting on twitter that you don't think that China should control Hong Kong. Secretary for Security in Hong Kong, Chris Tang, said earlier this week that criticizing the government with the intention to provoke hatred between the classes was a violation of the national security law. quote between the classes was a violation of the national security law a position that if actually like that that if actually like like this if you take this position this would outlaw in its

entirety all socialist organizing in hong kong because again anything that attempts to provoke hatred between the classes is illegal yep and you know this is some panacea of liberal democratic existence within yeah and this is this is the modern and like you know i mean again like like people talk about this a lot like hong kong is one of the world's most neoliberal cities and the ccp has taken it over and uh oh hey guess what they're they're they're living out the neoliberal dream of making it illegal to try to do any like try to do like class war stuff um one of the things that happens immediately after national security law is that it's used to destroy china's china's independent trade union federation and this brings us to like the sort

of class perspective on this um independent union organizing in china is illegal and when i say it's illegal i don't mean illegal in the sense of like jaywalking we're like okay if someone if like a cop sees you jaywalking they might arrest like, okay, if someone, if, if like a cop sees you jaywalking, they might arrest you. Like if you try to do independent union, union organizing in China, men will show up to your house in the middle of the night and you will disappear for three months until a video of you with two very large men standing just out of camera range appears in which you recant,

you're organizing and apologize for your crimes. Like to, to, to, to get a sense of the level of oppression we're dealing with here. Two Chinese leftists named Lou, you, you, like to to to get a sense of the level of oppression we're dealing with here two chinese leftists named lu yuyu and li tingyu recorded and published a series of protests like they they basically they had they on the chinese social media like they they posted this like record

basically of strikes and protests that were happening in the country every day so like literally all they're doing is they are documenting the strikes and protests that are happening and collecting data about them and posting it um in 2016 the police showed up to lou's house put a bag over his head and dragged him away to a drag him away to a jail cell uh lou spent four years in prison uh lee got two years and the two of them never saw each other again so again this this is what happens if you literally just report on the wild cat strikes that are happening someone will put a bag over your head and you will go to prison for four years like it is it is like the the situation for organized labor of any kind of anyone trying to do union organizing in china is unbelievably dire um now china and

this is what i'm talking about here is an independent union organizing china has an official trade union federation um the trade union federation china has is such a fucking joke that is literally a matter of academic debates like there are academic papers arguing about whether or not it even actually counts as a union and this has been true since the late 1950s when the ccp decided that uh oh hey this trade union uh is there to represent the party and not workers and its role is to mediate between uh the the you know to mediate between the party and uh workers not actually to you know like represent them when they like when they have disputes with their bosses so yeah like they don't like they they don't they don't go on strike like ever like they they they they they they exist as like another

part of the party state the goal of which is to make sure that bosses keep making money and if you try to work outside of it they will arrest you now taiwan is not like a shining workers paradise right the the sort of vaunted semiconductor industry that everyone talks about is run by a bunch of workers getting the ship burned down to them by vats of acid but conditions for the chinese working class are even worse taiwan Taiwanese wages are higher. Taiwan has better workplace protections. Again, you can legally organize unions. Meanwhile, in China, there are famously suicide nets around Chinese factories because working for these places is so fucking awful that people would literally rather kill themselves and live in it. And you can ask, why is this happening? And the reason it's happening

is that a lot of the stuff that is literally the worst fucking nightmare of the American left, things like your boss owning your apartment is just standard practice in China. This is, this is just, this is just what it's like to be a worker in China. Your boss owns your fucking apartments. You have literally hundreds of millions of people who live in these tiny, like they're called workers dormitories, which again, often literally owned by like the owner of the factory they're in. You get like, when I say like workers dormitories, right. It's not even like,

it's not even like an American dorm building. Right. We're like you, you know, you have like your own room. It's like, it is like, yeah.

Like it's, it's a bunch of people sleeping in cots, like sleeping in bunk beds with like a fucking bucket next to them to go to the bathroom. Like it is, it is horrible. You have like, the the i talk about this a lot in this show but again like literally there are payday loans integrated

into delivery apps like this this is the level of capitalism that china is and like i'm not gonna like yeah i'm not gonna like argue that it's worse in the u.s i think they're bad in different ways like they're they're they're they're like the u.s's incarceration system is like you know like one of the great human evils in the entirety of human history right there are things that like the u.s is worse at like the chinese police are a lot less likely just fucking murder you like you know but like yes but like china it sucks to be a worker in china like it it really sucks and i can't emphasize this enough because people don't really understand this. People do not understand that, again, the normal Chinese schedule is called 996.

You work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. This is the normal schedule. A lot of workers, again, that's like an average schedule. Most people work more than this. 996 is 70 hours a week, like it is it is it is a shit show and yeah if if taiwan if china invades taiwan the conditions of the taiwanese working class are going to get worse that is just a fact like imposing chinese law on taiwan would strengthen the power of the capitalist class and weaken the proletariat um from an indigenous perspective, which we've talked about this at length,

we've talked about at length how the Taiwanese system is not that good, but it's not like it's a settler colony, there's some representation, but it's not great. It is much better than the CCP's system. The CCP's line on ethnic minorities is that if you're an ethnic minority in China, you're going to work in a Han factory, you're going

to pick crops from Han-owned fields, you're going to dance and smile for Han tourists, and if you step out of line, you will be dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night and sent to a Han factory. You're going to pick crops from Han owned fields. You're going to dance and smile for Han tourists. If you step out of line, you will be dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night, sent to a fucking camp. There are, you know, like this is the thing that's American sort of have similar experiences with.

It's like, you know, you have immigration raids, you have raids on homeless encampments, but it's not that. And that, that's like, you know,

that that's a kind of experience that is somewhat similar to what it's like to live in Xinjiang. But it's not exactly the same. I know people whose families are just fucking gone. The police showed up in the middle of the night, and their families are just gone. They've never seen them again. They're just gone. No one knows where they are.

No one knows if they're even alive. They've just vanished. And if you think that this isn't going to happen to Taiwan's indigenous population, the moment they start talking about self-determination you are incredibly bafflingly hopelessly naive and you know like there's a lot of other shit that you can point to right like for example taiwan has gay marriage and china doesn't like the the degree of press censorship just like social media censorship in china that doesn't exist in taiwan is like absolutely absurd like you know i i i think like most like some people talking about press censorship in the u.s are like almost always right-wing shitheads who are complaining about

like they yelled a bunch of slurs like in china a very common thing that happens like someone will be posting about a corrupt local official and then every single post about it will get deleted and if you try to post the guy's name your post won't go up and then any emoji that people were using in association with the corrupt local official like get blocked and you can't use the emojis anymore and like you know and like and i i it's it's almost like the level of censorship is almost comical to the extent where like people don't believe yeah like in the u.s like don't like you know when people talk about like like oh the the chinese government isn't really banning uh guys who look too feminine and gay guys from appearing in media it's like no they are like they're they're they're i think i think it was a beyonce concert there

there was a very famous like very funny thing that happened like a few months ago where there was this concert i think it was a beyonce concert no it was i can't remember who it was but like so there was a stream of it in china and there was a guy there was a beyonce concert no it was i can't remember who it was but like so there was a stream of it in china and there was a guy there was a censor who was like putting like one of those gray out censored bars like over over the singer's clothes because they were they were considered too explicit and she's just like moving this like dot of like censorship thing across the stage trying to fall like this is the level of bullshit that happens here like it's it's not a thing that like the u.s really has much reference for because like we don't it's it's not a thing that like the u.s really has much

reference for because like we don't experience like this is not a thing that you don't experience in the u.s like yeah sometimes i like to think about these things in terms of like uh like like all people talk about orwell and huxley as these dystopian novels right and perhaps people don't read those novels uh but they love to quote them and like in all worlds we have like a system which like uh keeps you quiet by pushing you down right and in huxley's we have a system which keeps you quiet by keeping you happy with drugs and such uh and like it's important to recognize that like it both things can be bad but the material conditions in the day-to-day life of

people especially marginalized people in one society can be markedly better yeah well and i think also like yeah like i think as we're not like the the ways in which the american like there are similarities but like yeah like there are lots of ways in which the sort of chinese system and the american system are differently bad and that breaks people's brains because you get a lot of like you get you get a lot of americans who were convinced to become convinced that like china is a socialist paradise there's a chinese version of this where like you get international students who come to the us for the first time and see an election and they like lose their minds and are like absolutely convinced that like american democracy is like the only

political system and they read hayek and they like lose, they just like, they, they become the Chinese version of tankies, which are like weird neoliberal people. And it's like, no, like I, I know actually, in fact, none of these things are good.

Both of these societies are just like not good to live in in any way. And like, you know, and I think that there's another thing I should mention here, like why all of this sort of like bullshit posturing is happening between the U S and China right now, which is that like on, on the American side,

like Biden is trying to distract from the fact that the country is falling apart and there's a bunch of fascists trying to take over. And like, you know, like all of this bullshit is happening. China is trying to distract from the fact that they have 19% youth unemployment right now and that like there are there are like cops dispersing people doing runs on banks because

uh the the it finally looks like the chinese housing bubble is about to crack like it's you know this sort of nationalist stuff is like for for china in the u.s it is this sort of game that they play that has a lot to do basically with pacifying their own internal populations but you know for everyone in taiwan like it's not a game and that's that's the thing i think i want to close on which is like the single most important thing here is that there is no way for china to take control of taiwan except by war 94 of the population does not want to be ruled by China. 82% of the population of Taiwan wants a status quo.

If you try to force Chinese rule of Taiwan, the only way to do it is by war. And seizing control of and occupying a place with 23.5 million people is going to be a bloodbath. There's no other way to do it. Even if you are, I just want to leave this and a half million people is going to be a bloodbath. There's no other way to do it. I just want to leave this as sort of a message to people who don't agree with me on this, which is that if you've gotten to the end of this and you genuinely believe that Taiwan is part of China, are you willing to watch your family get burned alive for that principle?

Because that is what you are asking us to do do you are asking us to watch our families die for your belief about lions on a map and if if you are not willing to accept the consequences of your belief personally if you are not willing to see your family get obliterated by a fucking rocket then don't push for it to happen to us and yeah that is that that is taiwan 101 um please for the love of god stop doing this bullshit i don't want my family to fucking die i yeah yeah i think that's very well said mate uh i think a lot of people are so detached from the underground consequences of their like theoretical on twitter.com positions that it could be very easy to be incredibly callous to people who have loved ones skin in the game yeah and i think i think this is the part of it like no like 99 of the people on twitter

are posting about this head there have no stake in this whatsoever it doesn't matter to them if everyone on top if everyone who lives in taiwan died tomorrow it would have no material effect on them whatsoever right like the worst thing that would maybe happen to them it was it would be harder for them to get graphics cards. Yeah, compared to losing your entire family. Yeah, like this is 23 million people, an enormous number of whom are going to die if this thing happens. So yeah, like unless you are committed enough to this

to kill your own family, then fucking stop posting about it because that that that like if you were not willing to materially accept the consequences of your own position on yourself then you shouldn't have it yeah especially when you're pretending to be a leftist yep yeah that's this is this is gonna happen here uh yeah don't don't have a chinese invasion of taiwan happen here yeah overthrow your local settler colony yeah settler colonialism is bad that's the uh official stance of yep actually i know i'm not sure if we can legally i think i think we can legally say this is the official stance of Cool Zone Media.

I'm pretty sure we can't legally say it's the official stance. Yeah. Maybe cut that down. I need... Yeah. We'll say, yeah, here at Cool Zone Media, we don't endorse settler colonialism. Yeah, don't do it.

War is bad. Don't rocket cities. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Broth. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of rife. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app,

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