I would also like to make it clear that mainland China is the only one that has ever put these claims (except for Mongolia) into practice.
[1] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/05... [2] https://english.president.gov.tw/Page/93
Taiwan until around 1990 froze into place representatives from all the mainland provinces in its legislature, thereby effectively nullifying the democratic voice of the people who lived on the island.
Taiwan's "外生人", those born on the mainland and who fled to Taiwan at the end of the civil war, took over the government, suppressing the views and interests of the "Taiwanese", the Chinese who speak the local Chinese dialect and who lived there before. You know, kinda like what Russia wants to do with Ukraine.
The Taiwanese themselves previously took over the island, suppressing the view and interests of the aborigine people, who are Austronesian, not Chinese. Again, kinda like what Russia wants to do with Ukraine.
So if we're going to talk about democracy and freedom and sovereignty, we need to be less tribal/self-serving about it and more honest.
If we're going to castigate China, are you also going to castigate America about Hawaii? If not, then I don't think that's honest. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I recommend you read about what Native Hawaiians feel about America. There's also Puerto Rico. And the US taking the Southwest form Mexico, and then closing its border, treating migrant workers from south of the border like shit, all the while looking the other way as we can make them work for below minimum wage and no protections all so we can have cheaper produce and have cheaper restaurants and all the other things that depend on cheap brown labor. We can go further and talk about Europeans taking it all from the indigenous people.
I'm not defending China or Russia. I'm pointing out the huge amount of self-serving cherry-picking and hypocrisy.
If anything, it was the Slavs in that region that expanded eastward and resettled conquered territories e.g. Tatars(Crimea) to the eastern parts.
Taiwan was inhabited by Austronesians, some of which were butchered by the dutch when they first drove them out, then by Portuguese, later by the Japanese (for a while a lot of Taiwanese considered themselves Japanese, while others on that Island fought of the invaders in the east) and sometime in between all that Hakka and other Han Chinese settled the island.
After loosing the civil war as you know Chiang Kai-shek settled there while running a brutal dictatorship where the first thing he did was take all the local currency and reissue his own. I think the biggest giveaway on how problematic Taiwans history with China is, is that some of the biggest treasures that Mao tried to destroy are in the national history museum in Taipei.
I agree with you that Taiwan never accepted changing it's own constitution(i.e. passports are still issued as RoC, not as Taiwan), but you absolutely cannot compare Ukraine to Taiwan. Neither in geography nor in history.
That makes no sense.
From Wikipedia:
> Around 6,000 years ago .... Austronesian ... Han Chinese fishermen began settling in the Penghu islands in the 13th century.
That's 800 years ago.
Are you going to motivate an attack and invasion and war today, with what others did that far ago?
And then:
> In 1626, the Spanish Empire landed on and occupied northern Taiwan [...] 1642, when the last Spanish fortress fell to Dutch forces.[83] The Dutch then marched south, subduing hundreds of villages
That's Spain and the Netherlands, not Taiwan, occupying ... Taiwan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan
You could have the whole world be at war with itself everywhere, by looking back some hundred years and motivating conflicts today with what you then find.
So the US is English?
