The malnourished, 1 ft shorter than their S. Korean counterpart troops?

Yep! There’s a surplus of educated women, who are too educated / accomplished in their careers to want to marry uneducated rural men. And many of them also deferred marriage for their education and career and thus became a bit too old to bear children. All of this just exacerbates the male to female ratio problem in China, which is also a huge problem for China’s demographics.

China is going to shrink in population, Japan, Korea, Taiwan also have these problems.

Damn, Modi can redeem himself by just doing it again, but this time, stick a dagger in Putin’s back!

“Chinese Nationalism” is not even what you think. Very few people would even want to be a part of PRC.

There’s no denial that Taiwan is a predominantly ethnically-Chinese nation. There used to be some prestige in being Chinese and “中華”. The PRC and the CCP and its goons and tools has been quickly eroding that on the world stage with embarrassing acts one after another. When the PRC was closed, all of that shit was enclosed and isolated from the rest of the world. It should have remained that way.

When “Chinese Nationalism” is being discussed in Taiwan, it is more about retaining the ethnic Chinese identity and culture. (In fact, Taiwan has done a way better job in preserving the real Chinese culture than the PRC.) It is definitely not about re-unification and definitely not re-unification under the PRC.

Not all politics in Taiwan is about national politics. Even though the DPP won the presidency several times, they have narrowly won the legislative seats and didn’t get the majority this round. That means there are definitely people who voted DPP for president and KMT for local seats. There are many reasons for that. Local politics come into play, economics is also an important issue (low wage jobs is an issue for young people), compulsory military service is definitely not popular, and also the KMT, being the incumbent (and only party) for decades prior, has a much strong political machinery and financial backing (all that old corrupt KMT money) than the DPP. Not to say there’s no corruption in DPP.

Personally I don’t understand how any benshenren would vote for the KMT, the party that has massacred and disappeared many of our older generation relatives. Maybe there are some politicians who joined KMT because the DPP side of the ticket was already occupied and they want to still try to run for the office. When my dad gets together with his brother, they still recount which neighbors on the street they used to live on has suffered a loss during those years. There’s a lot of silent suffering and sadness. The younger generations don’t even know because people were afraid to talk about it for a long time. Many has sacrificed to wrestle a free and democratic country out from the authoritarian KMT. For me and my family, we’re allergic to the KMT brand.

They still operate with the same constitution!

This is not some gotcha as you think it is. Its just a bullshit talking point.

Changing the constitution would be perceived as an official declaration of independence and a potential ignition point for war. Recognize that its a catch 22 situation. No one is going to change it until the threat of war is over.

The irony is that Taiwan once held that UN security-council seat. I do believe the people of China needs to be represented in the UN, but doing so at the cost of Taiwanese people’s representation completely defeats the purpose of having a UN in the first place.

To me, the Taiwanese people have already silently made that choice of independence. Even if independence isn’t loudly proclaimed, Taiwan is still silently at war with China. Otherwise why spend so much money on war equipment from the US, and why have mandatory military service?

To me, the rest of the world powers, the G7, can jointly recognize Taiwan. At that point China will loudly complain and declare hurt feelings, but they will back off. Because there will be nothing they can do unless they want to become the world enemy.

Its nice to have something official and have recognition from the rest of the world and to be able to participate in UN or WHO and as “Taiwan” or even “ROC” instead of “Chinese Taipei” in sport contests.

But there is always a threat of war from China if Taiwan does the above. So no one wants to take that risk and be the one that starts the war, possibly WW3.

That something else is: Taiwan is an important geographic location. A separate Taiwan prevents China from having full easy access to the Pacific Ocean. If China holds Taiwan, China will be able to project its naval powers much further into the Pacific and the US does not like it.

This has always been the case since the KMT fled to Taiwan, way before Taiwan became a high-tech chip producing country. Way before Taiwan democratized. (Remember, Chiang Kai-Shek himself was a authoritarian asshole that has killed many earlier migrants to Taiwan.)

It’s nice to have TSMC producing high-tech chips, but Samsung and Intel can also do so, perhaps only a process node (or half) behind TSMC, but Intel CPUs are no slouch compared to AMD’s despite being a node behind. And Samsung have been producing some of nVidia’s GPUs so they’re not out of the game. But TSMC does need to be recognized and I don’t really think it can be reproduced in the US. Taiwan has a very highly educated and underpaid engineering work force. I really don’t think you can reproduce the same results in the US at the same costs. Its going to cost 5-10X more to move to the US.

Same here. I am introverted and I hate social interactions. It drains me. BUT for me, after talking and meeting a person face-to-face a few times, all the rest of the online communication becomes a lot more smooth-sailing.

tone deaf post

Its interesting to see your post to be so controversial. People who thinks all scientists are atheists either just don’t know any scientists or never been out in the real world. There’s really no difference between scientists and any regular population. I’m a engineer and in my group of about 40 engineers, many of us are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and some Atheists. We don’t let religion interfere with our work, and there’s no conflicts with each other. We do a mix of R&D in our work, and we build software and hardware that gets used by millions of consumers daily.

He’s a victim of his own purging culture. I’m sure he is afraid that when he is out of power, he will be purged, just like how he purged his competition.

Same with Xi of China.

The press just can’t stop talking about Trump. I feel like they wouldn’t be so popular if they didn’t receive so much press coverage.

One issue is, I’m ethnically Chinese, but been living in the US for more than 35 years (in my 40s), that when I try to speak my limited Chinese, I sound like a child. So to a person from China, I’m an adult Chinese person sounding like a kid, so it may look like I’m some type of a mentally challenged person. So it can be very difficult. And then if they found out I can speak English, they’ll be like “just f-ing speak English” and get it over with already. Of course it depends on the situation and person. But that’s the general difficulties of being Asian American in Asia (who is trying hard to blend in).

For non-Asians in Asia, they all say “everyone is so nice and patient with me”, and that’s because they are obviously a foreigner and its still a novelty for someone in China to be able to interact with a foreigner (maybe not in big 1st tier cities), so they will give you the time of the day.

I learned Zhuyin (注音) in Taiwan when I was younger, but then stopped using it when I immigrated to the US. At some point, I wanted to type Chinese on smartphones, so I started to learn Pinyin and used Pinyin for a while to type Chinese. The issue with Pinyin is that it uses the alphabets and that collides with English too much, I think as a English speaker, you naturally would try to use English’s way of pronunciation to try to sound out words in Chinese, and that creates problems for me because its a mismatch.

But recently, I started to use the Zhuyin system again, and it is just a lot more natural. Of course for me, I’ve learned it before as a kid, so it wasn’t that difficult to pick it up again. But it would be a steep learning curve for someone new to Chinese. But I still recommend it, it would be like someone needing to learn Hiragana and Katakana when learning Japanese. I’ve also learned from some of the older Chinese people from China that Zhuyin used to be taught in China as well, which was surprising to me. I guess that was the system in use before Mao decided that China needs to “westernize” and go with roman alphabets with Pinyin.

A lot of developed countries are going to see a decrease in population starting in the next 20 years and that will probably go on until the end of this century.

Our growth-minded economics needs to shift. Maybe we need to focus on how to gracefully decline. A decrease in revenue does not mean a company is not profitable. So that mindset needs to change.

We really need to focus on geriatric care, there will be a lot more old people than young people, so we need some way to get care to all the old people without over-burdening the young. More robots? Or robot-assisted care so that is it not so taxing on a nurse? I recently had to help a neighbor who was in declining health and mind, and man, I do not want myself to be in that state burdening my children and family. So we need some legislature to allow assisted suicide for those with terminal illness so I can go and die with dignity and grace.

Then we need a new de-construction industry that is focused on removing old buildings and old infrastructure and restoring the land back to its natural state. Otherwise we will have a plague of urban decay if that’s not managed well.