In today’s Wumao Soup (Wumao Wednesday!), we’ll talk about Taiwan (aka: the Republic of China), the sovereign country that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) insists is not a country, yet constantly threatens to invade just like a country, while the “antiwar” crowd is eagerly encouraging them to start that war, endangering millions.

Taiwan is a country, a state. It is independent: it has its own territory, government, army, police, courts, taxes, laws, passports and elections, just like any other country.

The only difference? Its neighbor, imperialist China, wants to invade it, and other countries try to please the big bully.

Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC). Taiwanese passports now use both names. The ROC was founded in 1912, after the fall of the Qing dynasty. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), was founded by democidal dictator Mao Zedong and his communist party, in 1949, after fighting against the ROC.

The basic chronology here makes it quite absurd to call the older state, the ROC, a “breakaway province” from the younger one, the PRC. Or to argue that the PRC, founded in 1949, is somehow older than the USA, founded on July 4, 1776.

Even Trump is older than the PRC.

The PRC are the Maoist rebels who fought China’s regime, not a continuation of it. They even refuse to pay the Qing Empire’s sovereign debts. As revolutionaries, they specifically sought to destroy the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) during the Cultural Revolution.

And they never ruled Taiwan.

It is pure expansionist warmongering. And like any imperialism, it relies on armies of online propagandists spreading lame excuses, so that it can hope one day to get away with armies of real soldiers murdering, looting and conquering.

Why we soup

Since 1945, the UN charter has assigned a permanent Security Council seat to the ROC. In 1971, the UN gave that seat to the PRC — without amending the charter. A political decision not tied to any actual event, as the two states had co-existed for decades at that point.

The US position has also been deliberately ambiguous. Washington “acknowledges” Beijing’s position on Taiwan — acknowledges, not agrees: US officials still visit Taiwan without the PRC’s permission, and countries do business with Taiwan as with any other country.

The Taiwanese have never been ruled by the PRC, and they have no desire to ever be ruled by it. Taiwan is not the PRC’s “internal affair”: if the CCP already controlled Taiwan, they would not be threatening to invade it; and if the Taiwanese wanted to join them, they would:

Taiwan today is a functioning democracy. They have free elections, opposition parties, free media, civil society. When was the last time China had free elections, by the way?

Perhaps it is the mainland, “West Taiwan”, who would rejoin the Republic, if offered a choice…?

But of course the maoist dictatorship is not going to let its subjects choose. Censorship, concentration camps, disappeared critics: the PRC is an authoritarian regime threatening its neighbors just like it threatens its own population.

15 Facts About China

And it’s not only about China expanding its territory and oppressing 23 million more people, terrible as that would be. The whole world would be destabilized by a PRC empowered by control of key chip factories, making threats of further Chinese aggression ever more likely.

The PRC loves to compare itself with the US in sheer, childish whataboutism, while also conveniently hiding its own past wars: Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, as well as supplying weapons, components and dual-use technology to terrorist regimes and armed groups from Iran to Russia.

Wumao Soup

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is particularly important for the PRC: Xi is backing Putin while carefully avoiding direct commitment, watching how the war unfolds to learn from Putin’s mistakes and observe whether the US responds strongly enough to blatant aggression.

In both cases, the aggressors rely on the West’s passivity: they pull up irrelevant claims or rewrite history, deny their target’s legitimacy to justify invading them, and craft narratives to justify their war without calling it a war (“special military operation” and perhaps “police operation” for China’s “internal affair”, even though millions of soldiers from each country would be involved?).

The propaganda is then massively spread through bot and troll farms, and numbs our resolve to confront them.

That is why “America should abandon Taiwan” is not an antiwar position: on the contrary, it is the surest way to start a war — at which point the “antiwar” crowd will don their favorite peacenik attire, officially “condemn” the war, and scream nobody please intervene, no “escalation”!

Genuine peace is preferable to war, surrender is not. Ukraine under occupation means “filtration” camps and genocide. A PRC occupation of Taiwan would also not be peaceful: mass arrests, disappearances, “re-education” camps, even worse than Hong Kong or the persecution of the Uyghurs.

Vatniks like Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy have long been eager to abandon Taiwan, and now Trump has been hinting at it too.

Eagerness to do business with China? Ignorance of the wide-ranging consequences of their words and actions? Lack of any moral compass whatsoever?

Or maybe Trump just likes post-truth excuses for starting wars, as he would over the “breakaway states” of Greenland or Canada…?

For regimes like the PRC — and increasingly for “MAGA” Trumpist politics too — truth and peace matter far less than loyalty to the Party or Leader.

---

Wumao propaganda is less sophisticated than the Russian one (“China good, America bad, let us invade Taiwan”) but… it’s still gaining ground with easy marks like Trump. Fact-based research to counter it takes time and effort. Please support our work:

Fight Disinformation With Us: Support our Work | Vatnik Soup