The rattling of sabers....

[unixronin]

A senior Chinese general has threatened to launch a full-scale nuclear strike against the USA if the US gives military support to Taiwan in the event of a Chinese military re-assimilation of Taiwan.

"If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," [Major-General Zhu Chenghu] told an official briefing for foreign journalists.

[...]

"We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian.  Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds ... of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese," he added.

Despite fifty years of Taiwanese independence, China still considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory.  Taiwan quite understandably disagrees rather firmly with this point of view.

Beijing considers Taiwan part of China, and has vowed to bring the self-governed democracy back into the fold.  In March, China's parliament passed an anti-secession law authorizing the use of "non-peaceful means" to do so.

Sounds like the Sudetenland all over again.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Indeed, that argument is not lost on me. I personally more than half suspect a major reason why China is so hot to take back Taiwan is because the Taiwanese computer industry is so successful and generates so much wealth. They don't, or won't, understand, of course, as failed idealogues never can, that returning Taiwan to the Workers' Paradise will probably kill that particular golden goose....

I recently read a Stephen Bishop novel titled Titan. One of the side plots was a China with a nascent Chinese space program, still ruled by a 120-year-old Mao Zedong, who decided that the best way China had to counter resource blockades from a United States under Bishop's version of Nehemiah Scudder (in a regime so benighted that history, science and technology were "edited" to conform to a strictly Biblical cosmology, with fixed stars and planets on fixed spheres), was to drop a big rock into the North Atlantic. Shame they were an order of magnitude or so off on the size of the NEO they picked ... it was a nice planet while it lasted.