Americans are very ease to distinguish based both on their political stances (which tend to be rather unique) and how they express them (which IS unique).
Y'all are like those pickup trucks with LED lights. Once you realize they exist, you can't miss them.
Anti-China/pro-Taiwan sentiment isn't exactly unique to the US. I think you're alluding to an incendiary tone with respect to how you say Americans express their views, but that doesn't seem to quite fit so I'm a little lost there.
You made an assumption and you've yet to expound on how you justified it beyond some vague assertion about American political discourse. Give me something to introspect on, then, for crying out loud.
You don't disagree with your government; you didn't know what your government's position was until right now.
You still don't really know what your government's position is, otherwise you'd understand that here, as in many cases, there's an official stance for diplomatic relations and then a bunch of propaganda (for both domestic and foreign consumption) that undermines that official stance.
Bold of you to assume what I do and don't know about geopolitics. I'm well aware of the fine line that the US government walks, but I don't speak for the US government and my views aren't informed by "propaganda" but by the simple observations that 1) the PRC is a totalitarian regime, and 2) that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign state which broadly speaking doesn't particularly want to be assimilated into the PRC. Where is the propagandistic angle here?
you're only allowed to call the PRC "totalitarian" or undemocratic if you condemn the "democracies" of the english speaking world. the US president isn't even the person who gets the most votes🤡
Taiwan does not "generally" have a stance against reunification, some independence parties are a bit more popular than they used to be, but them becoming a legally independent state requires vast constitutional and international changes no government has even begun to implement
I'm sorry, but there's no way you can possibly equate the US government to the CCP without arguing in bad faith. The decidedly un-totalitarian nature of the US government is exactly why it's basically not functioning right now. There's plenty of valid criticism there, but to draw any sort of comparison to the Chinese form of government is insane.
You aren't brainwashed, you are just enculturated to a very reactionary ideology. I actually agree that it's better to analyze them as separate countries for the purpose of something like this graph, but this thinktank (which, to be clear, is very Atlanticist, i.e. aligned with your geopolitical views) is almost surely gunning for having their little infographics be diplomatically palettable in hopes that they get used by important bodies.
I understand what you're saying here and I agree that that's what's going here, but making something "diplomatically palatable" is for all intents and purposes equivalent to appeasement and (in my view) automatically makes any other claims made subject to suspicion.
I mean, Atlanticists are imperialists and should be condemned, but your view is rather unhelpful since it means the vast majority of statements connected to the UN since ~1980 fall under the same view. It's not like the PRC denies that the RoC government exists and effectively controls the island of Formosa, in our context it is just a rhetorical affectation to the effect of the RoC government not being legitimate, which is a pretty fair stance to take given the RoC's own positively absurd territorial claims.
The ROC's territorial claims are a side effect of the PRC's stance on Taiwan. I don't remember the exact details but essentially the PRC has previously declared that it would interpret any change in the ROC's territorial claims as a declaration of war. It's a matter of pragmatism.
Every single country on Earth except like seven (I only remember the Vatican and Paraguay) acknowledges that Taiwan is a dependent province of the PRC, including the USA and just about all of Europe.
Yes, but as you know in many cases it's for purely diplomatic reasons since acknowledging Taiwan's sovereignty means basically severing ties with the PRC, and most countries do far too much trade with it to make that in any way appealing.
The end result here being the non-acknowledgement of Taiwan's de facto sovereignty, which is decidedly not a reflection of reality. I dare you to tell a Taiwanese person that they live in a dependent province of the PRC because other countries serving their own interests said so and see how they respond.
The bulk of Taiwanese support the status quo, including that being their official diplomatic position, so I think it would go over better than you imagine. The diehard separatists are a minority faction.
The status quo has broad support because it keeps the peace, and the Taiwanese people generally don't want to fight a war against China. That doesn't equate to the majority of the Taiwanese people holding the view that they're a part of the PRC and it should be fairly obvious that they don't believe nor want that.
The reality is the Taiwan isn't broadly recognized as a sovereign country, so it doesn't wield the same authority as an independent nation in terms of international agreements, trade, etc. It doesn't have allies who would defend potential sovereignty, and it doesn't have enough guns or money to leverage itself as independent. That's way more important than some abstract discontent some people feel. At best you could say Taiwan is a Chinese client state.
Countries don't exist because some people feel like they should be one. I could ask you to talk to a Texan secessionist and tell them their cause is hopeless.
I will tell a person living in Taiwan they live in a province of China, sure. I don't care. Their government is the remnant of the defeated nationalist faction and I have no sympathy for it. Taiwan will hopefully get reabsorbed into the mainland within my lifetime.
me when china threatens to abuse the living shit out of anyone if they recognise an 85 year running independently functioning island just so meatheads like you can spew obvious fat horseshit: 🙁
So fucking what? My government's official stance is not that they are a bunch of dickheads, yet here we are.
Outside of SOME official government communication (Western governments will happily send official delegations to Taiwan from time to time just to piss off the CCP) and other matters of strategic ambiguity like the Olympics, Taiwan is a country. Everybody but China and a few lonesome tankies agrees on that.
So when a private entity shows Taiwan as part of the PRC, it can only be assumed that they are tankies, Chinese propagandists, or incompetent. Either way, probably not trustworthy.
The unofficial consensus between the KMT/PRC was that Taiwan and China are one country. The NED-funded DPP has been trying to break that status quo, though.