So, they are telling me that once there was a united China where a democratically elected government existed; but part of the country was able to enslave part of its own population. Then, an election sent a new president from a new political party to Peking who wanted all Chinese men to be free. The Taiwanese, fearful that their slaves would be freed by the new president, withdrew from the Chinese nation and ever since, the free mainland part of China has been trying to pull the secessionist slave-holding province back into the mainland government on the understanding that all Taiwanese will be free like the mainland Chinese. We in America, of course, have the role of Britain and France, defending the secessionists.
Rrriiight.
I don't know, but that doesn't sound like the real current situation. Indeed, since Taiwan is now the free part of China and the mainland is almost fully slave-inhabited with the slave-owning communist party on top of the heap, one would think that the Taiwanese should be cast in the role of Union liberator despite their miniscule size compared to the "secessionists" on the mainland.
Perhaps that is exactly what the Peking communists are worried about.
After all, the old KMT captured all of China in the 1920s campaign called "the Northern Expedition."
The northward advance of the National Revolutionary Army, commanded by Chiang Kai-shek. The Northern Expedition was a combined military and diplomatic campaign that achieved the nominal unification of China under KMT control. After the Northern Expedition the KMT began to expand the areas under their de facto control, first in the lower Yangtze macro-region and then to the north and south along the coast. While the KMT continuously struggled with the development of civil society and extending the reach of the state, they were largely successful in consolidating their rule in the most critical areas of eastern China during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Against a corrupt and ill-trained army in the service of a national government barely in control of its parts, a better trained and cohesive KMT army with a powerful ideological weapon and a lot of money was able to march north from its southern base and defeat the Chinese government and attract defectors until the KMT controlled all of China.
If there is a Chinese Lincoln, he is on Taiwan.
