Increased use of Mandarin, however, obviously infringes of Chinese minority rights.

Edit: just to be clear, many Chinese dialects have a lower lexical similarity than European languages. The standardization of Mandarin in education has had impacts on these dialects as well.

BYD already has plants in Canada. I'd really appreciate if they just expanded their Canadian footprint - good Canadian jobs, cheap EVs, win-win-win.

China eats more poultry and fish. This was bound to happen. Poultry and fish are very calorie-efficient sources of protein.

They're also poor and economically disadvantaged. Do you like keeping poor people poor? Jfc

You can't make it to lead an American political party without being at least one standard deviation smarter than the average American.

60 million people is almost no one?

Geez it's like you people want poor people to stay poor. There's more than enough capacity for solar deployments in the nations East - it's explicit policy that's put deployments further West. Beijing is happy to build some UHV lines if it means that prosperity can be driven into the West - it's the same argument as for the HSR line to Lanzhou and then to Urumqi. It's the same argument as for the HSR line to Hohhot and the HrSR from Chengdu to Lhasa. Beijing knows that these infrastructure projects are inefficient, but Beijing is more concerned with equity of growth than the growth itself - they'd rather see 10% growth in the West and 3% growth in the East for 5% growth nationally than 6% growth nationally, but coming entirely from already established tier 1 population centers.

It's not only mutual prosperity, but also an effort to reduce internal migration towards tier 1 cities.

I mean, yeah. It'll be interesting to see if that means that they'll still pursue those legislative ideals (just without a platform or unifying cry or whatever), or if they're happy to push the responsibility down to the states.

My opinion is that the Republicans see the writing on the wall: why make unpopular decisions federally when you can make popular decisions at the state-level? They can maintain a christofascist state in their home ground without having to project onto states that'll ignore their legislation anyway.

sigh

Do you have the memory of a goldfish? Status quo under the previous KMT administration was very healthy. No talks of invasion, lots of talk about economic ties and cultural exchange. It was great, actually. Xi and Ma met, which was the first meeting between leaders since the start of the civil war. Ma is a true statesman and a symbol of what proper Taiwanese governance should be. Peace across the strait was possible for once.

Then, the DPP got elected, started sucking America's cock, started inviting top US officials for state visits, received awards from American state-funded institutions (like the National Endowment for Democracy), increasingly remilitarized, invited the US to sail through the Taiwan Strait... And the rest is history. Odd how it's always the US-backed government that's the "victim" in Western media, isn't it? Surely China violated the status quo with respect to crossing the median line on their own accord, not because just a few weeks ago a US warship was invited to sail through the strait? Do you even remember what the status quo was?

Taiwan claims territory that conflicts not only with China, but with: Mongolia, Myanmar, Bhutan, India, Japan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Russia, Pakistan, and also Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. Recognizing Taiwanese sovereignty violates the sovereignty of not only China, but also all of those countries... Which is absurd. Cut the crap and look at a map. ROC sovereignty would basically wipe Mongolia off the map. The funny thing is that Taiwan recognizing the sovereignty of the territory that conflicts with all of these other nations would have no bearing or impact on their sovereignty claim with China itself... Taiwan simply refuses to do so. The only claim that Taiwan cannot make freely is one that shrinks the borders of modern China (e.g. in the Arunachal Pradesh area and the South China Sea), but for everything else they have complete legislative authority to recognize foreign claims (after all, China has already done so, so doing so would not violate One China policy). They won't, of course, because they refuse to recognize China's negotiations in those territories as valid.

The lack of promises with regards to abortion and same-sex marriage is huge. It's a colossal shift. Trump has always been more of a traditional Jeffersonian Republican than a Federalist - he's in favour of shifting power from the federal government to the states. This is an increasing indicator that the states will be what decides on these social topics, not the feds.

That also explains why he's getting so much funding and support from the elite in Silicon Valley - they would like nothing more than for California to decide legislation rather than DC.

It's increasingly apparent that Trump views the role of the federal government as an arbiter of the economy and the role of the United States (as a concept) as a way of unifying the disparate interests of different states with regards to foreign policy. By gutting federal agencies, the only logical result is pushing power down to the individual states.

This is a huge paradigm shift. The Republican party went from being an evangelical Christian, tax-cut whackoparty into...

well, without the platform, nobody knows.

Dude thinks Chinese people aren't people. Provinces with a population that exceed some of the most populous states in America... "barely have any people"

The KMT supports normalization of relations with China. China was perfectly happy with the status quo until the DPP systematically stomped on the status quo and tore it apart