Hong Kong demands Taiwan officials sign 'one China' document for visa renewal | Hacker News Reader

Hong Kong demands Taiwan officials sign 'one China' document for visa renewal

reuters.com

60 pointsstepstop14 comments

The one-China policy is explicitly designed to be ambiguous about who controls this China, which lets the PRC pretend they control Taiwan and Taiwan pretend they control the mainland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy

So on the face of it, being asked to agree to this should not be objectionable to a Taiwanese official. Is the content of the doc they're being asked to sign available anywhere? Because it sounds like the devil is in the details here.

I only know about the One China policy from Wikipedia, but it seems like there's disagreement among the political parties of Taiwan about if they want to keep it. If I was an official, I wouldn't want to have signed a declaration that agrees to China's position unless it matched the official position of Taiwan.

Foreign policy is weird, countries don't give up on even trivial disputes without some concessions. Even seemingly trivial matters can be used for later negotiations. See the current list of US/Canada territorial disputes for an example notably Machias island.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_areas_disputed_by_Cana...

> The source declined to say exactly how many Taiwan officials were asked to sign the paper but said its acting chief, Kao Ming-tsun, had returned to the island late on Thursday after he refused to sign the document upon his visa renewal.

Good on Kao.

There is a reason why these types of governments overtime descend into chaos. It's not the exception it is the rules. The western world is just getting a refresher course on what that looks like.

In general, yes. But we haven’t before seen what happens when that government has total data and communication control on every individual citizen.

Yeh and what the soviets did was different than the Venezuelans. But I typically think life in canonical. We live the same lives with a small tweak to a variable. I dont think this will last in that government is people and people are flawed.

Maybe Taiwan should make chinese sign a seperate country document for visa renewals.

Seriously china’s obsession with Taiwan is absurd, they’re a separate country, get the fuck over it.

Dictatorships never accept getting over anything.

It's a pity somebody like you didn't get to say that to the Union about the Confederacy before the Civil War kicked off.

That analogy doesn’t work. Is Taiwan separate because it wants to keep abusing human rights and China wants to end those abuses?

No, the answer is no. If anything, your comment would only make sense if the confederates had won and instituted slavery everywhere in America, and taiwan was a small union hold out.

As it stands your comment sounds revisionist and dismissive of what the civil war was about.

The confederacy declared independence after slavers lost the election, and then started war with the USA.

Additionally Taiwan declared independence following a revolution that completely changed the existing country governance.

I would have thought the visa itself is de facto recognition that they are separate countries.

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