Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

The whole "unrecognised country" nonsense should begone. Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country (and does a reasonable job of being a decent country for the people living in it, it obviously is a better country than a number of completely recognized ones) yet it still has "limited recognition". How about recognizing the facts rather than virtual reality of politicians' imagination? Banning an entire country is bullshit.

It's not nonsense, and "everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" is a flawed statement. The UN does not recognize Taiwan. Taiwan is recognized as a sovereignty by 19 UN member states. It has formal diplomatic relationships with ~50 UN member states. UN has 193 member states in total. Please refrain from using subjective unprovable ideology to represent the mass.

It took until 1979 for the United States to recognize that China was, in fact, governed from Beijing, not Taipei.

(Beijing won the civil war in 1950.)

Today, in 2019, Taiwan still does not recognize China.

Recognition is a chip in the game of geopolitics.

The UN is a political organization and, importantly, highly leveraged by China for political gain. The objective reality is that Taiwan is an independent country that sets its own laws and is free to conduct its own foreign relations.

The objectivity in your eyes is subjectivity to another. Similarly objectivity in others is subjective in yours. There is never true objectivity in our collective presence. If UN ceases to be your objectivity, that's respected.

I mean, you can take a plane to Taipei. It isn't subjective or unprovable: the ROC will check your passport. They issue the currency you will use to buy food. The police work for them. Taxes are collected, exclusively, by them.

The objective reality is that most of the world, including the United States, does not actually recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. It recognizes that it exists as... Something.

I think you would be hard-pressed to argue that the Department of State, and its counterparts in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Japan[1], etc, etc, etc, have been 'highly leveraged by China for political gain'.

Oh, and to throw another monkey wrench in your argument, consider that both China and Taiwan believe that Taiwan is not an independent country, but that it is part of China.

What they disagree on is who is the legitimate government of China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy

>I mean, you can take a plane to Taipei. It isn't subjective or unprovable: the ROC will check your passport. They issue the currency you will use to buy food. The police work for them. Taxes are collected, exclusively, by them.

The question of whether or not ISIS is therefore a country is left as an exercise for the reader.

Countries that don't recognize Taiwan, the US included, do so solely because the GDP of China is much greater than the GDP of Taiwan and China is more than willing to throw their weight around in an attempt to legitimize their claim through coercion. If you hold a gun to someone's head and/or give them $100 and tell them to repeat that you are a cabbage, you don't become the cabbage, no matter how much of the world you coerce.

Both governments make claims against the other's land but that doesn't make them the same government.

You are technically right in that most states recognize Taiwan as a province of the PRC. However, describing Taiwan as a distinct country is ambiguous, since "country" doesn't have a strict definition. E.g., it's normal to consider the parts of the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark to be countries, although they are not independent. It's not much of a stretch to consider Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan, or Catalonia, to be countries too.

Edit: if you look at the font in question, it does have flags for England and Aruba, for example, so offering the flags doesn't imply that you are recognizing the places as sovereign states.

They were a country for a period of time. They had passports and a currency. I don’t see how that disproves OP’s point

Part of the politics is that the Republic of China still officially claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China. So it really is recognize one or the other. Politics within Taiwan have so far prevented declaration of Taiwanese independence from China in any form, and the One-China policy that everybody agrees to prevents recognition of the PRC and establishment of two-state relationships. Until either of these political realities change, the formal fiction of unrecognized statehood is unlikely to change.

This is not very true. Taiwan, Republic of China, has made attempts to change its name, only to be met with the threat of war from the People’s Republic of China if they perform a name change to Republic of Taiwan.

The RoK and DPRK each claim sovereignty over all of Korea, which both sides legally view as one country. That hasn’t stopped the rest of the world from recognizing them separately.

Taiwan’s partial recognition is due to pressure from China, not any logical impossibility of recognizing two different countries that officially claim to be one.

It would be a better exercise to define a sovereign state first and then independently apply the test to Taiwan and IS. History is full of unpleasant governments.

I do all sorts of things, because people who have physical, or economic power over me compel me to. Just because their authority is enforced through force (Or the implicit threat of force) (Or the promise of rewards for compliance) does not mean that they are illegitimate authorities.

Compelling other people to do things, with either a carrot, or a stick, is an incredibly normal state of affairs in life. My landlord will have me out on my ass if I don't cut him a check on the first of every month - does that mean that my recognition of his authority to my apartment is illegitimate, or somehow coercive?

coun·try /ˈkəntrē/ noun 1. a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.

Does the Peoples Republic of China currently occupy and govern the island of Taiwan?

1. I'm not sure how this has anything to do with your claim that PROC is improperly coercing the world into saying that black is white, by putting a gun to their heads. (And I still don't understand how it squares with the reality that the ROC is trying its best to do the same thing.)

2. Is Taiwan a distinct nation, or is it part of the Chinese Nation?

Both the PROC and the ROC currently seem to think that it is the latter. Most of the world agrees with them.

(Bonus points: Is Catalonia a country? What about Cascadia? What about Transnistria, and South Ossetia? What about Crimea? By your definition, it seems to quite clearly be part of Russia... Be careful where you express that viewpoint, though, it's not one shared by most of the world's governments, or most Ukranians...)

De Jure nationhood is a stupid game that ignores facts on the ground in favor of politicians vision. It is predicated on a fallacy that "legitimacy" is a vital resource and that those already in the nation club have a monopoly on it. At this point calling groups "countries" and calling other groups "terrorists" is better understood as the geopolitical equivalent of a curse word and/or a propaganda trope.

-Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era.

-Trasnistaria. Has population, land, flag, collects taxes. Only recognized by Russia. There's a few Russian backed puppets like this, I won't name them all.

-Taiwan. Already discussed.

-Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese media calls the protestors terrorists. Yet another example of "terrorist" meaning simply "whoever the establishment wants to de-legitimize". If you follow the CCP narrative, the thing they care about isn't Democracy but separatism. "One China" is about not recognizing Taiwan and HK as a matter of ethno-nationalist principal.

-Palestine. Recognized by majority of UN countries. Still not recognized by US, Israel, and associated power block. Why? Because of the stupid belief that recognition will somehow legitimate it.

-ISIS. At their peak they had a sizeable chunk of land, a flag, a capital, civic functions like a court system, an oil industry, handed out passports, were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics, had a uniformed army, and the word "state" was right there in the name. But don't you dare call them a state lest someone mistake you for a terrorist sympathizer.

This is why I subscribe to De Facto nationhood instead. A nation is a nation when it satisfies the following properties:

-A plot of land with well defined borders.

-A permanent population on said land.

-A Monopoly on violence over said land.

-An organization capable of credibly making peace, declaring war, and otherwise accepting agreements with other nations.

The last one is tricky as it only specifies the capability not the actualization. For example, if the organization agrees to peace but the individual factions of the army keep fighting then this condition is not satisfied and what you have is a stateless warlord situation. For another example, the ISIS situation clearly had an organization which was capable of agreeing to a surrender or appointing an ambassador, but they never wanted to or were allowed to. The condition is still satisfied even though they never did it.

> Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era.

Almost no one, including the Order itself, considers the Sovereign Military Order of Malta a country; it's the usual textbook example of a sovereign entity that is not a state/country by those who see it as sovereign (a point on which there is considerable dispute, despite the claim in its name and it's wide diplomatic interactions and grants of extraterritoriality, and, for it's headquarters, concurrent sovereignty with Italy.)

It's basically a NGO with a sui generis diplomatic status and disputed (among scholars) international legal status.

-ISIS. At their peak they had a sizeable chunk of land, a flag, a capital, civic functions like a court system, an oil industry, handed out passports, were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics, had a uniformed army, and the word "state" was right there in the name. But don't you dare call them a state lest someone mistake you for a terrorist sympathizer.

That's playing a bit fast and loose with the facts there. ISIS conducted public executions, crucifixions, desecration of cultural sites and enslaved people for a labor force. That's textbook asymmetric warfare/terrorism.

The UN was founded in 1945. I have reason to believe that countries existed long before that.

> That's playing a bit fast and loose with the facts there. ISIS conducted public executions, crucifixions, desecration of cultural sites and enslaved people for a labor force. That's textbook asymmetric warfare/terrorism.

To me that just sounds like textbook nationhood. The defining feature of the state is having the monopoly on violence within its borders.

> ISIS conducted public executions, crucifixions, desecration of cultural sites and enslaved people for a labor force.

you mean things which "recognized" states do all the time?

Was the Roman Empire a country?

You made few mistakes: 1. Beijing won the civil war at 1949. 2. UN has recognized PRC at 1971 and abandoned Taiwan or ROC. And till now, only very limited countries in the world (17) recognized Taiwan as independent state

Based on this framework it doesn't seem entirely clear to me Taiwan is a de facto nation. Do they have the monopoly on violence over their land? From my understanding (which admittedly isn't great) they at best of a duopoly on violence in their land shared with China, and China might have a better claim to that monopoly than they do. That being said, I completely agree with your broader point De Jure nationhood is a stupid game, and it's much more sensible to simply look at reality and make your own judgments about who is and isn't a legitimate state.

Thankfully many international treaties have been made in the last few thousand years and civilized nations wage war differently now. I was expressly disputing the parent poster's claim that ISIS did not use terrorist tactics, which is a statement I find difficult for anyone to really take issue with.

You can think of it this way. If the PRC were to say, "oh, by-the-way, feel free to recognize Taiwan as an independent country", every other country in the world would likely do so.

I do not think China using violence over, or on Taiwan would go over well.

Taiwan can do anything it wants without repercussions inside Taiwan, thus ‘monopoly on force’.

China using force in Taiwan would just be a declaration of war.

How would the breakaway province of Transnistria in Moldova be classified in this context?

I think it’s about time China gets the chance to make good on this promise, or gets defanged when it turns out they don’t have the stomach for it (they have a good thing going, shame to let it be ruined by war).

Everyone is tiptoeing around them for fear of waking the dragon.

Saudi Arabia also does all of the things you listed, except perhaps desecration of cultural sites. Just because a country does things you don’t like doesn’t make it not a country

> Department of State, and its counterparts in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil and Japan

Anyone in these departments of state is aware that Taiwan is a separate country. They’re just not able to say it.

In regards to 1. I’m a bit confused. Are you claiming China is landlord to the entire world?

Or that if they were, coercing all the population to say white is black would be the normal state of affairs?

While I think it's clear that ISIS was/is evil, I'm not sure that its as clear that those actions (or at least all of them) were terrorism.

I'd define terrorism as something along the lines of "using guerrilla tactics against civilian targets in order to achieve political ends". I would differentiate that from atrocities committed against a state's own people in order to keep them in line (for example Stalin's purges), human rights violations (e.g. witch trials or killing homosexuals), ethnic/religious cleansing, or guerrilla attacks against targets with legitimate strategic value.

My understanding, although I am definitely not super informed on this, is that ISIS's atrocities were mostly keeping people in line, human rights abuse, and religious cleansing. Therefore I would not consider those acts to be terrorism. However, that doesn't make them any less evil.

I assume they were, but since most of the world was intent on squashing the country flat as a bug I doubt formal recognition would have done anything for them.

The parts of the Netherlands are called provinces, and are not sovereign nations.

The larger area you call the Netherlands that includes Belgium and Luxembourg is currently called the Benelux[1]

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelux

Whether a state uses terrorist tactics is orthogonal to the issue of it being a state. Was the Russian shooting down of MH-17 not a terrorist act undertaken by a state? How about the bombing of the Beirut barracks? How about any number of acts by Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, or Imperial Japan?

I was thinking of the Kingdom of the Netherlands with its constituent countries:

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

Sure, I won't even dispute that. What I'm disputing is that the parent poster said that ISIS did not use terrorist tactics.

That is blatantly a false statement. I can't believe the negative reaction towards pointing that out.

I wasn't arguing that, I was just calling out the parent for saying ISIS didn't use terrorism as a tactic.

Nice whataboutism there though.

How is it whataboutism? Your criteria for being a country also apply to Saudi Arabia, which anybody would generally accept to be a country.

If I say a square is any four sided object with equal sides, is a rhombus whataboutism?

When was this?

Using that argument, any country with a foreign military presence inside its borders isn't a country.

I think the question of treating ISIS territory as an independent state, with all the international law that would imply about respecting its independence and autonomy, treating it as a peer at the UN, etc., is a textbook case of why (international-legal) legitimacy is a status not granted automatically in the basis of territory and control alone, and should not be.

The things ISIS members did to subpopulations people within that territory were almost universally condemned across the world as large-scale serious human abuse, and the territories were obtained through quite recent violence from other nations whose administrative borders had not stopped being recognised internationally.

So I think it was widely regarded that ISIS should not be granted the international respect and autonomy of legal recognition, nor should it keep any power it had of a monopoly on violence within its borders (or any borders).

That's not to say there aren't widely condemned things going on in other countries. But there is a kind of collective, sometimes grudging, but systematised respect for the autonomy of countries as nations, which I think was widely regarded as not something that would be right to grant to ISIS (or take away from the nations that ISIS had taken territory from).

You've just described the Roman Empire to a <T>.

(Is that generic type notation?)

> I was just calling out the parent for saying ISIS didn't use terrorism as a tactic.

Where did they say this? I don't see anything about ISIS not using terrorism as a tactic, just that if you recognize ISIS as a state, you get called a terrorist sympathizer. Besides, plenty of countries use terrorist tactics when at war, unfortunately.

What they said was ISIS "were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics"

You are summarising that as "ISIS did not use terrorist tactics"

I think that is a misleading summary. I don't think the poster meant to dispute that ISIS was behind terrorist attacks, both in the Middle East and also in other parts of the world. What they were saying, is that ISIS was engaging in conventional (non-terrorist) military operations against the Syrian and Iraqi governments, other rebel groups, etc. Terrorism and conventional military tactics are not mutually exclusive, one can pursue both strategies at the same time. But the second strategy is a sign that one is dealing with something having de facto statehood, as opposed to a non-state terrorist group.

If you are getting heavily down-voted, a possible explanation is that people perceive you to be engaging in an uncharitable reading of the remarks you are responding to

> If you are getting heavily down-voted, a possible explanation is that people perceive you to be engaging in an uncharitable reading of the remarks you are responding to

If they wanted to say that ISIS was using conventional _AND_ terrorist tactics that would be one thing. They specifically said "not". You even quoted.

If my options are either to stay silent or charitably read someone's claim that ISIS' tactics don't meet their definition of the word terrorism, because they're a state, then honestly I don't want an account on this site anymore.

An uneasy peace is miles better than war.

"Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country"

Really? Does your government officially call Taiwan "a country"? Show us the proof. Considering only 15 countries in this universe still do this, it's almost safe to guess NO.

> ISIS conducted public executions, crucifixions, desecration of cultural sites and enslaved people for a labor force. That's textbook asymmetric warfare/terrorism.

The US has done all of these except crucifixions. Arguably, we've done all of them (except crucifixion) within the last decade. I'm not sure we can claim "not crucifying" as moral high ground when Americans did things like the following (warning: what follows is horrifying):

"He was chained by his neck and dragged out of the county court by observers. He was then paraded through the street, all while being stabbed and beaten, before being held down and castrated. He was then lynched in front of Waco's city hall."

"Over 10,000 spectators, including city officials and police, gathered to watch the attack. There was a celebratory atmosphere among whites at the spectacle murder, and many children attended during their lunch hour. Members of the mob cut off his fingers, and hung him over a bonfire after saturating him with coal oil. He was repeatedly lowered and raised over the fire for about two hours. After the fire was extinguished, his charred torso was dragged through the town and parts of his body were sold as souvenirs. A professional photographer took pictures as the event unfolded, providing rare imagery of a lynching in progress. The pictures were printed and sold as postcards in Waco."[1]

This happened in 1916--most would consider the US to have been a nation for over a century by this point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Jesse_Washington

"Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country" is referring to people, not to governments. Just because a government doesn't recognize a country doesn't mean the people under that government don't recognize the country.

PRC doesn't have a military presence in Taiwan

Theoretically, a government should represent its people, which should be the foundation of democracy. If that foundation were broken, it is far more worrisome than these China/Taiwan/HK events.

I suggest fixing it ASAP. For example, the op can protest to urge his/her government to recognize Taiwan as a country, which will be "a beautiful landscape" as described by Nancy Patricia Pelosi.

Down to 15 now, after Solomon Islands and Kiribati switched diplomatic ties in recent weeks https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3029626/ta...

>as an independent state, with all the international law that would imply about respecting its independence and autonomy.

The UN absolutely has provisions in its charter for approved wars. The Korean war was UN approved. A regime that is violent against civilians and outwardly genocidal towards religious minorities like ISIS is exactly the situation UN approved intervention was made for (designed with the Nazi's in mind).

I reject the premise that calling them a state would entail granting them anything.

I actually wish there were more sovereign orders like that. Any group of people sharing common values and resources sufficient to make sense this way should have a right for sovereignty even if they don't own any land whatsoever, let alone when they have legitimately bought some. Sure there should be limits on what they are allowed to do (e.g. they should probably not be allowed to assemble nukes at a member's farm) but these should be applied by means of the same procedures like with recognized nations.

I would rather put being able and willing to secure human rights and functional social-economic framework on the controlled territory among the criteria for recognition.

> Theoretically, a government should represent its people, which should be the foundation of democracy. If that foundation were broken

Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this.

And even if a government was really elected legitimately and chosen not to recognize Taiwan I doubt this meant the people didn't know Taiwan is a de-facto independent country and actively wanted to keep it unrecognized. To be honest I myself have only found out Taiwan recognition is limited a couple of years ago. I always knew there is such a country and never knew about its diplomatic problems.

> Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this.

That a legal government of a modern democratic country cannot represent its people is a horrendous claim. As a strong believer of democracy, I'd rather assume that you were the minority in this case. The everyone claim may hold true for everyone you know (among the minority of your country of course).

I was writing to make it clear that it's inappropriate for minority to make such "everybody" claim. And obviously the above reasoning applies perfectly to EVERYBODY holding similar opinions, especially those living in modern democratic countries.

There are countries with high corruption rates where elections are well-known to be manipulated in a number of illegal ways, e.g. by tossing in huge numbers of fake votes and by blocking opposition from participating in elections for fake reasons. And even if the elections were held correctly, an elected government which ignores its duty to protect minorities is not democratic.

As a strong believer of democracy are you naive enough to believe all the elections are perfectly fair, no party at power ever cheats to imitate democracy and that democracy is about everybody sacrificing themselves to obey "the majority"? Do you believe the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is actually democratic? Do you believe the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia is liberal?

Why wouldn't everybody recognize it as a country and declare it a war?

You're getting some negative reaction because you're missing the points OP was making.

1) At points, they were waging a war that did not rely on terrorist/guerrilla tactics. OP did not claim they don't do 'terrorist stuff' at all. Waging conventional war requires control of territory, which is why this is important.

2) Saying ISIS is/controls a state would have you labeled as a terrorist sympathizer in the media or in conversation. This demonstrates that calling something a 'state' has an implicit moral connotation in popular culture. OP is arguing this should not be true.

None of OPs points were a _moral_ judgement of ISIS. I think we can all agree ISIS is bad.

For instance, I strongly believe Palestine should be an independent, free state distinct from Israel. However, the UN _recognizing_ it as a state does not mean it magically becomes one. The UN is just making a political point, but sadly one that has little impact on the reality in Palestine.

Thank you. This is exactly what I was getting at.

Ah, my apologies. I’ve never heard ‘the Netherlands’ used to refer to the kingdom without actually specifying that part.

(And a few times to the 1700’s ish low countries, hence my confusion)

To a point. I’m not saying we should have a war. I’m saying we should stop tiptoeing around China.

The US has "acknowledged" the "One China" position of both sides of the Strait since the 1970s, but it has never supported the notion that Taiwan (and Kinmen, Taiping, etc.) is PRC territory or that the mainland is ROC territory. "China" is not a nationstate. There's only the ROC (1912) and PRC (1949).

"As a strong believer of democracy are you naive enough to believe all the elections are perfectly fair, no party at power ever cheats to imitate democracy and that democracy is about everybody sacrificing themselves to obey "the majority?"

As believer of HEALTHY democracy, I've never made any such implications. Guys from US/UK/EU claiming Taiwan is a country should go protesting right away, don't let democracy down!

As I already said, if democracy doesn't work in your country, don't waste your time caring about China/TW/HK unless you actually live there.

Not really, it was the alpha version of the EU.