Quote:
Originally Posted by Nosauz
Not really, but the fear mongering west would be pushing this notion. It's pretty much established that China just wants to maintain land that has traditionally been Chinese, like say tibet, or taiwan, which have been part of the chinese empire ever since Shi huang di united all of china, it's not so farfetched for a country to want to maintain the borders that were established from the rich history that most chinese are quite in love with. It's why there are the swiss alps and the french alps because those borders were ordained by traiditonal segregation due to the churchs power.
|
Didn't it took
almost two thousand years after the reign of Quin Shi Huangdi for those territories to become part of China??????????????
Unless you want to take into account the bits of China the Tibetan Empire occasionally conquered, Tibet and China become more or less linked only in the XIIIth century when both were conquered by the Mongol Empire, afterward those relations were much more flimsy: changing from tributary, rebellion, and de facto independance troughout the Ming and Qing.
As for Taiwan, Europeans had administrations there before Koxinga kicked them out to establish a kingdom for himself, the Qing annexed it only in the XVIIth century before losing it to the Japanese two centuries later, and it was almost a century after that that the ROC reclaimed it.
And if we start using past tributary relations as jurisprudence, what about Japan and Vietnam or even most of Eurasia if we were to take the Mongol Empire as a reference... power games and claims of sovereignty are one thing, not inherently bad in my regard, but going all the way to the First Emperor and "All United Under The Sky" is more than a stretch in this case (on the other hand, Xinjian...).
I don't know where you are coming from to use the Alpine border between Switzerland and France as a comparison, but it cannot even be used as a similar case, because it has nothing to do with the Church powers, and the cultural differences there are almost non existent.
These borders are mostly if not uniquely the result of the political history of Europe, as on one side communities congealed within or were conquered by the Swiss Confederacy, and on the other side those culturally close communities were transferred to France only in the second half of the XIXth century, from the House of Savoy (which held them for more than 5 centuries) in compensation for the assistance in conquering and unifying Italy. It's even a little more complicated, as some parts of Switzerland belonged to the Savoys, and borders moved quite a lot until the Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars.
Sorry if I get touchy here, but being fond of History, especially European and East Asian History, I cannot stand it when I see incorrect facts used in and argument.