Summary

Russian President Vladimir Putin reinforced Russia’s support for China, backing Beijing’s claims over Taiwan and downplaying concerns about Sino-Russian cooperation.

At the Valdai forum, Putin stated that Russia views China as an ally with a “reasonable” policy on Taiwan, accusing Taiwan of provoking a Ukraine-style crisis in Asia.

He highlighted the strong trade and security ties between Russia and China, asserting that joint military exercises between the two nations are defensive and comparable to U.S.-Japan drills, and pose no threat to other countries.

  • enkers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    131·
    7 days ago

    Isn’t this a bit of a predicament for Trump? Traditionally the US has supported Taiwan’s independence, and it seems to me that’d be continued under Trump’s “China bad” rhetoric/policy. However, getting chummy with Putin might require rescinding support for Taiwan’s independence.

    Am I missing something here?

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      37·
      7 days ago

      Traditionally the US

      There’s your mistake. Trump doesn’t give a fuck about what the US traditionally does, and neither do his supporters. Same as Trump being blatantly pro-Russia despite the US, and the US right in particular, traditionally being anti-Russia.

      They don’t give a fuck if they’ve always been at war with Eurasia or Eastasia. All they care about is having the proles crushed beneath them, and whatever Big Brother figure promises them that, they’ll gleefully bootlick for.

    • wurzelgummidge@lemmy.worldEnglish
      221·
      7 days ago

      Traditionally the US does not support Taiwan independence. Go look it up.

      Though it is true that they are quietly trying to push their puppets in Taiwan to declare independence because they know damned well that is the only way they will get the war they so desperately want.

      The vast majority of the Taiwanese want the status quo to remain exactly as it is

      • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        The majority of Taiwanese don’t want the status quo, but prefer kicking the can down the road over the autonomous mainland provinces throwing a fit.

            • wurzelgummidge@lemmy.worldEnglish
              214·
              7 days ago

              That is not proof. It is also a cropped photo. The uncropped version shows Tiananmen Square at the top but it doesn’t show what your propagandists want it to show. I’ll post it for you when I get home.

                • wurzelgummidge@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  4 days ago

                  That’s Tiananmen Square at the top. Doesn’t look like the kind of place where “ten thousand” students had been machine gunned down just a few hours before, does it?

                  One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. - Carl Sagan

                  • The massacre story was quite wrong, said Jay Mathews, former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. “A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.”

                  • New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, a bitter critic of China, wrote: “There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.”

                  • Some told the truth years later. In 2009, James Miles, a senior BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had “conveyed the wrong impression” and that “there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.”

                  • Graham Earnshaw of Reuters, who was in the square, wrote a detailed report in his memoir explaining how the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone, including himself, leave peacefully.

                  • Even the student protesters debunked the story. Wu’er Kaixi, who claimed to have seen the massacre with his own eyes, wasn’t even there, they said. He had left the Square hours earlier. It was later revealed that Wu’er was a Xinjiang Uyghur named Örkesh Dölet. He was spirited out of China through the Hong Kong-based “Operation Yellowbird” and taken to the US, where he was given a place at Harvard University.

                  • More recently, Wu’er Kaixi/ Örkesh Dölet drew parallels between the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Hong Kong 2019 riots—perhaps more accurately than he realised, both being heavily misreported using the exact same techniques, by the exact same unholy alliance of behind the scenes manipulators and anti-Chinese journalists.

                  • Madrid’s ambassador to Eugenio Bregolat was filled with righteous anger. He noted that western journalists were reporting the massacre as fact from their hotel guestrooms, while Spain’s TVE channel had a television crew physically in the square that evening and knew it was false.