China and Taiwan

File under ‘P’ for potential game-changers. Or for panda diplomacy. Either way, the China-Taiwan split is really the last vestige of the Cold War, and just as the European front of that war ended through a peaceful integration, there’s no reason (in theory) that China and Taiwan won’t eventually find a mutually acceptable final status arrangement without resorting to the worst-case scenarios of regional conflagration. Especially once the actual ideological differences between the two governments are smoothed over to the point of being undetectable. That still leaves China with a lot of deferred maintenance in terms of ethno-nationalist separatism. But […]