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After China’s Military Spectacle, Options Narrow for Winning Over Taiwan

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China’s 72-hour spectacle of missiles, warships and jet fighters swarming Taiwan was designed to create a firewall — a blazing, made-for-television warning against what Beijing sees as increasingly stubborn defiance, backed by Washington, of its claims to the island.

“We’re maintaining a high state of alert, ready for battle at all times, able to fight at any time,” declared Zu Guanghong, a Chinese navy captain in a People’s Liberation Army video about the exercises, which ended on Sunday. “We have the determination and ability to mount a painful direct attack against any invaders who would wreck unification of the motherland, and would show no mercy.”

But even if China’s display of military might discourages other Western politicians from emulating Nancy Pelosi, who enraged Beijing by visiting Taiwan, it also narrows hopes for winning over the island through negotiations. Beijing’s shock and awe tactics may deepen skepticism in Taiwan that it can ever reach a peaceful and lasting settlement with the Chinese Communist Party, especially under Xi Jinping as its leader.

“Nothing is going to change after the military exercises, there’ll be one like this and then another,” said Li Wen-te, a 63-year-old retired fisherman in Liuqiu, an island off the southwestern coast of Taiwan, less than six miles from China’s drills.

“They’re as bullying as always,” he said, adding a Chinese saying, “digging deep in soft soil,” which means “give them an inch and they will take a mile.”

Mr. Xi has now shown he is willing to bring out an intimidating military stick to try to beat back what Beijing regards as a dangerous alliance of Taiwanese opposition and American support. Chinese military drills across six zones around Taiwan, which on Sunday included joint air and sea exercises to hone long-range airstrike capabilities, allowed the military to practice blockading the island in the event of an invasion.

In the face of such pressures, the policy carrots that China has used to coax Taiwan toward unification may carry even less weight. During previous eras of better relations, China welcomed Taiwan’s investment, farm goods and entertainers.

The result may be deepening mutual distrust that some experts warn could, at an extreme, bring Beijing and Washington into all-out conflict.

“It’s not about to be a blow up tomorrow, but it elevates the overall probability of crisis, conflict or even war with the Americans over Taiwan,” said Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who previously worked as a diplomat in Beijing.

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Taiwan has never been ruled by the Communist Party, but Beijing maintains that it is historically and legally part of Chinese territory. The Chinese Nationalist forces who fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the civil war also long asserted that the island was part of a greater China they had ruled.

But since Taiwan emerged as a democracy in the 1990s, growing numbers of its people see themselves as vastly different in values and culture from the People’s Republic of China. That political skepticism toward authoritarian China has persisted, and even deepened, as Taiwan’s economic ties to the mainland expanded.

“The attractiveness of the carrots in China’s Taiwan policy — economic inducements — has now fallen to its lowest point since the end of the Cold War,” said Wu Jieh-min, a political scientist at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s top research academy.

“The card it holds presently is to raise military threats toward Taiwan step by step, and to continue military preparations for the use of force,” he said, “until one day, a full-scale military offensive on Taiwan becomes a favorable option.”

Since the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders have tried to coax Taiwan into accepting unification under a “one country, two systems” framework that promised autonomy in laws, religion, economic policy and other areas as long as the island accepted Chinese sovereignty.

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But in increasingly democratic Taiwan, few see themselves as proud, future Chinese citizens. Support for Beijing’s proposals sank even lower after 2020, when China imposed a crackdown on Hong Kong, eroding the freedoms that the former British colony was promised under its own version of the framework.

Mr. Xi has continued to promise Taiwan a “one country, two systems” deal, and he may return to offering Taiwan economic and political incentives, if he can influence the island’s presidential election in early 2024.

Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, must step down after her second term ends that year. And a potential successor from her Democratic Progressive Party, which rejects the “one China” principle and favors independence, may be more pugnacious toward Beijing.

In the years after that election, China’s leaders likely “want to show some substantive jumps forward on Taiwan, not necessarily unification, but some results there,” said Wang Hsin-hsien, a professor at the National Chengchi University in Taipei who studies Chinese politics. “Xi Jinping is the kind of man who repays enmity with vengeance and repays kindness, but when he takes vengeance it is repaid in double.”

One puzzle that hangs over Taiwan is whether Mr. Xi has a timetable in mind. He has suggested his vision of China’s “rejuvenation” into a prosperous, powerful and complete global power depends on unification with Taiwan. The rejuvenation, he has said, will be achieved by midcentury, so some see that time as the outer limit for his Taiwan ambitions.

“We now have a 27-year fuse that can either be slow-burn or fast-burn,” said Mr. Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who is now president of the Asia Society, citing that midcentury date. “The time to worry is the early 2030s, because you’re closer in the countdown zone to 2049, but you’re also in Xi Jinping’s political lifetime.”

In an agenda-setting speech on Taiwan policy in 2019, Mr. Xi reasserted that China hoped to unify with Taiwan peacefully, but would not rule out armed force.

He also called for exploring ways to update what a “one country, two systems” arrangement for Taiwan would look like, and the Chinese government assigned scholars to the project. Such plans, Mr. Xi said, “must fully consider the realities of Taiwan, and also be conducive to lasting order and stability in Taiwan after unification.”

“I still believe that the military capacity is first and foremost calibrated at present as a deterrent,” said Willian Klein, a former U.S. diplomat posted in Beijing who now works for FGS Global, a consulting firm, referring to China’s buildup. “Their strategy is to narrow the possible universe of outcomes to the point that their preferred outcome becomes a reality.”

But the proposals that Chinese scholars have put forward on Taiwan highlight the gulf between what Beijing seems to have in mind, and what most Taiwanese could accept.

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The Chinese studies propose sending Chinese officials to maintain control in Taiwan, especially if Beijing wins control by force; others say that China must impose a national security law on Taiwan — like the one it imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 — to punish opponents of Chinese rule.

“It must be recognized that governing Taiwan will be far more difficult than Hong Kong, whether in terms of geographic extent or the political conditions,” Zhou Yezhong, a prominent law professor at Wuhan University wrote in a recent “Outline for China’s Unification,” which he co-wrote with another academic.

Taiwanese society, they wrote, must be “re-Sinified” to embrace official Chinese values and to “fundamentally transform the political environment that has been long shaped by ‘Taiwanese independence’ ideas.”

China’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, said in a television interview last week that Taiwan’s people had been brainwashed by pro-independence ideas.

“I’m sure that as long as they are re-educated, the Taiwanese public will once again become patriots,” he said in the interview shared on his embassy’s website. “Not under threat, but through re-education.”

Polls of Taiwanese people show that very few have an appetite for unification on China’s terms. In the latest opinion survey from National Chengchi University, 1.3 percent of respondents favored unification as soon as possible, 5.1 percent wanted independence as soon as possible. The rest mostly wanted some version of the ambiguous status quo.

“I cherish our freedom of speech and don’t want to be unified by China,” said Huang Chiu-hong, 47, the owner of a shop that sells fried sticks of braided dough, a local snack, on Liuqiu, the Taiwanese island.

She said she tried to see the People’s Liberation Army in action out of curiosity, but glimpsed nothing at a pavilion overlooking the sea.

“It seems that some people are concerned,” she said. “For me, it’s just a small episode in the ordinary life of Taiwanese.”

Read the full article here

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A journalist since 1994, he also founded DMGlobal Marketing & Public Relations. Glover has an extensive list of clients including corporations, non-profits, government agencies, politics, business owners, PR firms, and attorneys.

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My ancestors were full-blooded Indians … until the census said otherwise

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(OKLAHOMA – August 17, 2025) – When I first started researching my family’s genealogy, I thought I was just going to fill in a few blanks.
Instead, I uncovered a lie so deep, so systematic, it reshaped everything I thought I knew about who we are as a people.

I want to show you something personal.

Below, you’ll see two official U.S. government records—both documenting one of my direct ancestors. Thomas Jefferson Adams Harjo.

Creek Nation certificate

Creek Nation certificate

📜 The first is from the Dawes Roll, the federal list created in the early 1900s to register members of the Five Civilized Tribes.

As you’ll see, my ancestor is listed as a Full-Blood Indian—a clear acknowledgment of their tribal heritage and cultural identity.

1900 US Census

But then, take a look at the second image:

📄 That’s the federal census record from just a few years later.
Same ancestor.
Same location.
But this time, the government marked them as Negro.

No tribe. No Indian classification.
Just folded into the general Black population—without consent, without explanation.

That wasn’t a mistake.
That was paper genocide.

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This is what happened to millions of Indigenous Black Americans across the South.
Their identities were stripped away on paper—one document at a time—by a system designed to erase, absorb, and exploit.

This wasn’t just about racism. It was about land, power, and control.

By reclassifying tribal people as Negro or Colored, the government could:

  • Deny them land rights

  • Remove them from tribal rolls

  • Steal their inheritance

  • And make sure future generations never knew who they really were

This is why so many of our elders say, “My grandma said we had Indian in us.”
They weren’t lying.
They just didn’t have the tools to prove it.

Now we do.

And I’m not showing you this to just share my story—I’m showing you because this might be your story, too.

If you’re ready to go deeper, tomorrow I’m going to pull back the curtain on how far this went—how the reclassification of Black Indians was not an exception, but the rule across the Southeast.

You’re not crazy.
You’re not reaching.
You’re remembering.

—Mike
Founder, Native Black Ancestry

 

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Voices of West Tampa: District 5 Special Election Forum, Aug. 27th

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(TAMPA, FL – August 12, 2025) – The Black Agenda is coming! Join us this August for a powerful virtual town hall where residents, neighborhood associations, nonprofit leaders, faith communities, and other key stakeholders will come together to share their concerns and discuss solutions.

🎥
 This event will be streamed live and will feature candidates offering their vision for the future of West Tampa.
This will be a street-level, bottom-up dialogue—focused on real voices, real stories, and real strategies to protect and uplift our community.
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/register/n2MwP53TQ-2e9xfih1rrAg

Join us this August for a powerful virtual town hall.

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From Illinois to Texas, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates Leads Largest African American Parade in the Country Amid National Education and Democracy Attacks

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(CHICAGO – August 8, 2025) – This Saturday, internationally recognized labor leader and Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates will serve as an Honorary Marshal at the 96th Annual Bud Billiken Parade, the largest African American parade in the United States.

Why Does This Matter?

  • Back To School: As families nationwide prepare for the academic year, the Chicago Teachers Union will usher it in by continuing the call for Chicago’s 300,000+ students to have the schools they deserve.
  • Texas: State-level fights over education and democracy in Illinois resonate across the nation. Illinois is currently hosting Texas Democratic leaders who are fighting shared policy battles including public education funding and labor protections.
  • National Relevance: The Chicago Teachers Union is one of the most powerful teachers’ unions in the country. When America catches a cold, Chicago catches the flu, but its leaders continue to push back on attacks against equality and opportunity. It is the third-largest local teachers union in the country and the largest local union in Illinois.

“DOGE already happened in Chicago. Our public school system was ravaged by the types of policies that are being implemented at the federal level right now: summarily firing female workers, Black female workers from the schools; closing schools—Rahm Emanuel closed fifty of them.” – Stacy Davis Gates (May 2025)

________________________________________________
About Stacy Davis Gates

  • A working mother and high school social studies teacher.
  • Led the historic 2019 CTU strike, securing smaller class sizes, sanctuary protections for immigrant students and the right to teach Black history.
  • Raised millions to elect pro-education and pro-worker candidates including Mayor Brandon Johnson and fought for equitable school funding.
  • Serves as Executive Vice President of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers, Party Chair of United Working Families, and board member of the Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE).
  • Is one of the next-generation labor leaders that you are going to want to get to know. She is going to help define what union leadership looks like in the coming years.

Stacy Davis Gates

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