What’s so bad about it?

Splitting the nation is bad bad bad. That’s basically what the people in China were taught over and over ever since they were in elementary school. But if you look at all the arguments made by the government, the “badness” simply stops short of being bad. The argument is simply “it’s bad because it’s bad.” It never, for a single minute, tries to explain why it is bad. (And I just start to get tired of typing the word “bad.”) It never even bothers to point at Taiwan and say “look, that’s an example of why no one should break away from China.” In fact, it can’t find any evidence to prove that Taiwan is now worse off than if it were part of China. It also cannot argue that the Chinese culture stops to exist in Taiwan because of its break-off. In fact, many people agree that Taiwan is doing a better job than China today in terms of preserving the Chinese culture.

What’s most funny that sometimes the slogan is not “splitting the nation”, but rather “splitting the Chinese race.” Now this is just convenient. The implied assumption is that people of a same cultural or racial background should live under a single regime. Again, why? Who made such rule? Second, we need to look at the term “Chinese race.” Before we do that, we need to look at the TV animation “American Dad!” Remember it’s opening song when he sings “saluting to the American race”? That’s supposed to be a joke, because there is no such thing as “American race” especially when the nation is composed of people from all over the world. As for China, it does claim that it has 56 ethnic groups. Yet, if any of these groups want to break away or simply live life in their own way, they are “splitting the Chinese race”; only when they agree to be ruled by only one of the ethnic groups out of 56, that is Han, can they safely say they themselves are a distinctive ethnic group, and, Lo and Behold, they add diversity to this great nation or “race.” How does that logic even work? What I see, is that if you agree to behave like a slave, then you get to claim that you are free; if you want real freedom, sorry, you are harming the “greater good.”

Indeed, when someone decided to wander across the red sea and go up north and east over 20,000 years ago, they were harming the “greater good,” they were splitting the human race. Indeed, they managed to split the human race, resulting in Asians, Caucasians, and more, not to mention the different languages. And look at those bunch of traitors in Siberia who decided to walk across a layer of ice and into North America! How dare they build their own empires like Inca. And how dare the people who borrowed the Chinese language and chopped it up and created something called Japanese and Korean? They are manipulating the greater good!

But the real question is, what’s so bad about it?