Originally Posted by reno96teg
well, my brother's wife is taiwanese. he's over there right now, actually. i also dated a taiwanese girl who spent much time in shanghai, and in fact her mother did the majority of her business there. so, no, technically i haven't met these poor oppressed families. and granted, the taiwanese tend to be pretty biased against the mainland chinese (at least the country), but i do believe i have a more direct line into information on the happenings there than the majority of americans get. so there!
well i'm taiwanese, so meh
h: my dad's company is now operating almost entirely out of china, too.
my parents' families are all pretty anti-china. but most taiwanese people are anti-china for reasons other than what you are suggesting.
many areas of china are rapidly changing. beijing may be a bastion of nationalistic pride and anti-anything-that's-not-china sentiment, but a lot of the chinese people are more modern than you think. the younger generation is embracing things like japanese, taiwanese and korean pop music and TV shows - which would have been totally unheard of and/or censored ten to twenty years ago. students everywhere are clamoring to learn english. criticism of the former chinese president, Jiang Zemin, is actually allowed! why do you think the chinese auto industry is so large? because people can afford to buy cars. the US is even threatened by this...
while they still have a LONG way to go, china is changing. i agree, it sucks that google has to bend over in order to do business in china, but that's just how it is. people can whine all they want about this, it'd be suicide if google didn't setup shop in china, and you can bet that they won't be the last.