Dave,

Not sure why I keep thinking you are from SD. My bad!

 

Alot of the trees he wants to cut down is trees that are infected with this beetle and its already dead trees.

I do agree that Taiwan is a seperate country and China doesn't recognize it. Basically China said that if Taiwan wanted to declared independence like India did with England. Then China will use military power to regain Taiwan, which US should support due to Taiwan's economic contribution to the global economy.

 

Like dliske said, Taiwan is descended from the government that existed in China prior to the communists gaining control. I don't really know why we're talking about trees in California but whatever.

The reason that the US wants "one China" is that we want trade with communist China. It's a huge market with basically no penetration from outside interests. They're pretty isolationist though and I don't feel that realistically they are going to start importing large quantities of outside goods any time in the near future. Portions of the big cities like Beijing are sort of cosmopolitan but there's a huge portion of the country that is still basically peasants.

 

If you had some older taiwanese people on this board, you'd get quite a reaction about its ties to china today. How i've heard it is like this. Taiwan was it's own place. Chinese people came over to taiwan and then started taking over the place. 15% of the population was supposedly Chinese, and 85% of the population was taiwanese. These Chinese took high offices and started to discriminate on the Taiwanese. The taiwanese would be in trouble if they spoke taiwanese at school. They HAD to speak mandarin. If you didn't join the chinese you would often lose your job, clientell, etc. That is why you get people who lived in taiwan for 20 years and dont speak taiwanese.
But that is one side of the story, i probably left some stuff out.. .but hey im not chinese nor taiwanese, so yeah