They have had 70 years to secede.

So? Now they want to do it

25% want to.

but the PRC threatens to throw a temper tantrum about it

The PRC is very clear that Taiwan becoming sovereign means Western empire at their doorstep. This has literally been the strategic situation for over 400 years. It's not just a "now" thing and it's not just a PRC. It's a fundamental aspect of security. Security it always mutual. The US wouldn't allow China to build a military presence in Long Island of they decided to secede, and you wouldn't call it a tantrum. It's obvious from your word choice that you don't believe China is allowed to have legitimate security concerns.

Just let it sink in how a country of one billion is actively choosing to worsen its situation over an island of not even 25 million.

Are you serious right now? The US embargoed the PRC while it was the poorest country in the world, and prevented anyone in the Western world from trading with it, while the US and UK invested billions to develop the province of Taiwan under a fascist mass murdering dictatorship, and you think I need to let it sink in what China is doing?

The PRC could have moved on for a very long time and put its resources in its own prosperity instead of wasting the resources on a cause that will end in a war. It’s so petty.

This is so offensively dismissive it's clear you have no ability to reason clearly about this. China has a literal multi-century security threat on its doorstep and it's been spending money developing a military that is capable of defending against the world's largest genocidal empire and you think that was "Wasting resources". And before you go all paternalistic about China should have invested in its own prosperity, China accounts for literally all of the net poverty alleviation in the last century, while Europe and North America created more poverty than they alleviated. There are grandparents in China today that grew up subsistence farming and are now experiencing robotic self-driving vehicles. China is doing just fine developing its prosperity and also its national security posture against the world's largest ever military threat.

The fact still stands: the PRC wants a piece of land they never established control over.

That is not, actually, what they want. They want to establish a security perimeter that is inviolable by imperialists. Again, literally the same motivation for almost 400 years. You consuming fan fic editorializing Chinese motivations doesn't change reality.

The French, German, and Italian tribes living in Switzerland physically separated themselves from their nations of birth and then mutually agreed to integrate their tribes into a single tribe, and included everything in that choice from language to cuisine to marriage…

Just what happened in Taiwan. They don’t consider themselves Chinese, they are simply not allowed to openly say it

That's literally not what happened. At this point, you're clearly not even engaging in good faith. What happened in Taiwan, as I've stated many times, is that foreign militaries intervened in internal Chinese politics for the purpose of subjugating China militarily. That is not AT ALL like the situation in Switzerland. At all. The Han Chinese colonized Taiwan, and the dominated and oppressed the indigenous. This is far more akin to the situation in North America, where white people are still all European settlers. The Han Chinese in Taiwan are Chinese settlers and settlers don't have a claim to a new new national identity. If they did, then genocide would be the result. We have to hold this line and you don't get to have a double standard simply because you're an anti-communist.

due to the giant fragile red snowflake next door. We’re pretending something that isn’t the case just to protect the fragile feelings of a giant that cannot accept the truth.

Again, it is so obvious that you can't engage in this discussion in good faith that I the only reason I'm bothering to refute you is so that others can learn.

Chinese colonization of the region is necessarily a distinct process from European colonization.

Well, isn’t that handy! :D

If you're entire grasp of history requires that everyone doing similar seeming things is actually part of the same historical process so that you can make false equivalencies to prove your point, you might not understand anything about history. It's not handy, it's reality. Of course the Chinese process is a distinct process from the European process. They were done by different people, under total different philosophies, in different geographies, with different outcomes. This statement shouldn't be controversial. The fact you want to project all the evils of your own society onto China is a way for you to absolve yourself of supporting your empire by prioritizing opposing your empire's mortal enemy.

Germans, Slavs, Romans might have had some rivers and mountains here and there, yet have a long history of conquering each others land. Somehow that’s colonialism, but when Hans crossed a river to dominate other cultures, it isn’t?

What? No, that's not what I said at all. I said that Han colonization is a different historical process from European colonization. In the flat lands of Europe where there were no physical hard boundaries yes, the lands were constantly conquered and reconquered. That's why there is a Swiss nation but no Belgian nation and no Austrian nation. These were just stretches of territory that various nations fought for control over. That wasn't colonization. Colonization is when one group subjugated other nations in their distinct historical homelands. Europeans and Chinese did this, but they were distinct historical processes shaped by their unique geographical context which gave rise to distinct political, economic, philosophical, and technological development.

Yea. The most successful being the Hans (if there are no Mongols or Japanese around). Somehow you don’t seem to have a lot of problems with them establishing themselves as the master humans. Talk about double standards…

The concept of Han Supremacy is also not equivalent to the concept of Eurocentric Christian White Supremacy. Han Chauvinism, which is the idea that the Han were cosmically and divinely mandated to bring civilization to the world led to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and mass murder all over China, just like Eurocentric Christian White Supremacy did in Europe. But the result in China has ALWAYS been a multi-national multi-ethnic state, whereas in Europe the results were very often ethnostates with a single nation present.

That's not to say one is better than the other, but it's to show that they are different. In this context, the Hand "establishing themselves as the master humans" was absolutely problematic. But Han Supremacy died over a century ago and was replaced with Han Chauvinism, which was the belief that the Han knew better than anyone else. Han Chauvinism was endemic in the early PRC, but Han Chauvinism was deliberately ended under the administration of Deng Xiaoping when the CPC modified the constitution and specifically targeted the concept and its impact. Because the CPC came to the realization that even though chauvinism wasn't nearly as bad as supremacy, it was still contradictory and would lead to ruin.

All you need to do is look at the One Child Policy to understand how fundamental this change was. When China established the One Child Policy, the same people who claim that China is just as evil as Europe pointed to the policy as fundamentally cruel. However, what most people never talked about was the fact that ethnic minorities were exempted from the policy. Some were unrestricted, some were restricted but to some number above one. The people who were constrained to one child were Han. Compare that to the social outcomes in Europe and their former and current colonies and it's starkly clear that there is a fundamental difference now.

I don't have to defend Han Supremacy, nor their genocides, nor their settler colonialism. It's all bad, and the harm needs to be repaired. I'm happy to be consistent on that front.

This is why Tibet is historically a protectorate of China and not a colony or an occupied region.

Who says so? The Chinese? The Tibetans?

Historians, politicians, the UN, international law. I get that it doesn't fit your narrative, but there's a real difference between a protectorate and a colony. Tibet could not have been a resource colony when it first became a protectorate because no one was able to access the natural resources and build logistics to exploit them until after the PRC was established and finally industrialized. Meanwhile, the indigenous population of Tibet has more than doubled in the last 70 years. That's not indicative of a colony. That's indicative of an active colonial project. That's indicative of a thriving autonomous region under the military protection of a larger regional hegemon.

Of course, the self-proclaimed master humans want to whitewash their oppression. Weird that you can only see the wrongdoings of one side, while completely whitewash the other side.

It's not weird at all. I just operate with a different set of facts than you. China has over 250 indigenous languages with over 1000 living speakers, whereas in all of North America it's less than 100. That's a fundamentally different outcome. Of the many indigenous ethnicities in China, most of them maintain their cultural customs, celebrations, holidays, cuisines, and histories. The Chinese government actively funds the preservation of these cultures, practices, and histories. Meanwhile, indigenous folks in North America are so traumatized by European colonization that the older generations are literally disowning their own kids for abandoning Christianity. The US and Canadian governments continue genocidal programs of blood quantum, water rights, toxic dumping, and cultural erasure.