One China

If Taiwan or Tibet can be independent, then so can Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex and Kent. Except, of course, that a very long time ago Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex and Kent. Neither Taiwan nor Tibet ever has been. Each has simply always been part of China. Neither the de facto Taiwanese Government nor the Dalai Lama, for all the many faults of either, is in favour of independence, which would not be recognised by anywhere else on earth, and certainly not by the United States.

The sheer scale of the population transfers that would be necessary to partition multiethnic China into a Tibetan homeland and a Han homeland, plus at least 54 others, are practically impossible to imagine. The whole thing would make the partition of India look like the resolution of a Parish Council boundary dispute.

But even that would only be an enlarged version of the Kosovo situation, the template (as America knows full well) for any UDI by predominantly Hispanic border areas with Mexico.

Taiwan, on the other hand, although a small number of aborigines of Indonesian origin do exist (and are recognised as one of the 56 ethnic groups of China), the term "Taiwanese" as an ethnicity is usually used merely to refer to those who had migrated to Taiwan from mainland China, either from Guangdong (Kwangtung) before the nineteenth century, or from Fujian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as distinct from those who took refuge there, also from mainland China, after the War. But that is it. That is the sum total of the difference.

So, if Taiwan can be independent, then so could be any United State of America that happened to feel like it. Which is why it never will be, so far an anywhere else at all is concerned.

Reunion is inevitable. It always has been. The only question is as to the terms.