It formally wasn’t. China never recognized it as independent and neither did the “international community” (however you want to interpret that term).
Should Mongolia also be absorbed into China?
That’s not for me to say. The PRC recognized Mongolia’s independence and they have great and lucrative relations now. I don’t currently see that anyone who matters has any material or ideological interest in changing that.
I’m not making a prescriptive statement. I’m telling you how things are and not how they should be.
Countries are not inert objects in a universal logical framework, they are made up of people and what the people of a country think and want and feel matters, even if that’s subjective. And when that country is a civilization state like China that carries a certain weight.
By that logic no small country could ever become independent of a big one.
They usually can’t unless their independence is to the advantage of one of more big countries. For instance, although Mongolia being independent has more to do with Russia and the Russian civil war than it does with China, it is nevertheless a useful buffer state for both.
If it wasn’t, it probably wouldn’t be independent.
I’m not making a prescriptive statement. I’m telling you how things are and not how they should be.
Yeah, no. I disagree. What I’ve been hammering on is that a territorial claim is NOT objective, but rather prescribed by human institutions. If you don’t agree, that’s fine. But the fact remains: there’s no objective fact that determines whether Corsica belongs to France or itself: only human opinions. I can’t make the point any more thoroughly than I already have.
That’s correct. That’s what i’ve been trying to tell you, that the subjective matters and that we can’t just ignore it and pretend like we can establish an objective framework for everything where human relations are concerned, which is ultimately what international relations are just on a larger scale.
It formally wasn’t. China never recognized it as independent and neither did the “international community” (however you want to interpret that term).
That’s not for me to say. The PRC recognized Mongolia’s independence and they have great and lucrative relations now. I don’t currently see that anyone who matters has any material or ideological interest in changing that.
I’m not making a prescriptive statement. I’m telling you how things are and not how they should be.
Countries are not inert objects in a universal logical framework, they are made up of people and what the people of a country think and want and feel matters, even if that’s subjective. And when that country is a civilization state like China that carries a certain weight.
They usually can’t unless their independence is to the advantage of one of more big countries. For instance, although Mongolia being independent has more to do with Russia and the Russian civil war than it does with China, it is nevertheless a useful buffer state for both.
If it wasn’t, it probably wouldn’t be independent.
Yeah, no. I disagree. What I’ve been hammering on is that a territorial claim is NOT objective, but rather prescribed by human institutions. If you don’t agree, that’s fine. But the fact remains: there’s no objective fact that determines whether Corsica belongs to France or itself: only human opinions. I can’t make the point any more thoroughly than I already have.
That’s correct. That’s what i’ve been trying to tell you, that the subjective matters and that we can’t just ignore it and pretend like we can establish an objective framework for everything where human relations are concerned, which is ultimately what international relations are just on a larger scale.