Rare post on Taiwan

my beautiful home [click for huge]

Have no idea how I take the passage below, but living in Taiwan, and with the shadow of China growing bigger by the day, these issues are starting to become more pressing. I start from the position that the China problem is intractable, which means there's no clear first or second step, other than a hope for federalism rather than outright conquest.

To affirm that humans thrive in many different ways is not to deny that there are universal human values. Nor is it to reject the claim that there should be universal human rights. It is to deny that universal values can only be fully realized in a universal regime. Human rights can be respected in a variety of regimes, liberal and otherwise. Universal human rights are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different.

John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism

This can be rewritten as follows:

To affirm that Chinese people thrive in many different ways is not to deny that there are Chinese values or one Chinese nation. It is to deny that these values can only be fully realized in a universal regime. Chinese values are not an ideal constitution for a single regime, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different.

But that probably doesn't have much use in this context.