Ok, so a so-called communist regime is totalitarian but a military dictatorship isn't?
While we're at it, does not the constitution of the Republic of China also call for reunification?
DS
Of course a military dictatorship can be as totalitarian as a communist regime in every facet of civic life. But Taiwan and South Korea decided against that. So what I was delving into, it depends how a regime orders it’s society (or incentivises how a society will be ordered) at the levels below the top political power as to whether one could consider it totalitarian in every facet of life. That’s more what I was trying to articulate.
Like I said in an earlier post. Taiwan and South Korea were very susceptible to communist insurgency, given they had been fighting ideological and physical wars with communists. So they needed to find a way to undercut the communists, so that communist doctrine held no appeal for the hearts and minds of the populace.
So what the Taiwan and South Korean regimes did in the early stages (which Japan did somewhat too the 1890s onwards - well before the world wars) with their land and industrial reforms was more closely aligned to a form of ‘distributism’ as opposed to communism or socialism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
Some have colloquially described distributism as ‘community capitalism’. And by ordering a society this way, it means that local communities largely go about every day life without much input from an all encompassing state as a communist state tends to. Hence what I meant by not being totalitarian in the all encompassing way that communist revolutions tend to be. This explains why communist revolutions tend to be so adversarial to religion and become quasi-religions in themselves. They have an insatiable appetite to control every facet of civic and personal life - totalitarian at every level of one’s existence.
Despite being dictatorships at the top, Taiwan and South Korea didn’t do this. And wisely, they also didn’t do what other anti-communist dictatorships in South Vietnam or the Philippines did by essentially just leaving all the wealth and ownership among a tiny elite. You could say that by ordering their society in such a way, it set in motion an inevitability to evolve away from a dictatorial form of governance at the top. Because the populace and community units within it were empowered to form their own destiny.
Sure, for the large ticket items, there was a huge amount of state intervention. I am not arguing against such measures at all. But it was more in the form of large incentives (such as via the financial system). Quite a different way than the communist totalitarian version.
It was somewhat situational though. A lot of the means to production and property had been owned by recently expelled Japanese colonialists in both Taiwan and South Korea. Therefore such reforms were relatively easy.
As to your point about unification or re-unification. A lot of it depends on context. Of the thousands of years of the civilisation of China, guess how many years Taiwan has been ruled by a mainland Han Chinese regime? The answer is 4 years. So to infer it is a natural historical appendage of mainland China (as the CCP does) is rewriting history to the extreme. Sure, Mongol regimes that held mainland China ruled Taiwan for longer periods. But the Chinese themselves don’t consider these periods legitimate rulers of China. They are thought of as invaders and colonists. So once again, tying themselves in knots of contradictions.
The constitution of ROC using ‘reunification’ would refer to the regime being Han Chinese people in exile. And hence one day will go back to their homeland and be reunited with it. Having said that, it’s an anachronism among most Taiwanese now. Very few see that as a realistic proposition. Particularly Tsai’s party in power. Which of course puts them in the difficult predicament. Do they state the material reality of the situation by explicitly declaring that they are a separate, independent Chinese society on the island of Taiwan (which of course we know the ramifications of that)?
