Erik Prince

Nope.

Never been ruled by Beijing.

Not since 49, like you said, Chiang Kai-shek fled there with the nationalist leadership.

And there's been serious fighting, artillery duels.

I mean, there's islands that belong to Taiwan that are within five kilometers of the Chinese mainland.

Yeah.

Puyemoy, Matsu, I think it's called Kinmen now.

Yeah, Kinmen.

Right up, like I said, a hour and a half swim from the Chinese mainland.

As the Chinese communist economy has grown, Beijing has used that economic leverage to twist countries into not recognizing Taiwan and to only recognizing Beijing.

But Nixon also did it back then because, you know, the Soviet Union and Communist China used to be very, very closely aligned.

And then in the 60s, they started having a bit of a falling out and border disputes.

And Nixon kind of used that outreach from China because they were afraid of getting run over by the Soviet Union to kind of put a wedge between the Soviet Union, the USSR, and the Chinese Communist Party.

And, you know, you look at the history of China then, they're still under Mao.

Mao died in 75 or 76.

China, mainland China, had some massive problems in the Great Leap Forward in the 50s, which was probably the single greatest terrible decision by a political leader where they

forcibly pushed collectivized land.

And then on top of that, believed all the lies of the local communist officials as to how much each of these fields, each of these farms was producing.

And it led to massive starvation.

Like 40, 50 million Chinese died at the hands of their own government because of this forced collectivization of agriculture.