superdx wrote:And thinking Taiwan is part of China is also quite insulting. Don't confuse a democratic country with an authoritarian state.
Taiwan has only been democratic for a quarter of a century and was a ruthless authoritarian state, the official title of the state is the Republic of China, and for a long time, they were pretenders to being the ruling state of China. The vast majority of inhabitants are ethnic Han Chinese. Within the RoC, formal Taiwanese independence is a partisan issue, with the KMT claiming the "one China principle" according to the 1992 consensus and the DPP pushing for formal separation as Taiwan.
It's not as simple as evil godless commies on one side of the strait and democratic capitalist good guys on the other. There's a lot of reasons Taiwan is associated with China. If you don't like the PRC, then you can say the PRC. You can offend a Chinese person by conflating the PRC with China the same way you can insult a Russian by associating that with the USSR.