Yeah it's the lack of black and whiteness that makes me so confused as to why you would brand the government of a 1 billion person nation as an enemy rather than say, a competitor or even an ally that behaves in occasionally intolerable ways. Kind of like how a lot of nations continue to be allies with a nation that goes around invading other nations and deposing legitimately elected governments in the interest of ore and fossil fuel companies.

I think the useful model for this is that currently there's a competition between the naval powers and the land powers, which is rapidly heating up. (Due to the last decades of very high rate of economic growth of China.)

https://youtu.be/YcVSgYz5SJ8?t=7765

Maritime order (basically a trade alliance, if you join you have more chance to influence it, win-win) and the continental order (buffer zone, extractive/authoritarian, negative-sum).

Of course as the competition is getting fierce one seems to borrow from the other. (Russia is funding itself and its war from trade. And China sold market access in exchange for technology.) And the US is now transitioning from soft-power to pay up or you are out. (Balance of trade, NATO contributions, etc.)

Name one single other country that we trade with that has an official policy that it owns another country we trade with, and insists that if we say out loud the other country is a country it means immediate war?

> has an official policy that it owns another country we trade with, and insists that if we say out loud the other country is a country it means immediate war?

there is a cost for maintaining the US hegemony, Taiwan is being used as an excuse to maximize such cost for the US - China gets to choose when and how to increase tensions, the US has to react accordingly and spend more and more borrowed resources as responses. that is the official policy, a smart one.

Wouldn’t being a nice neighbor that people want to get along with be more effective at undermining US hegemony? This just seems like a convoluted rationale to avoid taking the Chinese government’s statements at face value: they think Taiwan is their property, intend to take and integrate it when they get a good opportunity to do so, and consider anything that might make this harder or undermine support for it to be a grievous national security threat.

Taiwan has an official policy that it owns the mainland

This is hilariously a result of China's view. China's claim is that Taiwan is part of the still civil warring China, and should be re-integrated. Part of that strategy is an insistence that OTHER countries need to parrot this claim, including countries like the US that recognize Taiwan as an independent entity. The "oneness" of China is vitally important.

The claimed story is that Taiwan is worried if they abandon the "one warring China" policy and openly state they are Independent, that will aggravate China and cause them to push their claim harder, and maybe lead to war.

Taiwan having such a policy is directly because that's the policy China wants everyone else to claim. Notably, Taiwan has taken zero effort to produce a military capable of doing any over-water invasions, which would be absolutely necessary if they actually wanted to do that. Unless you think Taiwan would rely on the USA to invade China for it, which I do not think the US ever wants to do. Our explicit strategy is to own all the islands around China (including Taiwan) and basically blockade China in all but name.

China meanwhile DOES build a military to take over Taiwan, explicitly, including systems designed to sink our carriers and practice targets in the desert. Strictly speaking I'm not concerned about China wanting a viable means to sink our Navy, as China doesn't want to starve to death if we could blockade them, but the buildup around the capability to take Taiwan betrays that it is not a defensive posture.

> This is hilariously a result of China's view

No it really isn't, and it's certainly not hilarious. Taiwan's position is historic. The government of Taiwan literally used to be the government of the mainland.

The point is that Taiwan is forced to maintain this position.