alt Hacker NewsI agree that, in principle, the people of every territory should have the right to peaceful self-determination regardless of validity of other people's claims to territory. In practice, virtually nobody acknowledges that right, even though it's ostensibly the first article of the UN charter. The Irish had to make life hell for the English to get any concessions, Catalonia had its independence movement dismantled, Kurds are oppressed by every state they live in. The US itself is guilty of this; there was no particular reason the union of two completely opposite cultures had to be enforced, and in another timeline perhaps there was a peaceful national divorce. The hypothetical independent California was actually, in reality, an independent Confederacy of several states, and their independence movement was crushed. To that extent, I could agree China is in the wrong, but only insomuch as any other country is, and it should not be singled out as a particularly aggressive nation when it's playing by the same international norms as the rest of the world. That it wants to reclaim Taiwan is in no way indicative that it has any intention to invade Korea or Japan, as supposed upthread.
It sounds like we have some common ground, but I think you may have a misunderstanding of the present American worldview and politics.
We're 79 years removed from Philippine independence, and you would have to try very hard to find a single American who wants them back. The US military would have been fully capable of annexing Iraq and Afghanistan with violent repression of dissent and zero concern for civilian casualties, had that been the will of the people. After 75 years of peaceful coexistence with a hypothetical independent California, I would be very surprised to see any political will for annexation.
The "same international norms as the rest of the world" you refer to are anachronistic. The post-WWII norms, to a large extent defined and upheld by the US, aren't based around maximal balkanization or unconditional support for separatism, but rather opposition to transfer of territory by force. If that sounds like ladder-pulling, maybe it is, but China has no standing to complain; Western conquests have been largely disbanded, while China remains as the third-largest nation in the world (ahead of the US).
I'm not claiming that the US has never done anything wrong. I asserted the opposite of that. I'm arguing that pointing out someone else's crime isn't a justification for someone to go commit a crime of their own. If you shoot someone from a rival gang, your lawyer isn't going to argue in court that it's okay because someone else from that gang shot someone else a decade ago. There's actually a word for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism.
But if we both agree that wars of aggression are bad regardless of whether they're started by the US, China, Russia, or anyone else, then we're basically on the same page.