The Republic of China Armed Forces encompass the Army, Navy (including the Marine Corps), Air Force, and Military Police Force of the Republic of China (ROC). It is a military establishment, which accounted for 16.8% of the central budget in the fiscal year of 2003. It was originally the National Revolutionary Army before being renamed as the Republic of China Armed Forces in 1947 due to the implementation of the Constitution.
Until the 1970s, the military's primary mission was to retake mainland China from the communist People's Republic of China (PRC) through the Project National Glory. The military's current foremost mission is the defense of the islands of Taiwan, Penghu, Quemoy and Matsu against a possible military invasion by the People's Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China, which is seen as the predominant threat to the ROC in the ongoing dispute over the political status of Taiwan.
Read more about Republic Of China Armed Forces: Personnel, Arms Purchases and Weapons Development, Military Parades, Military Ranks, Nuclear Weapons Program
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“Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama;
Aged in wrong, the empires are declining,
And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence.
What shall I say to the young on such a morning?—
Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?—
No; my little ones lean not toward revolt.”
—William Dewitt Snodgrass (b. 1926)
“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced—by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)