I have lived in China for 13 years, and in that time I have talked with perhaps three mainlanders who thought that Taiwan had the right to determine its own future. Everyone else with whom I’ve discussed the issue, from ardent liberals to hardcore Marxists to the politically apathetic, has been fervently against the idea that Taiwan could ever be considered a country. It’s an idea as weird, taboo, and offensive to the majority of Chinese as proposing the restitution of slavery would be to Americans — not for its moral value but for going against everything they hold dear about their country.

Most of the time, when Beijing says something has “hurt the feelings of 1.3 billion Chinese,” it’s petulant bullshit; on Taiwanese issues it comes closer to the truth. On the WeChat Moments feed of a former student, a bright and intellectually curious teenager, I saw her rage at finding the Taiwanese flag on the wall of a dorm at her new American university. “IT’S NOT A COUNTRY!” she indignantly declared, her anger echoed by her (Chinese) schoolmates follow-up comments.

This is, of course, a deeply unthinking attitude. It’s a product of decades of propaganda about China’s (real but century-old) humiliations at the hands of foreign powers. It arises, too, from a complex of neuroticisms and resentments about Taiwan’s wealth and success in the past, now mixed with smugness at the mainland’s new power. And for ordinary Chinese, it’s a result of the constant lessons — beginning with kindergarten rhymes and reinforced every week by their parents, peers, and teachers — about China’s supposed oneness and the evil of those who would split the country.

It’s an unhappy and bitter part of Chinese nationalism, one that denies both the six-decade reality on the ground and the agency of Taiwanese to decide their own future. But it’s not going to disappear overnight.