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"While Teinosuke apparently approves of Russia using force to seize territory from China, I suspect that his position would be different on Hong Kong."

I didn't "approve" (or disapprove) of Russia seizing territory from China in the nineteenth century; I said it was a matter of moral indifference as to which imperial overlord controlled Mongolia. Thus, I don't especially rejoice at the fact that Tuva (also a former Qing possession, and between the wars a quasi-independent puppet state of the Soviet Union) is nowadays part of the Russian federation rather than the PRC. I would be glad if it were independent, and in the same way I approve of the existence of an independent Mongolia.

One difference between the time when Russia annexed territories hitherto controlled by Qing China and the time when the PRC might hypothetically have resorted to force to retake Hong Kong was that the right of conquest was generally recognised at the former time, but not at the latter.

Some posters may have claimed that a non-Communist regime in China would have been happy to tolerate British rule in Hong Kong, but I never have.

An independent Khalistan would provoke resistance and violence (likely on the scale of the Partition of 1947) between Sikh nationalists and others in the Punjab.

Well, that would depend on how the disappointed minority behaved. There has, in any case, been considerable violence over the decades between Sikh nationalists and the central Indian government.

Are we to assume you are in favour of an independent Kashmir but not of an independent Punjab? If so, could you explain this hypocrisy?

I knew a Serb who had grown up in Sarajevo in old Yugoslavia and was nostalgic for its milieu of (comparative) ethnic tolerance. Now Yugoslavia has been divided into several independent states, which often seem at odds with one another. I don't regard that encouragement of ethnonationalism as an improvement.

I also met an academic from the former Yugoslavia, not long ago. For complicated family reasons, she held a Croatian passport, but had been born in Slovenia, raised in Bosnia, and went to university in Belgrade. She told me that she considered herself Yugoslav and that no other identity described her experience. She strongly regretted the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

However, the comparison between the old Yugoslavia and the several independent states that came into being after its dissolution is surely not the most pertinent one, since a civil war took place to turn the former into the latter. So wishing that Yugoslavia still existed in the old form is akin to wishing that there had never been a war. A more meaningful comparison is between the several independent states that now exist, and the alternative of a postwar Yugoslavia in which various populations unhappily co-existed in the wake of a painful civil war.

Lebanon was also a once tolerant and multicultural country, which suffered a painful civil war that ended around the same time as the civil war in Yugoslavia began. It's not inconceivable that the Lebanese war might have ended with the country breaking up into a Christian and Muslim state - the former centred on the coastal towns of Byblos and Batroun and the Maronite heartlands of Mount Lebanon, the latter including the southern coastal cities of Sidon and Tyre and the northern city of Tripoli, plus the Bekaa Valley. Needless to say, the status of multicultural Beirut would have been challenging to solve. However, given Lebanon's parlous and unstable situation in its postwar era, one wonders if partition would have been the lesser of two evils. One might further wonder whether a united postwar Yugoslavia wouldn't have turned out rather like postwar Lebanon: tense, unstable, frequently threatened by a renewal of civil strife.

It's odd (other than on account of zeal to divide and weaken China) that Teinosuke would be so gung-ho for an independent Uyghur state in Xinjiang when the demographic data does NOT show the Uyghurs as a majority, indeed, as barely a plurality.

The Uyghurs were an overwhelming majority in the region in the 1950s, as the same source makes clear. The PRC (as, of course, you know) has deliberately encouraged migration into Xinjiang to erode the Uyghur majority. Anyway, the Uyghur state needn't coincide with the whole region of Xinjiang Province; it could be established in Southwestern Xinjiang where, as you acknowledge, Uyghurs still form the majority.

Actually I imagine that removing a resentful subject minority population from Beijing's control would strengthen, rather than weaken China. At the very least, Han Chinese wouldn't be being stabbed by Uyghur militants in railway stations.

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The Lebanese confessional system was in fact modified at the end of the Civil War in order to acknowledge demographic change and the fact that Christians were no longer in the majority. Originally, parliamentary seats were allocated in a ratio of 6-to-5 in the favour of the Christian bloc. The 1990 settlement adjusted this ratio to half and half. So far from binding Lebanese for all time, the settlement established in the National Pact has already been altered.

Moreover, of the three top offices of state (President, Prime Minister and Speaker of Parliament), two are held by Muslims.

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Note that no country voluntarily cedes any of its land.

Not quite true. In 1965, Malaysia (without losing an insurgency) determined that it was for the best that Singapore should leave the Federation. I would like to see this kind of decision taken more frequently in international politics. It surprises me that large countries so rarely see it as in their interests to dispense with the trouble caused by restive regions.

Even if China were to yield a part of Xinjiang for an independent Uyghur state, what would the majority of Uyghurs outside it supposedly do? Suddenly leave their homes and jobs behind in China and relocate there?

Well, as you said in an earlier post, populations aren't static. Probably some would, if they could find jobs and homes there, and some wouldn't. However, the existence of such a state would open up the option. Similarly, one suspects that some Han Chinese in the former Xinjiang Province would relocate to China, while others would choose to remain in East Turkestan.

By way of comparison, in Kazakhstan, Russians and Kazakhs were almost equal in numbers at the fall of the Soviet Union (each a little under 40% of the total population of the Republic). After independence, many Russians relocated to the Russian Federation, but plenty stayed in Kazakhstan (whose population is still more than a fifth ethnic Russian). There are also well over half a million Kazakhs in Russia. Note, therefore, that the existence of a national homeland needn't equate to ethnic exclusivity; both Kazakhstan and Russia are, in fact, multicultural. But that both Kazakhs and Russians have a national homeland, should they wish to reside in one, strikes me as a positive thing.

Consider Armenia. It does not cover anything like the extent of historic Armenia, but it is an independent nation state to which Armenians can relocate, should they wish or need to. Many Armenians in Syria found the Republic of Armenia a refuge when the Syrian Civil War broke out. Some Lebanese Armenians have done likewise in the last year and a half, as the situation in Lebanon has deteriorated.

I've often thought that Turkey was shortsighted to veto Kurdish independence in Northern Iraq. They fear that this would inflame separatist sentiment in Turkish Kurdistan. I think it would douse it; Kurds sufficiently nationalistic to wish to live in an independent Kurdistan would be able to relocate to one.

Uyghur terrorism has failed to come close to creating any threat that would impel China's government or most Chinese to consider that China has lost an insurgency in Xinjiang.

True, but it's a problem that wouldn't exist if East Turkestan became independent. It's also unclear as to why China (or any other state) should wish to hold onto a hostile minority population.

When I was much younger and there was still regular violence in Northern Ireland, I remember expressing puzzlement as to why the British government was so determined to hold onto that territory. I remarked (with, no doubt, a touch of youthful intemperance) that, since the people of that region had shown themselves incapable of living in peace in a civilised polity, Northern Ireland should be expelled from the UK forthwith. I assumed that the Republic of Ireland wouldn't really want the territory either, since that would merely mean loyalist bombs in Dublin instead of IRA bombs in London. An independent Northern Ireland, I said, would be nobody's problem but its own!

I am still baffled as to why the Serbs think it could be in their interests to rule over 1.9 million resentful Albanians in Kosovo.

I think that China's government is better qualified than Teinosuke to determine what's in China's internal security interests.

I think the most straightforward way to solve China's internal security problem with the Uyghurs would be to convert into into an external matter!

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Granted. When I arrived in towns like Tyre and Baalbek, their Shia identity was immediately apparent. The main road in Baalbek boasted a shiny new Iranian-style mosque, for instance. The corniche in Tyre was filled with posters of the Shia Speaker of Parliament, and of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

And we should not forget that Lebanese Christians are divided too. The late Lady Yvonne Cochrane Sursock, doyenne of Beirut high society and champion of historical preservation in the city and country, was of a Greek Orthodox family, and had some very harsh words for the presumptions of the Maronites: "Without them, Lebanon would never have existed. With them behaving as they have a tendency to do, it can't go on". With melancholy symbolism, Lady Sursock died, aged 98, at the end of August, as a result of injuries sustained in the explosion at the port of Beirut - on the eve of the centenary of the proclamation of "Greater Lebanon".