Why China Claims Taiwan
The Yeasayers
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) certainly thinks Taiwan is part of China. Beijing has threatened to invade the island if it ever declares independence – even though the United States has long implied that it wouldn’t stand idly by. As far as the PRC is concerned, Taiwan is a renegade Chinese province controlled by an illegitimate government.
Conversely, the Kuomintang (KMT) on Taiwan has historically viewed mainland China as the renegade, controlled by an illegitimate communist government. After all, the KMT didn’t start out as a Taiwanese political party. It started out as the Chinese Nationalist Party, which battled hard for control of China after the last emperor fell in 1911 – right up until 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Red Army drove Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT nationalists from the mainland.
Generalissimo Chiang and the KMT retreated to Taiwan, and for decades they said they would someday return to rule a reunified China. Taiwan, they said, was just the Chinese province to which they – China’s legitimate, non-communist government – had retreated. Over the years, of course, the KMT’s position vis-Ã? -vis the PRC came to look increasingly like an LSD-induced fantasy, especially after 1972, when President Nixon and Chairman Mao got cozy.
After Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975, the KMT moved slowly but surely away from grand designs for retaking the mainland and toward a “Taiwan first” policy. They had already used billions of dollars in American aid to lay the foundations for an economic explosion. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Taiwan enjoyed the benefits of that investment, including an average annual economic growth rate of nearly 10 percent.
The Naysayers
Most nations eventually had little choice but to recognize the communist PRC as the “real” China. But they still could do plenty of business with capitalist (yet nevertheless authoritarian) Taiwan. The fruits of all that economic intercourse included a higher standard of living and a better-educated workforce, and this prosperity, as it often does, led to democracy.
The first serious opposition political party to emerge, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), officially formed in 1986. Since then, Taiwanese independence has been a key plank in the DPP’s platform – though the party has been careful not to appear overly radical in recent years, especially since its leader, Chen Shui-bian, was elected president. Favoring independence is one thing. Declaring it, or even pursuing it too obviously, with hundreds of Chinese missiles pointed at you is something else entirely.
The appeal of independence in Taiwan has some obvious grounds. First, economic modernization and long separation from the mainland have clearly made Taiwan something very different from a typical province of the People’s Republic. What’s more, two generations have come of age since the arrival of the Chinese nationalists, whose families account for just 15 percent of the population. Growing up on Taiwan, the nationalists’ children, and now their children’s children, naturally feel less connected to the mainland.
For the other 85 percent of Taiwanese people – whose families’ presence on the island predates the KMT retreat – there are other historical questions to consider. Proponents of reunification on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have always assumed that China’s historical claim on the island is legitimate: that prior to the Chinese civil war, Taiwan was, or should have been, part of China. Yet in recent years, critics have challenged that assumption. They argue that China ceded control over Taiwan to Japan at the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and that the Qing dynasty governed the island loosely at best for 200 years before that.
In fact, since at least the 17th century, when a holdout general from the overthrown Ming dynasty used the island as a base of operations against the newly established Qing, Taiwan has played host to a long series of colonizers who later had to deal with insurrections, rebellions, and resistance movements. For some, Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT appear in the grand sweep of history as little more than Taiwan’s most recent colonizer. The big question now is whether the People’s Republic is determined to be the next.
