Facts Matter in K-12 Education and in Citizenship; Consider >>>>> Taiwan's History and Manifest Independence Exposes the One-China Pretension

Historical facts, often describing complex and uncomfortable situations, are vital for the impartation of K-12 education and for the informed exercise of citizenship.  Consider the vital and uncomfortable facts that expose the pretension that the independent geopolitical entity of Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China are part of a single China.


Certain parallels describe the historical experiences of people in the United States and those of Taiwan What we now call the United States was first populated by people who came from Asia many thousands of years ago;  the original inhabitants of Taiwan came from Southeast Asia many millennia before the island had entered the consciousness of the Chinese.  Europeans explored the Americas in earnest from the 16^th century;  Portuguese mariners sailed by Taiwan late in the same century, declaring the land to be Ilha Formosa (“Beautiful Island”).

During the 17^th century, the British colonized the eastern seaboard of what became the United States.  In the middle of that same century, the Dutch established the first government exercising external control over Taiwan’s original inhabitants.  By the late 18^th century, people in the thirteen British colonies were developing a separate identity on the American frontier and broke from the British to form an independent nation.  In 1661, a Chinese rebel ranged himself against the recently (1644) established Qing Dynasty, ousted the Dutch, and founded the Zheng family dynasty on Taiwan.  In 1683, after ousting the Zheng rulers, the Qing dynasty established a rather spare governing apparatus on this island frontier, leaving plenty of power in the hands of local magnates.

In the course of the 17^th through 19^th centuries, in another motif similar to the American experience, immigrants from the Chinese provinces of Fujian and Guangdong crossed the 100-mile strait that separates Taiwan from the Chinese mainland in numbers that overwhelmed the native population.   Under European imperialist pressure, the Qing government made Taiwan an official province of China in 1887 but then in 1895 ceded the island to the Japanese after losing the Sino-Japanese War.

The Japanese ruled Taiwan as a colony from 1895 until the end of World War II, in 1945.  The Japanese were tough imperialist overlords but they were administratively consistent and they laid the foundation for a modern infrastructure that traversed the 245-mile long, 100-mile wide expanse of the island.   During 1945-1949, the Kuomintang assumed control of Taiwan under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek;  large contingents of mainlanders followed after the Kuomintang lost to Mao Zedong’s Chinese communists in the Chinese Civil War.  The Kuomintang ruled Taiwan as the Republic of China, forecasting an eventual return to the mainland that was never likely and never came. 

In 1971, the mainland-based People’s Republic of China gained recognition in the United Nations over the Taiwan-based Republic of China;  in 1972 the United States and China signed the Shanghai Communique , with the statement that “There is only one China, and Taiwan is part of China.”  By 1979, the United States discarded Taiwan as a bulwark against communism in the Cold War, surmising that formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China was now more conducive to the national interest.

The “One-China” policy was nonsense from the beginning, except as an exercise of political expediency.  By the 1970s, Taiwan had become one of the “little dragons” (joining South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore) and thus a rising economic power;  during the 1990s, masterful President Lee Teng-hui superintended political democratization on Taiwan.  Today, the island’s people consider themselves to be Taiwanese, distinct from Chinese on the mainland, possessing an identity forged first on the Chinese frontier, then under Japanese and Kuomintang control, and ultimately in a flourishing liberal democracy.

Taiwan now ranks 21^st among the world’s economies in per capita GDP;  the People’s Republic of China is ranked at 80.  The pollution index for the Taiwanese capital of Taipei is a “low-to-moderate” 28;  for the PRC capital of Beijing, the figure is a “very high” 108.  While Taiwan earns the first ranking among the “free,” “partly free,” and “not free” listings of the international monitoring organization Freedom House, the PRC is judged “not free” for its many human rights violations.  The Taiwanese increasingly honor the culture and address the concerns of the island’s original inhabitants;   the leaders of the PRC by contrast rule not really a nation but an empire that tramples on the rights of non-Han people such as the Tibetans and Uyghurs, whose “autonomous areas” comprise over 30% of PRC territory.

The People’s Republic of China holds 10% of the national debt of the United States and enjoys a 40% share of a U. S. trade deficit that totals over $500 billion.  Still meager per capita, the Chinese economy is powerful in the aggregate, and in military terms China is a colossus.

Political expediency and economic dependency undergird U. S. acquiescence in the erroneously dubbed “One-China” policy.  But make no mistake:  The status of Taiwanese nationhood is already a reality;  if formally declared, that status could only be taken away through the force of arms, under the watchful eye of an international community that chooses to side with military might over historical right.