Article #1
Taiwan is Already and Will Continue to Be an Independent Nation
Toward understanding the errant history and faulty reasoning pervading Zhao Jian’s “There should be a genuine adherence to the one-China principle” (Star Tribune, September 25, 2023), know that Taiwan is a de facto nation that has been independent of any government controlling all of China for 128 years.
Around 4,000 BCE, long before the Shang (ca. 1500-1000 BCE), Zhou (ca. 1000-246 BCE), Qin (221-206 BCE) and Han (202 BCE-220 CE) dynasties developed Chinese civilization and political rule, Austronesian people with Malayo-Polynesian linguistic affinities linking them to the originalinhabitants of the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, and many islands of the Pacific Ocean inhabited the island that came to be known as Taiwan.
There was very little Han Chinese settlement of Taiwan until 1624, when officials from the Netherlands established a base in southern Taiwan. Both these European colonizers and the rebel regime of Zheng Chenggong (also known as Koxinga), which ousted the Dutch in 1661, encouraged Han Chinese migration from the southern provinces of China to provide agricultural labor for farms established to produce rice and sugarcane.
In 1683, forces of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) crossed the strait and ousted the Zheng regime; only after vigorous debate at the Manchu court as to whether or not to establish governance on Taiwan was the island entered on the maps of a Chinese dynasty. But the Qing lost Taiwan to the Japanese after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. The enormously formative period of modern Taiwanese history under Japanese authority, during which the brutal but efficient Japanese rulers presided over considerable agricultural, industrial, and infrastructural development, came to an end in September 1945 with the Japanese concession of defeat in World War II. By 1949, the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang, defeated by the Chinese Communists the 1945-1949 Chinese Civil War, retreated to Taiwan and established governance.
The arrogance and corruption of the Guomintang (also known as Kuomintang) induced the February 28th Incident (Er er ba shijian), a Taiwanese rebellion against Guomindang rule in which somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Taiwanese lost their lives. The Guomindang never entirely recovered from this false start, which lay etched in the memories of people of all walks of life for many decades leading up to the 1980s. But Guomindang officials, listening carefully to advisers from the United States that arrived in the wake of President Harry Truman’s order for United States ships to occupy the Taiwan Strait, and building on the infrastructure and certain policies set in motion during the Japanese era, the Guomindang regime authored a series of policy initiatives that transformed the economy of Taiwan.
International political realignments in the meantime contributed to an increasingly unsettled political situation in Taiwan. In 1971 the United Nations dropped its recognition of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China in favor of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that was firmly ensconced as the actual governing force in China. In 1972 the government of Japan gave formal diplomatic recognition to the PRC and the United States administration led by President Jimmy Carter did so in 1979. By that time there was a well-developed movement of political opposition on Taiwan, formed of courageous activists who proved willing to challenge the one-party state.
Against this backdrop of growing political opposition, President Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law in 1987 and tapped the talented native Taiwanese official Lee Teng-hui as his successor. Lee oversaw an astounding political transformation; in 1996, he won Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election.
In the year 2000, Chen Shuibian, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won the presidential election and ended the dominance of the Guomindang. The DPP lost control of the presidency to the Guomindang in 2008 but regained the top office in 2016, when current president Tsai Ing-wen prevailed. Right now, the DPP seems likely to win the looming presidential contest in January 2024; the Guomindang is polling a distant third, behind the DPP and a new party, The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).
Taiwan, is a de facto nation with a unique history. The island nation ranks number 12 among thenations of the world in GDP per capita (compared to number 73 for China) and is rated number 10 as a full democracy” by the highly respected Freedom Housei and Economist Intelligence Unit indices (the United States is now rated as a “flawed democracy”; China, brutalizers of the Uighur and Tibetan peoples, is among the world’s most “authoritarian” on these indices).
Taiwan is no more part of China than the United States is a colony of Great Britain. Most people on Taiwan identify as Taiwanese, not Chinese, and prefer the existing status quo as a de facto independent nation. But if the Taiwanese people should ever declare de jure independence, such a declaration could only be dishonored through force of arms, under the watchful eye of an international community that chooses to side with military might over historical right.
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