Taiwan: An Anti-Imperialist Resource

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Written By Qiao Collective

After more than a century of de facto separation from the Chinese mainland by Japanese colonialism and U.S. intervention, Taiwan remains a rhetorical and military flashpoint of renewed Cold War aggression on China.

This selected timeline and resource compilation provides a deeper look into the forces that have produced “Taiwan independence” as a political consensus shared by U.S. politicians, erstwhile Western leftists, and Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party. Amidst warmongering rhetoric fueled by Western claims of imminent Chinese invasion, this compilation serves as a starting point for understanding China’s aspirations for national reunification and Taiwan’s overdetermined status as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for Western ideological, economic, and military power in Asia and the Pacific.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction arrow_upward

In the Western imagination, Taiwan exists as little more than a staging ground for ideological war with the People’s Republic of China—a crossroads of democracy versus authoritarianism, Western values versus Chinese backwardness, and free market capitalism versus closed-door communism. Yet for centuries, the island of Taiwan has played a rich and pivotal role in broader Chinese history. Located just one hundred miles from the mainland’s southeastern coast, Taiwan was linked to the mainland through migration, trade, language and culture long before European and Japanese colonizers seized on its strategic location as a launchpad for economic and military forays against China at large. Today, this history continues as U.S. imperialism positions Taiwan as an ideological and military base for its new Cold War against China.

Taiwan’s separation from the Chinese mainland began in 1895, when the Qing government was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan after its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War. While Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II legally restored Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan, the Chinese civil war and the global Cold War once again rendered Taiwan an instrument for imperial ambitions against China. For the ascendant postwar United States, the 1949 establishment of the PRC under the Communist Party of China marked the “loss of China”—a blow that was partially recouped by propping up the fleeing Chiang Kai-shek government in Taiwan as “Free China.” In 1950, as the U.S. waged war to prevent the socialist unification of Korea, President Harry Truman dispatched the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to similarly foreclose the possibility of a unified socialist China. The legacy of that militarized division remains today, as the U.S. enforces the separation of Taiwan from the PRC through multibillion-dollar arms sales, menacing war games, and a concerted propaganda drive which together undermine the possibility of peaceful reunification. This bipartisan campaign of hybrid warfare has intensified over the last fifteen years, following China’s rise as a major power, the corresponding U.S. Pivot to Asia, and the era of “decoupling” pursued by both the Trump and Biden administrations. As the U.S. military declares the Pacific its primary theater of war, successive U.S. administrations have marshaled enormous economic, military, and ideological resources to build up Taiwan as a focal point for this new Cold War. This program violates the letter of the one-China principle and the spirit of the United States’ own “one-China policy,” which together have formed the basis for bilateral relations since 1979. Furthermore, they neglect the centuries-long shared history of Taiwan and its people with their neighbors across the strait.

Just as Western colonialism was once justified as a “civilizing mission,” U.S. imperial designs on Taiwan and China at large march under the banner of promoting “democracy” and defending the international “rules-based order.” The U.S. claim to be acting in defense of Taiwan’s “vibrant democracy” from Chinese authoritarianism is particularly ahistorical, given that the United States is responsible for propping up the Kuomintang (KMT) military dictatorship under Chiang and his successors for almost forty years. Meanwhile, despite grandiose language about U.S. global leadership, the reality is that the majority of the world understands cross-strait relations to be an internal matter for China. Only eleven UN member states maintain formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan (as the Republic of China), and no country recognizes Taiwan as an independent nation. This fact is unsurprising; UN recognition of the PRC as the legitimate representative of China came on the wings of overwhelming support from the Third World. Having experienced the genocidal violence and economic exploitation inherent to the Western imperial system, the Global South, like China itself, adheres to the tenets of sovereignty and non-interference. 

Though ideologically diverse, proponents of Taiwan independence rely on an overlapping revisionist toolkit that elides the historical context of unresolved civil war shaping the cross-strait relationship. Instead, China’s aspirations for national unity are cast in terms of imperialism and expansionism. The era of KMT martial law is counterfactually invoked as precedent for authoritarian Chinese encroachment, obscuring the historical KMT-CPC rivalry and the role of the U.S. in supporting the military dictatorship. Meanwhile, the history of Japanese colonialism has been systematically revised to present a relatively “benign” rule that forms the bedrock for a non-Chinese local identity. Claims that Taiwan’s democracy has “voted out” reunification as a political pathway omit the crucial context that the island’s most vocal left-wing supporters of unification were systematically purged, jailed, and murdered under Japanese colonialism and KMT rule. Efforts to co-opt Taiwan’s yuánzhùmín, or indigenous peoples (see Notes on Terminology #3), into the project of Taiwan independence rely on a similar level of obfuscation; despite the separatist camp’s appropriation of decolonial rhetoric, yuánzhùmín have historically been apathetic towards the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). And in spite of attempts to stake Taiwan separatism to a schema of ethnic difference, official demographics list 95% of Taiwan’s population as being Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group of the Chinese mainland.

While those on the left may be (rightfully) skeptical of elite rhetoric of freedom and democracy, this rhetoric of Chinese imperialism, settler colonialism, and ethnic chauvinism may be harder to parse for those unfamiliar with Taiwan’s history. Yet, whether it is couched in the moralizing language of classic Cold Warriors or self-styled leftists, Taiwan independence ultimately serves the material interests of Western imperialism. Like the European and Japanese imperialists that colonized Taiwan for access to Chinese trade from the 17th through the 20th century, the United States transparently envisions the island as an outpost for efforts to contain China militarily and decouple from it economically. More than 70 years since U.S. military leader Douglas MacArthur described Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the nation’s Cold War against China, Taiwan remains a crude asset for U.S. military realpolitik. It is the linchpin of the so-called first island chain that links the 400 U.S. military bases spread across Asia and the Pacific and, crucially, home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest advanced semiconductor chip manufacturer. Lofty narratives of Taiwan independence thus ultimately fuel consent for militarization, intervention, and war while marginalizing anti-imperialist voices for diplomacy and peace. They also disguise the true intent of retaining Taiwan as a neocolonial outpost of Western empire to undermine China’s sovereign economic development. There is no “independence” in becoming a U.S. client regime entrapped in a capitalist world order. It would set a precedent for any country, large or small, that challenges U.S. hegemony to be balkanized with impunity. For the left to support such an outcome would be self-sabotage on an epic scale, regardless of the titanic politico-economic shifts on both sides of the strait since the Chinese Revolution of 1949.

The modern-day context around cross-strait relations is complex and evolving, and the lives of Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan strait have been negatively affected by centuries of imperialism. We recognize that there is no perfect, clear-cut path to development after colonization and civil war, but insist on China’s right to defend its sovereign project of socialist construction. Cross-strait relations should be debated and resolved on Chinese terms and in Chinese dialogues only. They should not be used as crude ammunition in the U.S.-led geopolitical assault on China.

This syllabus includes a condensed timeline of Taiwan’s history to provide historical context to contemporary discussions about China, as well as a list of resources that highlight key aspects of cross-strait relations and history. It is not intended to be comprehensive in scope, for Taiwan’s place in Chinese history extends far beyond the recent centuries of Western and Japanese imperialism in Asia. Nor is it intended to offer simple answers to questions about mainland China and Taiwan. It aims only to be a starting point for critical inquiry, and we urge readers to seek a diversity of sources and form their own opinions. A more detailed understanding requires further study into Taiwan’s history, cross-strait relations, Chinese politics, and ongoing geopolitical developments.

Notes on Terminology arrow_upward

  1. Since 1949 the de facto governing authority over the islands of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu has retained the official name “Republic of China” (中華民國), or ROC for short. For the sake of clarity and consistency we adhere to this usage throughout the timeline. However, this does not imply recognition of the ROC's claim to legitimacy as a continuation of the pre-1949 government of both mainland China and Taiwan. Official statements from PRC officials and media typically refer to the “Taiwan authorities” (台湾当局), while the pro-independence camp and mainstream Western media usually refer to this de facto state entity simply as “Taiwan” – leading to ahistorical and incorrect formulations like “president of Taiwan,” “flag of Taiwan,” etc. In non-governmental contexts we use the common demonym “Taiwanese” for people residing and/or born and raised in Taiwan, and for entities based there.

  2. The political divide between mainland China and Taiwan is also reflected in different writing and romanization systems for the Chinese language. The PRC has used simplified Chinese characters since the 1960s, while Taiwan continues to use traditional characters. With romanization the situation is arguably even more complicated: Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音) has been the standard in mainland China since 1958 (and internationally since 1982), while Taiwan has never adopted a standard romanization system. In this timeline and resource list we use pinyin to romanize names of mainland Chinese places and individuals predominantly associated with mainland China after 1949, as well as all pre-1949 Chinese individuals with some exceptions for persons commonly known in English under non-standard romanizations (e.g. Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek). For places under de facto ROC jurisdiction and post-1949 Taiwanese individuals, we default to the most common romanizations of their names in English-language media. When each person is first mentioned we also include their Chinese name in parentheses: in simplified characters for post-1949 mainland individuals, and in traditional characters for post-1949 Taiwanese individuals as well as all pre-1949 Chinese individuals.

  3. The term běnshěngrén (本省人, lit. “people of this province”) refers to Chinese people in Taiwan whose ancestors, predominantly Hoklo (福佬) and Hakka (客家) from Fujian and Guangdong provinces, migrated to the island before the end of Japanese colonization in 1945. The term wàishěngrén (外省人, lit. “people from outside the province”) refers to those who moved to Taiwan from the mainland after 1945, as well as their descendants. Běnshěngrén do not include the non-Han peoples whose presence in Taiwan predates Chinese migration; those people are the Taiwanese yuánzhùmín (台湾原住民, lit. “original peoples of Taiwan”). Yuánzhùmín is typically translated into English as “aboriginal” or “indigenous,” both of which can imply a colonial relationality whose applicability in Taiwan is a matter of active debate. We therefore choose to leave the term untranslated, in analogy with wàishěngrén and běnshěngrén, so as to clearly delineate the island’s original inhabitants from those běnshěngrén who (especially in the pro-independence camp) have increasingly taken to describing themselves as "native Taiwanese." arrow_upward

2. Timeline arrow_upward

a. Pre-Colonial Taiwan and Early European Colonization arrow_upward

➤ ~15,000 years ago: Glaciation during the late Pleistocene Ice Age lowers sea levels in the Taiwan Strait, forming a prehistoric land bridge that physically connects the island to mainland Asia until ~10,000 years ago in the early Holocene. Some of the earliest historical evidence of human habitation in Taiwan comes from this period.

➤ ~4000 BCE: A new wave of seaborne migration to Taiwan begins, originating from what is today southeastern China. These people are known to have hunted, fished, performed horticulture, and cultivated rice and millet; they would become the ancestors of today’s yuánzhùmín.

  • Historical linguists believe Taiwan to be the origin of the Austronesian expansion. Through their common seafaring ancestors, yuánzhùmín are closely related to peoples that settled as far west as the Malagasy of Madagascar; to modern-day Filipinos, Malays, and Indonesians; and as far south and east as the Polynesians of Aotearoa / New Zealand, Hawai’i, and Easter Island.

  • As a result of these migrations, Taiwan became part of the Maritime Silk Road, a network of seabound trade routes spanning from China and Southeast Asia to India, the Arabian Peninsula, and the east coast of Africa.

  • Based on the island’s terrain, yuánzhùmín have long been differentiated into two broad groups. One group, inhabiting the western and northern plains, today includes the officially recognized Siraya, Makatao, and Taivoan peoples (along with many unrecognized groups). The other group, inhabiting the mountainous central and eastern highlands, today includes the officially recognized Amis, Atayal, Bunun, Kanakanavu, Kavalan, Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saaroa, Saisiyat, Sakizaya, Seediq, Taroko, Thao, Tsou, and Yami peoples.

  • The Chinese name Taiwan (臺灣 / 台湾) is thought to derive from that of the Taivoan people, who live near modern-day Tainan in the southwestern part of the island and were among the first to come in contact with both Chinese migrants and European colonists.

➤ 230 CE: Records from China’s Three Kingdoms period document an expedition from Eastern Wu that landed on an island referred to as “Yizhou” (夷洲). Most of its members are said to have died of unknown diseases, but the survivors brought back “several thousand” natives. Some historians have identified Yizhou with Taiwan. 

➤ 607-610: The Book of Sui (the official history of the Sui Dynasty) records several expeditions to an island kingdom called “Liuqiu” (琉球) in the East China Sea. Modern historians identify it either as Taiwan or as the Ryukyus, an island chain to the northeast (currently governed by Japan) whose name is written with the same characters.

➤ 1171: Song Dynasty records document the presence of Chinese migrants on Penghu (澎湖), an archipelago just to the west of Taiwan (also known in Western literature as the Pescadores). Beginning that year, Song officials would send annual patrols and build permanent settlements to protect migrants from raids by peoples further to the east, most likely Taiwan or the Philippines.

➤ 1281: Penghu is incorporated into Jiangzhe province (comprising modern-day Fujian and Zhejiang) by the Yuan Dynasty. 

➤ 1349: Chinese explorer Wang Dayuan (汪大淵) provides the first verified written account of Taiwan, documenting his interactions with yuánzhùmín and finding evidence (e.g. pottery) of prior contact but no permanent habitation by Chinese people.

➤ 1371: The newly founded Ming Dynasty institutes a ban on most maritime trade and coastal settlement, including a full withdrawal of Chinese settlers from Penghu. Defying the ban, Chinese merchants would continue traveling to Penghu and Taiwan and trading with the latter’s yuánzhùmín (with some learning their languages) in subsequent centuries. 

➤ 1523: Ming China bans maritime trade with Japan specifically in hopes of stopping the increasing number of Japanese pirate attacks all along the Chinese coast. But the social and political upheaval in Japan during the Sengoku period only makes piracy more lucrative for Japanese and Chinese pirates alike. In particular, Lin Daoqian (林道乾) and Lin Feng (林鳳) would use Taiwan as a base for large-scale raids on the mainland in 1563 and 1574 respectively.

➤ 1542: Portuguese sailors on their way to Japan observe Taiwan and label it on their maps as Ilha Formosa (“beautiful island”), giving rise to the island’s standard name in most Western literature until the mid-20th century.

➤ 1593: Toyotomi Hideyoshi, chancellor and imperial regent of Japan, demands tribute from the “ruler of Taiwan” but finds no one of that description. This occurs just a year after he launched a massive invasion of Joseon Korea with the eventual aim of conquering Ming China as well – a confluence of events that in many ways presaged the First Sino-Japanese War almost exactly three centuries later.

  • Under the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan would launch failed invasions of Taiwan in 1609 and 1616 before adopting the isolationist sakoku policy in 1633, ending all interest in occupying the island for another two centuries. 

➤ 1603: Chinese explorer Chen Di (陳第) visits Taiwan on an expedition to suppress Japanese pirates, writing a detailed account of the lives and customs of yuánzhùmín titled Dongfanji (東番記, lit. “Account of the Eastern Barbarians”).

➤ 1624: The Dutch East India Company builds Fort Zeelandia near modern-day Tainan, marking the beginning of formal European colonization on the island. The colony of Dutch Formosa in southwest Taiwan becomes a major entrepot for trade with China, Japan, and the East Indies, aiming to prevent competing European empires (mainly the Spanish and Portuguese) from establishing footholds in East Asia.

  • When the Dutch arrive, they find several thousand Chinese residents already present on the island. Under their rule, tens of thousands more migrants would be recruited or kidnapped from Fujian province and brought to Taiwan as agricultural laborers, raising the total Han population to around 40,000. The Dutch would also attempt to forcibly convert large numbers of yuánzhùmín to Christianity, meeting stiff resistance (especially from the Siraya) that would not be quelled until 1636. 

➤ 1628: The Spanish Empire attempts to start another colony in northern Taiwan with the building of Fort Santo Domingo. Compared to the Dutch, they are much less successful in this effort. In 1642, they would destroy the fort themselves after the Dutch defeat them in the Second Battle of San Salvador and expel them from the island.

➤ 1644: The Ming Dynasty loses its capital Beijing, and shortly thereafter most of mainland China, to the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty. Some Ming loyalists retreat to Xiamen in Fujian province and continue resisting the Qing for several decades under the leadership of general Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功), also known in the West as Koxinga. 

➤ 1652: Under the leadership of Guo Huaiyi (郭懷一), Han Chinese peasants in Taiwan launch a large-scale revolt against colonial rule that is suppressed by the Dutch and some of their yuánzhùmín allies. The peasants’ main grievance is a colonial head tax applied to Chinese but not yuánzhùmín. Around 4000 migrants or 10% of the island’s Han population are killed; one historian considers this “the first Chinese antiwestern uprising in modern history.”

➤ 1662: From his base in Xiamen, Zheng Chenggong leads an army that joins forces with both Han migrants and yuánzhùmín (whom he persuaded to turn on their erstwhile allies) and successfully expels the Dutch from Taiwan and Penghu. There he establishes the Kingdom of Tungning (東寧國) with the aim of restoring the Ming Dynasty in alliance with other loyalist strongholds in the south of mainland China. He dies shortly after and is succeeded by his son Zheng Jing (鄭經). At its height, the kingdom would control maritime routes between the East and South China Seas and maintain a trade network spanning from Japan and Korea to Southeast Asia.

  • In order to starve out the Tungning Kingdom, the Qing Dynasty issued its own ban on maritime trade and coastal settlement in Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, even as far north as Shandong province – often as far as 25 kilometers inland. With Dutch help, Qing forces finally managed to capture Xiamen and the other Ming loyalist bases on the mainland by 1663 (though Zheng Jing would briefly retake them during the 1673-81 Revolt of the Three Feudatories). Ironically this “Great Clearance” policy had the effect of triggering another wave of migration to Taiwan, bringing its Han population to at least 100,000.

  • Zheng Chenggong is widely revered today on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but for markedly different reasons. In the mainland he is regarded as a hero for liberating Taiwan from Dutch colonial rule and thereby inflicting the first major defeat of a Western imperial power at Chinese hands. In Taiwan on the other hand, the Ming loyalist Kingdom of Tungning is seen by Kuomintang supporters as a forerunner of the post-1949 Republic of China (with the PRC playing an analogous role to the Qing Dynasty), and rather ahistorically by independence supporters as a specifically “Taiwanese” proto-state.

➤ 1683: Qing forces under the command of Admiral Shi Lang (施琅), a former Zheng loyalist, take advantage of political turmoil after the death of Zheng Jing to mount an invasion of Penghu and Taiwan. They force the Kingdom of Tungning to surrender, putting an end to the last major outpost of Ming restorationism. (Small pockets of Ming loyalist resistance would sporadically arise for another century or so.) The length and severity of the conflict underscored Taiwan’s strategic location and importance as a base for foreign and domestic attacks on mainland China.

➤ 1684 May: The Qing Dynasty incorporates Taiwan as a prefecture of Fujian province, located right across the strait from the island. 

  • During the next two centuries, the population of Taiwan grew to around three million as the rice, sugar, and fishing industries expanded. Significant numbers of Chinese merchants and laborers would also migrate seasonally between Taiwan and their home villages on the mainland, cultivating cross-strait trade without necessarily settling permanently. 

  • Qing authorities generally placed high importance on maintaining order and preventing conflict between Chinese migrants and yuánzhùmín. Early on they repatriated many soldiers and refugees who had left the mainland for Taiwan during the war. They also imposed a permit system to restrict migration from the mainland (especially of full families), though it was often ignored by local officials and would be fully lifted in 1875. Most notably, from 1739-1875 Chinese migrants were banned from entering or acquiring land in the mountains of central and eastern Taiwan; during that period no uprisings by highland yuánzhùmín were recorded. On the other hand the lowland yuánzhùmín were largely sinicized and/or assimilated into Han culture, often through intermarriage when only single Chinese men were allowed to migrate.

  • That said, intra-ethnic tensions among Han Taiwanese erupted into violence so often that they inspired the phrase “三年一小反, 五年一大乱” (lit. “every three years a minor uprising, every five years a major rebellion”). Many migrants tended to identify with their original hometowns, religious sects, or language groups and were suspicious of those from different locales. When they arrived, they brought with them clan feuds and other rivalries from the Chinese mainland. Residual Ming loyalist sentiment also contributed to the unrest, most notably in the large-scale rebellions of Zhu Yigui (朱一貴) in 1721 and Lin Shuangwen (林爽文) in 1786. Yuánzhùmín often served as reliable allies and auxiliaries of the Qing government during such intra-ethnic conflict.

b. Century of Humiliation, Japanese Colonization, and World War II arrow_upward

➤ 1839 September 4: Qing viceroy Lin Zexu (林則徐) seizes and destroys thousands of tons of opium in Guangzhou, much of it belonging to private British merchants, in accordance with an edict banning the narcotic. He also orders a naval blockade on foreign shipping in the Pearl River. In response Britain launches the First Opium War, destroying the blockade and thoroughly outgunning the much larger but technologically inferior Qing forces. China is defeated and forced to sign the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which requires it to compensate Britain for the war, cede Hong Kong as a British colony, and open five additional ports to foreign trade. Britain also gains “most favored nation” trading status. 

  • Prior to the war, China had remained mostly closed to foreign trade. Highly sought-after Chinese goods could only be exchanged for European silver through the port of Guangzhou, causing a massive trade imbalance between Britain and China. Defying the official Chinese ban, the British cultivated huge quantities of opium in India to sell to Chinese smugglers to reverse the imbalance. 

  • In the last year of the war, two British ships (the Nerbudda and the Ann) were shipwrecked on the coast of Taiwan. Local Qing officials detained and executed most of their surviving crews in Tainan, notwithstanding a failed rescue attempt and bombardment of Keelung by the warship HMS Nimrod.

  • The Opium War marked China’s first-ever defeat by a Western colonial power, inaugurating the so-called Century of Humiliation. The United States, France, and Russia would soon extract similar concessions from China in the “unequal treaties” of Wangxia (1844), Huangpu (1844), and Aigun (1858) respectively.

➤ 1850 December: The Taiping Rebellion erupts with an anti-Qing uprising in Guangxi province that rapidly spreads to large swathes of southern China. At its peak, Hong Xiuquan’s (洪秀全) Taiping Heavenly Kingdom would govern around 30 million people from its capital in Nanjing under a program of radical land reform, social egalitarianism, syncretic Christianity, and anti-Manchu agitation. A comparable number would die in the Qing’s 14-year war to put down the rebellion, which forced the ailing dynasty to enlist the aid of Britain and France despite having just fought them in the Second Opium War.

  • Liu Mingchuan (劉銘傳), who would later help repel French forces from Taiwan and serve as the first governor of Taiwan province, first made his name as a vice commander of the Huai Army which was created by future statesman and diplomat Li Hongzhang (李鴻章) to help suppress the Taiping Rebellion.

  • The large-scale unrest throughout south China severely impacted the supply of rice to the southeastern coast, increasing demand for rice from Taiwan and inducing U.S. traders to forcibly reopen the island to foreign trade.

➤ 1856 October 8: Dissatisfied with the outcome of the First Opium War, Britain and France (with some U.S. and Russian support) launch the Second Opium War in order to force more trade concessions and increase Chinese opium imports. The war ends with the signing of the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin and the 1860 Convention of Beijing. Major consequences of the Chinese defeat include (1) establishment of British, French, U.S., and Russian embassies in the closed city of Beijing, (2) compensation for the war paid to Britain and France, (3) the opening of ten more ports and expanded rights in China for foreign merchants and missionaries, (4) forced legalization of the opium trade in China, and (5) Russian annexation of Outer Manchuria. 

  • British forces used Hong Kong as a base throughout the war, establishing a historical precedent for imperialist powers to carve colonial footholds out of China and turn them into launchpads for further expansion.

  • British and French troops infamously looted and burned Yuanming Yuan (圆明园, also known as the Old Summer Palace) at the end of the war, nominally in retaliation for China’s mistreatment of opium smugglers from those countries.

  • In the aftermath of the Second Opium War, Portugal took the opportunity to formally cement its colonization of Macau with the Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Beijing (1887).

➤ 1857: U.S. commissioner to China Peter Parker submits a proposal to Washington, D.C. calling on the U.S. to annex Taiwan. Cajoled by U.S. merchants who had established commercial outposts on the island, Parker argued that it was unlikely for the Qing Empire to retain sovereignty over Taiwan for long, and that “the world will be better for [Taiwan] coming under a civilized power.”

➤ 1867: The Rover, a U.S. merchant ship, is shipwrecked off the coast of Taiwan and its crew killed by local Paiwan people in retaliation for earlier massacres by white intruders. U.S. consul Charles Le Gendre organizes a failed punitive expedition against the Paiwan in which a Marine commander is killed. He would later condemn Qing China as “semi-civilized” for its refusal to control the yuánzhùmín, and advise the Japanese government to colonize Ryukyu and Taiwan instead.

➤ 1870s: The 1868 Meiji Restoration leads the Japanese Empire into a headlong drive for Western-style colonial modernization. As a first step, it progressively colonizes the Kingdom of Ryukyu. 

  • Ryukyu (琉球) was an independent kingdom located on an island chain stretching northeast of Taiwan towards Japan. It had long been a tributary state of Ming China, routinely serving as a conduit for indirect trade with Japan during their respective periods of isolation. The Tokugawa shogunate first invaded Ryukyu in 1609, forcing it to become a vassal state of Japan while it nominally continued to pay tribute to China. 

  • 1871: Fifty-four Ryukyuan sailors are shipwrecked in southeastern Taiwan and killed by local Paiwan people. Local Hakka Taiwanese rescue twelve survivors who eventually manage to escape the island. The reason for the massacre (now known as the Mudan Incident) is unknown, but historians suspect it was due to cultural miscommunication.

  • 1874: Japan launches a large punitive expedition to invade southern Taiwan, claiming that the slain Ryukyuan sailors were “Japanese nationals” and that yuánzhùmín territory is “terra nullius,” being outside effective Qing control. It withdraws its forces only after China pays a large indemnity and recognizes Japanese suzerainty over Ryukyu.

  • 1879: Ryukyu is fully annexed and incorporated into the Japanese Empire as Okinawa Prefecture. To this day, local resistance continues to Japanese rule and (since 1945) the heavy U.S. military presence imposed on Okinawa.

➤ 1875: After the Mudan Incident and subsequent Japanese invasion, the Qing government decides that its previous policy toward yuánzhùmín land claims had left large parts of Taiwan too “empty” and vulnerable to foreign encroachment. Restrictions on both internal movement and external migration of Han Chinese from the mainland are fully lifted, but attempts to settle them in mountain areas are half-hearted and ineffective. In the next two decades over 100,000 highland yuánzhùmín formally submit to Qing rule but their ways of life remain largely unaffected.

➤ 1884 August–1885 April: The French Empire intensifies its colonial aggression against Vietnam. The ruling Nguyễn dynasty requests Chinese aid and the Qing government sends armies from several provinces to fight in what becomes known as the Sino-French or Tonkin War. In response, French forces destroy a large part of the Chinese navy in Fuzhou and later invade Taiwan.

  • General Tang Jingsong (唐景崧) of the Yunnan Army persuades Chinese warlord Liu Yongfu (劉永福), leader of the private Black Flag Army, to join the war against the French on the mainland. Liu Mingchuan leads the Huai (or Anhui) Army against French troops in Taiwan, over two decades after it was first famously deployed to help crush the Taiping Rebellion. These armies play decisive roles in defeating French forces on land, but China is forced to negotiate a peace settlement due to the relative weakness of its navy.

  • The partial French blockade and occupation of Taiwan is arguably the main pressure point that forces China to sue for peace, due to the threat it poses to the entire southeast coast. The Qing government places the utmost importance on securing France’s withdrawal from the island, and in exchange it recognizes French colonial rule over northern Vietnam in the 1885 Treaty of Tianjin.

➤ 1887: Taiwan becomes a full province of China. Liu Mingchuan, who commanded the Huai/Anhui Army against French forces in Taiwan in the Sino-French War, is appointed the first governor. He lays significant groundwork for Taiwan’s defense, infrastructure, and development, but resigns in 1891 for health reasons and many of his projects are subsequently abandoned.

➤ 1893: Taipei becomes the permanent capital of the province of Taiwan.

➤ 1894: Tang Jingsong, who commanded the Yunnan Army during the Sino-French War, becomes the governor of Taiwan. 

➤ 1894 July 25–1895 April 17: Japan defeats China in the First Sino-Japanese War, fought primarily in Korea and Manchuria over the question of Joseon Korea’s tributary relationship with the Qing. The Treaty of Shimonoseki forces China to cede Taiwan and Penghu to Japan, give up suzerainty over Korea, pay compensation for the war, and grant Japan “most favored nation” status in foreign trade.

  • The Treaty of Shimonoseki originally ceded the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan as well, but Russia, Germany, and France launched the Triple Intervention, which forced Japan to give it up in exchange for more compensation from China. In particular, Russia’s competing designs on Manchuria and Korea would later lead directly to the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.

  • Li Hongzhang, the former leader of the Huai Army during the Taiping Rebellion and close friend of former Taiwan governor Liu Mingchuan, commanded most Chinese military forces during the war. He was primarily responsible for negotiating and signing the Treaty of Shimonoseki, and only acquiesced to the loss of Taiwan and Penghu under threat of renewed war.

  • When news of the treaty reached Taiwan, there was extremely fierce local resistance to the Japanese takeover. In fact, the formal ceremony to cede Chinese sovereignty was originally slated to take place in Taipei with Li Hongzhang’s son presiding, but Li and his family were so hated in Taiwan due to his association with the treaty that the ceremony had to be held at sea.

➤ 1895 May 23: Governor Tang Jingsong, with the support of local officials, declares independence in defiance of Japan’s claims on the island. They proclaim the short-lived Republic of Formosa (臺灣民主國), with Tang inaugurated in Taipei as its first president. Their national motto, “Forever Qing” (永清), reflects their loyalty to Qing China. Tang hopes that the formation of the republic will delay the Japanese takeover and perhaps even start inter-imperialist conflict over Taiwan.

  • Tang Jingsong invites his friend Liu Yongfu (commander of the Black Flag Army in the Sino-French War) to lead Qing troops in Taiwan against the Japanese invasion. Tang and Liu organize a Chinese resistance force but are swiftly overwhelmed at Keelung, prompting Tang to abandon Taiwan and immediately flee to the mainland. A month later, Liu Yongfu assumes the presidency of the Republic of Formosa in Tainan.

  • Many of the Qing troops in Taiwan are unmotivated to fight the Japanese and surrender quickly. However, the invaders would face stubborn local Taiwanese militias and civilian insurgencies for decades afterwards, responding with ruthless slaughter of villagers and complete destruction of towns. This would only strengthen Taiwanese support for the resistance. 

  • 1895 October 10: Liu Yongfu offers to surrender on the condition that Taiwanese locals and Chinese troops be spared from punishment, but the Japanese refuse.

  • 1895 October 21: Liu Yongfu flees Taiwan on a British merchant ship, the Republic of Formosa is overthrown, and Japanese governor-general Kabayama Sukenori is installed as the new authority. In the next two years, many Taiwanese residents flee to mainland China or into the mountains.

➤ 1896 March: In response to continued Taiwanese resistance, the Japanese imperial government enacts Law 63, a controversial law that gives governor-general Kabayama’s executive ordinances the same weight as Japanese law and effectively grants him supreme legislative authority over Taiwan. Kabayama uses the law to enforce strict military measures for controlling the Taiwanese population. Although Kabayama’s rule lasts just over a year, Law 63 would continue to be extended in increments until 1906 and allow his successors the same degree of authority over Taiwan.

  • For Japan, Taiwan served as a source of raw materials and agricultural exports and a captive market for manufactured goods from the metropole. The island’s strategic location could also be used to defend the Ryukyus and serve as a base for further expansion into China and Southeast Asia. Finally it was held up as a poster child for Japan’s supposedly more beneficent and enlightened model of colonization compared to Western imperial powers. All of these plans required rapid and effective suppression of Taiwanese resistance.

  • Over the next few decades, Taiwan’s economy would be completely reoriented to serve Japanese imperial development. Infrastructural advances like road and rail construction, port building, electrification, and the establishment of financial and communication services served primarily to benefit Japanese industry. Agricultural products like sugar, rice, opium, tobacco, and camphor were monopolized and exported to the metropole by Japanese companies that controlled almost all shipping in Taiwan. 

  • To raise money for Taiwanese development, Japan relied in large part on land tax revenues. By 1901, the colonial government had completed a land reinvestigation project and redrawn the Qing-era boundaries that had safeguarded yuánzhùmín land claims, opening up significantly more land to taxation. 

  • Some Japanese-language schools were opened for Taiwanese students, but education remained largely segregated and few students had opportunities to pursue secondary school or college. As a result, most Taiwanese students continued to attend Chinese schools established under the Qing government.

➤ 1896 April: The Opium Production Office, which would later build the first modern laboratories and factories in Taiwan, is opened in Taipei to establish and enforce a Japanese monopoly on the production, distribution, and sale of opium. 

➤ 1896 June: Despite the collapse of the Republic of Formosa, resistance fighters in Yunlin county refuse to give up and continue to attack the Japanese occupation. In retaliation Japanese forces massacre an estimated 6000 people and burn thousands of homes. The resistance continues to fight for almost seven years until May 1902, when more than 250 fighters are persuaded to surrender at a formal ceremony. They are massacred with machine guns as soon as they lay down their arms.

➤ 1897: Japanese imperialists institute the shinshō award system to promote Taiwanese residents with unique wealth, social status, or community service into colonial management positions (local police, household surveillance, etc.). The policy is instrumental in building a cadre of Taiwanese collaborators that would help Japan manage the island.

➤ 1899-1900: U.S. Secretary of State John Hay suggests the non-binding Open Door Policy to establish an open market in all of China that would safeguard the economic interests of all imperial powers there, rather than carving the country at large into directly administered colonial spheres of influence.

➤ 1899 October 18–1901 September 7: Fierce popular resentment of foreign domination in China (especially by Christian missionaries) explodes in the so-called Boxer Rebellion. For 55 days, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists – known in the West as the “Boxers” – besiege the Beijing Legation Quarter, where the embassies of western imperialist powers were forcibly opened after the Second Opium War. The rebellion is suppressed by the invading Eight Nation Alliance, a military coalition between the United States, Britain, France, Japan, Russia, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. After defeating the Qing army and ending the siege, invading troops embark on a year-long punitive expedition in the capital and the surrounding countryside. The rebellion comes to an end with the signing of the Boxer Protocol, which decrees a massive compensation payment in gold to the foreign powers, execution of any Chinese person found to be participating in anti-foreign societies, and expanded military occupation rights for imperial powers. 

➤ 1907 November: In an anti-colonial uprising known as the Beipu Incident, a group of Han and yuánzhùmín revolutionaries kill 57 Japanese officers and their families in the small Taiwanese coal mining town of Beipu. In response, the Japanese military massacres over a hundred people and decimates the town, leaving many children orphaned and families too afraid to look for the bodies of their loved ones.

➤ 1911 October 10–1912 February 12: A decade of anti-Qing uprisings culminates in the Xinhai Revolution, putting an end to the ruling dynasty and with it two millennia of dynastic rule in China. The Republic of China (中華民國, ROC) is proclaimed with Sun Yat-sen (better known in Chinese as Sun Zhongshan 孫中山) as its first president. Sun’s esteemed reputation derived from his leadership of the Tongmenghui, which had coordinated anti-Qing activity throughout China and among diasporic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, Japan, and the West. While he was not actively involved in the revolution itself, virtually all political tendencies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait continue to revere him as a “Father of the Nation” and lay claim to his legacy.

  • After just two months Sun cedes the presidency of the ROC to the opportunistic Qing general Yuan Shikai (袁世凱), who in return secures the abdication of the last Qing emperor Puyi (溥儀). Yuan’s dictatorial rule would result in an abortive Second Revolution in 1913, the dissolution of the National Assembly, and his self-proclamation as emperor in 1915 (which would trigger yet another civil war). After his abdication and death in 1916, central state authority as vested in the so-called Beiyang government collapses through much of China. This marks the beginning of the Warlord Era (1916-28), when (often foreign-backed) military despots wage near-constant regional civil wars for territorial control.

➤ 1913–1914: In a bitter two-year campaign of land invasion, aerial attack, and naval bombardment, Japanese forces quell fierce resistance by Bunun and Atayal yuánzhùmín to encroachment on their land. The colonial government had established a mountainous reservation (significantly smaller than during the Qing era) to limit direct conflict with highland peoples, but Japanese settlers repeatedly violated its boundaries as they sought to extract ever-expanding quantities of timber.

➤ 1915 January 18: Expecting Western powers to be primarily focused on European affairs during World War I, Japan secretly issues Twenty-One Demands to Yuan Shikai that would entail a massive expansion of Japanese control in China while curtailing the growth of Western colonial holdings. The demands are divided into five groups; the seven most aggressive ones in Group V would give Japan such extensive control over finance and policing as to reduce China to a de facto protectorate. One of the Group V demands would create a virtual Japanese monopoly on investment in Fujian, effectively extending its colonial rule from Taiwan to the mainland.

  • Wary of potential conflict with Western powers, Japan orders China to keep the details of the demands secret. China ignores the threat, leaks the text to the press after negotiations break down, and uses the ensuing inter-imperialist conflict to eliminate all the Group V demands before signing the agreement.

  • The United States and Britain in particular are displeased with what they see as Japanese attempts to supplant Western imperialism as the dominant power in Asia, a violation of the Open Door Policy that was first proposed and informally adopted in 1899.

➤ 1915: Han Chinese and yuánzhùmín unite under the leadership of Yu Qingfang (余清芳) to launch the largest armed uprising against Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, known as the Tapani or Xilai’an Incident. Inspired by a mixture of anti-colonial and quasi-socialist aspirations with religious millenarianism (reminiscent of the Taiping and Boxer uprisings), the rebels storm numerous police stations and briefly declare an independent state (the Tai Republic) before the revolt is suppressed.

  • The estimated number of Taiwanese casualties during the initial Japanese colonization period (1895 to 1915) ranges from 40,000 to 90,000 people killed.

➤ 1919 May 4: The May Fourth Movement begins with anti-imperialist student protests in Beijing and expands into a nationwide student-worker uprising against the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and its transfer of German colonies in China to Japan. This betrayal by China’s nominal Western allies severely discredits liberal democracy and Wilsonian “self-determination,” to the benefit of Marxism and the Soviet model of national liberation. A number of revolutionary formations emerging out of this movement would later cohere into the Communist Party of China (CPC).

  • China had joined World War I on the side of the Allied Powers in 1917 on the condition that after the war, foreign privileges in China would be abolished, the German colony of Shandong would be returned, and the Twenty-One Demands would be annulled. When these promises were not fulfilled, China refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles and negotiated a separate peace with Germany.

  • China’s main contribution to the war effort was the 140,000-strong Chinese Labor Corps, the largest and longest-serving non-European labor contingent in WWI. CLC veterans who stayed in France after the war later hosted future CPC leaders Zhou Enlai (周恩来) and Deng Xiaoping (邓小平).

  • The May Fourth Movement grew out of the earlier New Culture Movement, a progressive anti-traditionalist revolt that had cohered around the magazine New Youth (started in 1915 by future CPC co-founder Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀).

➤ 1919 October 10: After returning from exile in Japan, Sun Yat-sen founds the Kuomintang (中國國民黨, KMT) or Nationalist Party in Shanghai. He had previously founded a parliamentary party of the same name in 1912, which won the first National Assembly election and was soon banned by Yuan Shikai. This newer iteration of the KMT – the same one which survives to this day – is built not to contest elections but to wage a military campaign to liberate China from warlord and imperialist rule, starting from its base in Guangzhou. It would be guided ideologically by Sun’s “Three Principles of the People” (三民主義, commonly translated as nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood or socialism) and enjoy generous assistance from the USSR as a progressive bourgeois-nationalist liberation movement.

➤ 1920 July 16: Influenced by the revolutionary political consciousness among mainland Chinese youth, Taiwanese students studying in Japan start Taiwan Youth, a publication inspired by the mainland’s New Youth magazine. They advocate for rebellion against feudalism and Japanese colonial rule.

➤ 1921 July 1: The Communist Party of China (中国共产党) is founded under the leadership of Li Dazhao (李大釗) and Chen Duxiu. Neither is able to attend the first National Congress in Shanghai, but 27-year-old Mao Zedong (毛泽东) is there to represent the Hunan party branch.

➤ 1921 October 17: Some founders of the Taiwan Youth magazine establish the Taiwanese Cultural Association (臺灣文化協會, TCA), which becomes for a time the leading force agitating against Japanese colonialism and for democratic self-rule in Taiwan.

  • One of the younger TCA members, Cai Xiaoqian (蔡孝乾, born 1908), would later join the CPC while studying in mainland China. He would become the only Taiwanese party member to participate in the Red Army’s Long March and would later return to organize the underground communist movement in Taiwan.

➤ 1923–27: Under strong pressure from their Soviet sponsors, the KMT and CPC form their First United Front in order to wage a national democratic revolution against warlordism and imperial rule. This uneasy cross-class alliance at first survives the death of Sun Yat-sen and his succession by his far more conservative, anti-communist, and U.S.-influenced lieutenant Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in 1926. That same year the United Front launches its long-anticipated Northern Expedition from Guangzhou, advancing rapidly through south China before coming to a sudden and bloody end with Chiang’s April 1927 massacre of over 5000 communists in Shanghai.

  • Chiang’s anti-communist purge marked the beginning of the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, which in this first phase would rage unabated until 1936. Although the Northern Expedition would overthrow the Beiyang regime in 1928 and nominally reunify China under the KMT’s one-party rule, the latter never secured full and undisputed control over the entire claimed territory of the ROC from its capital in Nanjing. Under Mao Zedong’s leadership the communists would quickly take advantage of local power vacuums to establish revolutionary base areas, guided by the new strategy of “people’s war” rooted in the peasant masses.

➤ 1927 July 10: The Taiwanese People’s Party (臺灣民眾黨, TPP) is founded to advance Taiwanese cultural, educational, and (limited) political autonomy within the Japanese empire under cross-class leadership, gradually adopting a more left-nationalist and socialist program inspired by Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People. 

  • Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水), a founding member of the TCA and TPP, was especially inspired by Sun Yat-sen. His ideology became more socialist as he grew disillusioned with “legitimate” (i.e. Japanese-approved) political reforms. Before his death in 1931, his final recorded words were: “Taiwan’s social revolution is in its third phase, and the victory of the proletariat is imminent. Our young comrades must fight hard, and our old comrades must band together and help our young comrades to liberate our compatriots.”

  • Lin Hsien-tang (林獻堂) was another founding member of the TCA and TPP. He resigned from the party in protest against its socialist turn, believing it would alienate the many wealthy, highly-educated landowners in the TCA. In 1930, he founded the Taiwan Federation for Local Autonomy to advocate for improved colonial management and more Taiwanese autonomy in colonial government. It achieved some limited electoral concessions and was the only group to survive the 1931 crackdown on anticolonial organizations, but quickly became discredited in Taiwanese society. On the advice of the Japanese colonial governor, the federation voluntarily disbanded in 1937 at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

➤ 1928 April 15: The Taiwanese Communist Party (臺灣共產黨, TCP) is founded – originally as a branch of the Japanese Communist Party – with the aim of full liberation from Japanese rule, under worker-peasant leadership and in coordination with the CPC’s anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle on the mainland. 

  • The TCP saw much success in organizing with the Taiwan Peasants’ Union and later heavily influenced the left-wing turn of the Taiwanese Cultural Association and the Taiwanese People’s Party under Chiang Wei-shui.

  • Compared to the TPP, Japanese repression of the Communist Party was much more intense from the onset, with the headquarters raided, charter confiscated, and several members arrested just ten days after its formation. Some members fled to China and joined the CPC, but at least 49 were arrested and executed by the Japanese. One party founder, Xie Xuehong (谢雪红), was imprisoned and tortured for 13 years but would continue leading the Taiwanese communist movement after her release, this time against the KMT.

  • In 1933 Weng Zesheng (翁澤生), another member of the TCP, was caught by the KMT in mainland China and released to the Japanese, who imprisoned and tortured him until his 1939 release due to illness. He died soon afterwards.

➤ 1930: Seediq yuánzhùmín fighters under the leadership of Mona Rudao (莫那·魯道) launch the last large-scale armed uprising against Japanese rule in Taiwan, known as the Wushe Incident. Colonial authorities brutally suppress it through the use of poison gas – arguably the first known deployment of chemical weapons in East Asia. The Taiwanese People’s Party reports this war crime to the League of Nations, bringing down intensified persecution on the party.

➤ 1931: Amid escalating repression and militarism throughout Japan and its colonial empire, the Taiwanese Cultural Association, Taiwanese People’s Party, and Taiwanese Communist Party are all banned or forcibly disbanded.

➤ 1931 September 18: The Japanese Kwantung Army launches an invasion of Manchuria, using as pretext a false-flag attack known in the West as the Mukden Incident. By February 1932, they complete their conquest of the northeastern Chinese region and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo under the nominal leadership of Puyi, the last Qing emperor.

➤ 1935: Under the control of large Japanese companies, Taiwan undergoes intensive industrialization, transportation, and electrification in preparation for a full-scale invasion of mainland China.

➤ 1936 December 12–26: After a decade of civil war, KMT generals Zhang Xueliang (張學良) and Yang Hucheng (楊虎城) kidnap Chiang Kai-shek in Xi’an and force him to agree to a Second United Front with the CPC to oppose Japanese imperialism. Chiang had long hoped to subdue the CPC before confronting Japan, but this was deeply unpopular among ordinary KMT troops who resented being forced to fight their countrymen and believed that Chiang was ignoring the Japanese threat. Despite the alliance, KMT-CPC clashes would continue throughout the war with Japan and the Second United Front would end with the New Fourth Army Incident of 1941.

➤ 1937: Japanese colonial authorities introduce a new “Japanization” or “imperialization” policy called kōminka (皇民化, lit. “becoming subjects of the emperor”) that aims to forcibly assimilate all Han Chinese and some yuánzhùmín into Japanese society. This entails bans on Chinese-language press and education, to be replaced with Japanese; the adoption of Japanese names; renunciation of Chinese ancestry for the adoption of new Japanese ancestors; and suppression of Han and yuánzhùmín spiritual customs in favor of State Shinto and emperor worship. There was also heavy emphasis on volunteering for the Imperial Japanese military and dying for the Japanese emperor. By some estimates, approximately 7% of Taiwan’s population underwent Japanization.

  • Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), who later became the fourth president of the Republic of China, was perhaps the most well-known individual to undergo kōminka. He adopted the Japanese name Iwasato Masao (岩里政男), his family was heavily involved with the Japanese colonial police in Taiwan, and during the war he voluntarily enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army.

  • Japanese cultivation of a “native” Taiwanese elite was essential for a functioning colonial government because colonists were vastly outnumbered, even in the cities. Via the hokō system, the colonial police recruited local headmen and leaders of local community organizations to effectively monitor the lives of all Taiwanese residents. 

  • The kōminka policy was an extension and intensification of the Japanese dōka policy (“assimilation”), which aimed to subordinate Chinese / Taiwanese identity beneath a dominant Japanese identity. Japanese colonial officials disagreed on how best to present Taiwan as a model colony compared to Euro-American colonies in Asia. Relative liberals like politician ltagaki Taisuke and governor-general Den Kenjiro saw assimilation and eventual equality as a vehicle for stable Japanese rule in Taiwan. Others such as governor-general Akashi Motojiro supported strict segregation and accepted assimilation only insofar as it served Japan’s military goals. Though there was some relaxation after armed anti-colonial resistance was subdued, the Japanese colonial government enacted increasingly harsh assimilation policies in the prelude to the Second Sino-Japanese War.

  • Lin Hsien-tang of the largely discredited Taiwan Federation for Local Autonomy was an ardent assimilationist and friend of ltagaki Taisuke. They together founded the Taiwan Assimilation Society (Taiwan Dōkakai) to advocate for “Japanification” and assimilation, which was met with enthusiastic support among Taiwanese shinshō awardees. However, the organization was fiercely attacked and quickly dissolved by the Japanese government and colonial officials, who opposed the extension of constitutional rights reserved for Japanese colonists.

➤ 1937 July 7: Japan launches a full-scale invasion of China following a skirmish in Beijing known in the West as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, marking the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

  • Taiwan became an important logistics and industrial center for Japan during the war. During the war, essential raw materials such as bauxite, iron ore, crude oil, and rubber commandeered from western Southeast Asian colonies would be processed in Taiwan before being shipped to Japan. 

  • As in other Japanese colonies, opium production in Taiwan (monopolized by the Opium Production Office) also became a key revenue source for the Japanese empire, which ran massively profitable drug rings in mainland China before and during the war.

  • The entire colony was also socially reshaped under the kōminka policy. To power its war machine, the empire employed its Taiwanese subjects first within military and economic support infrastructure, then as volunteer soldiers, and by the final years of the war as conscripts in the Imperial Japanese Army. In total some 200,000 Taiwanese volunteered or were conscripted into the IJA, including about 80,000 in combat roles primarily in the Philippines and mainland China. By 1940 it was common for Taiwanese youths to attach "desires written in [their own] blood" (kessho shigan) to their applications for military service. 

  • Taiwanese soldiers often encountered less “Japanized'' colonial subjects during the war and began to believe they deserved greater standing within the empire by virtue of the “imperialization” they had undergone. Civilians confined to the island were less inclined to such ambitions, often turning to Chinese nationalism as even the most moderate anticolonial forces in Taiwan proper had been ruthlessly suppressed. 

  • Throughout the war Japan used Taiwan as a launchpad for attacks on Guangdong, Hainan island, and after Pearl Harbor the Philippines as well. From 1944 to 1945 U.S. air raids killed anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 Taiwanese civilians, and Allied attacks on Japanese shipping effectively isolated the island from the rest of the Japanese empire.

  • Japan’s surrender came as a surprise to many in Taiwan. Most of the population celebrated and some even took the opportunity to exact revenge on Japanese colonial officials and Taiwanese collaborators. Some Taiwanese volunteers in the Imperial Japanese military were killed at their stations or committed suicide; Japan would refuse to repatriate or compensate any of them for their service. Huge numbers of people turned out to welcome the Chinese Nationalist forces as they arrived in mid-October.

c. Post-World War II, Cold War Containment, and Military Dictatorship arrow_upward

➤ 1943 November 26: The Republic of China, the United States, and the United Kingdom issue the Cairo Declaration, which calls for the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan and Manchuria after Japan’s defeat. 

➤ 1945 July 26: The Allied Powers put forward the Potsdam Declaration, which outlines the terms for Japan’s unconditional surrender. These include a commitment that the terms of the Cairo Declaration – including Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan – will be fulfilled.  

➤ 1945 August 14: The Soviet Union and Republic of China conclude the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Among other provisions it commits the USSR to “non-interference in the internal affairs” of China – implying the end of direct support to the CPC (though this in fact continued) – and the ROC to formally recognize Mongolia, which had been de facto independent from China since the 1911 revolution.

➤ 1945 September 2: Japan unconditionally surrenders to the Allied Powers after the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a lightning Soviet offensive that liberates all of Manchuria and northern Korea in under two weeks. The instrument of surrender accepts the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, including retrocession of Taiwan to China. 

➤ 1945 October 10: After several weeks of negotiations in Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong (under U.S. and Soviet pressure respectively) sign the Double Tenth peace agreement. On paper it commits the KMT and CPC to recognize each other’s legitimacy, pursue peaceful reconstruction, and work toward multi-party elections. In practice it collapses almost immediately and fighting resumes in early 1946, inaugurating the final and decisive phase of the Chinese Civil War.

  • Around the same time, the U.S. began directly intervening in the civil war by deploying 53,000 Marines to Hebei and Shandong provinces as part of Operation Beleaguer. They repatriated around 600,000 Japanese and Korean nationals and ordered occupying Japanese troops to remain at their posts until U.S. or KMT forces could accept their surrender. This was done to prevent the Japanese from surrendering to communist forces and thus strengthening the latter’s position. Over the next few years the CPC would fight several direct skirmishes with the U.S. occupation, which grew increasingly unpopular (including with the soldiers themselves) until the last troops were withdrawn in June 1949.

➤ 1945 October 25: KMT official Chen Yi (陳儀) receives a signed surrender from Japanese forces on Taiwan, proclaims Taiwan Retrocession Day and begins to reorganize the island to return to its original status as a Chinese province. Chiang Kai-shek subsequently appoints him the first ROC governor of Taiwan, but his mismanagement leads to the February 28 massacre and he is dismissed from his position soon after. (Chiang would later accuse him of collaboration with the communists and have him executed in 1950.)

➤ 1946 July: Cai Xiaoqian, formerly of the Taiwanese Cultural Association, returns to Taiwan to organize an underground communist resistance as secretary of the CPC Taiwan Provincial Working Committee. Under his leadership the party begins to grow a mass base through the Changhua peasant rent reduction struggle and the Taipei railway workers' movement. 

➤ 1947 February 28: Growing local discontent with KMT rule in Taiwan leads to open conflict after state officers strike a widow accused of selling contraband cigarettes in Taipei. Witnessing the act, a crowd forms and begins to protest, leading an officer to fire into the crowd and kill one bystander. Protests grow into open rebellion against the KMT government and the creation of de facto civilian government structures and armed militias. The uprising, now known as the 228 Incident or February 28 massacre, was eventually violently suppressed by the ROC military in March 1947. Estimates of civilian casualties range from 18,000 to 28,000, many of the victims poor wàishěngrén who bore the brunt of the anti-KMT anger. 

  • One especially notable figure in these events is Xie Xuehong, who had earlier co-founded the short-lived Taiwanese Communist Party (1928-31) and during the rebellion organized a guerrilla force called the 27 Brigade. After the uprising is crushed, she flees to Hong Kong and then to mainland China, where she joins the CPC and establishes the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League (台湾民主自治同盟). Since 1949 the League has been one of eight minor legal parties in the CPC-led United Front. 

  • At the time, many anti-KMT protests in Taiwan (particularly those led by the student movement) strongly identified with the communist ideals animating resistance to KMT rule in mainland China. The 228 Incident involved many tendencies and was by no means exclusively communist-led, but underground party cells grew in the wake of its suppression. There were 1300 CPC members in Taiwan by the time their mainland comrades secured victory in 1949.

➤ 1947 November: The ROC adopts a new Constitution (still in effect today) and holds nominally multi-party elections to a new National Assembly, in an effort to legitimize the KMT’s increasingly embattled rule with a façade of constitutional democracy. With large areas of the country under communist control and state legitimacy cratering, the KMT officially wins over 80% of the seats on a voter turnout of just 4-8%. 

  • Around half the National Assembly delegates would retreat to Taiwan with the rump ROC government in 1949. With elections suspended under martial law they would continue to serve until 1991 (becoming known as the 萬年國會 or “Ten Thousand Year Assembly”), the vast majority of them nominally “representing” long-lost constituencies on the mainland.

➤ 1948 January 1: Left-wing members of the KMT, increasingly incensed at Chiang Kai-shek’s right-wing politics and dependence on U.S. support, break away and form the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang (中国国民党革命委员会, RCCK). They name Song Qingling (宋庆龄), the third wife of late ROC president Sun Yat-sen, as Honorary Chairwoman of the Revolutionary Committee. Since 1949 the RCCK has been another of the eight minor legal parties in the CPC-led United Front.

➤ 1948 December 2: Chiang Kai-shek, sensing the KMT’s imminent loss of mainland China to the CPC, secretly begins to move China’s currency reserves to Taiwan with the help of lieutenant general Wu Song-ching (吳嵩慶), head of the ROC finance and budget department. Gold, silver, and foreign exchange held by banks throughout mainland China would be secretly shipped or flown to Taiwan over the next 12 months – in total several million taels of precious metals and U.S. dollars that would be used to back the New Taiwan Dollar and stabilize KMT rule in Taiwan. Some of this money had been taken from the Chinese middle class earlier in the war with the promise of currency reform and restoring China’s financial stability. 

➤ 1949 April 6: The KMT starts mass arrests of college students at National Taiwan University who were staging a hunger strike in protest of KMT policies. Ten demonstrating students are shot by police. 

➤ 1949 May 20: The KMT government in Taiwan declares martial law. Utilizing “temporary provisions” for the suppression of the “communist rebellion,” the KMT suspends the ROC Constitution, initiating a period known as the White Terror (白色恐怖). The KMT dictatorship would last until 1987, a period during which an estimated 140,000 people were imprisoned and an estimated 4,000 executed for political reasons, such as criticizing the KMT or suspected communist sympathies. The brutality of KMT rule in Taiwan is in sharp distinction to the representation of the Taiwan regime as “Free China” (often posed against “Red China”) by Cold Warriors in American politics.

  • Some Taiwanese communists managed to evade imprisonment and execution by escaping to the mainland. Zhang Kehui (张克辉) left Taiwan after the White Terror began and would later become the last Taiwan-born chairman of the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League and vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. He passed away on January 11, 2024 in Beijing and was buried in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.

➤ 1949 October 1: With the defeat of KMT forces in mainland China all but guaranteed, Mao Zedong proclaims the founding of the People’s Republic of China (中华人民共和国, PRC) in Beijing. Over the next several months the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) establishes control over the last remaining KMT-held areas of mainland China as well as Hainan island.

  • The rural land reforms carried out by the CPC inspired millions of Chinese peasants to join the PLA and accelerated the defection of KMT conscripts. Hyperinflation due to KMT economic mismanagement and corruption was a major factor in their downfall, compounded by their failure to establish full territorial control over China either before or after the war.

  • The communist victory was an especially severe blow to the United States, which considered the ROC its preferred junior partner in Asia (a role instead played since 1949 by its former enemy Japan). As one of the Big Four Allies in World War II, China enjoyed more respect from Western powers than it had in the era of unequal treaties; its elevated status had helped neutralize Japanese propaganda about “liberating” Asia from white imperialist rule. Though U.S. officials regularly grumbled about Chiang Kai-shek’s corruption and insistence on large loans, they gave significant monetary and logistical support to the ROC. In addition to their aforementioned direct intervention through Operation Beleaguer, they airlifted KMT troops to occupy key cities and provided at least $2 billion in aid (about half of it military, much of which the PLA captured). Blame for the “loss of China” quickly became a subject of intense debate in U.S. politics, leading directly to the rise of McCarthyism. 

➤ 1949 December 7: Defeated KMT forces retreat to Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek declares Taipei the provisional capital of the ROC and continues to claim authority over all of China. Around a million soldiers and civilians relocate to Taiwan, greatly expanding Taiwan’s population of Mandarin-speaking, mainland-born wàishěngrén.

  • Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) together outlined three main goals for stabilizing the ROC regime: maintaining political control in Taiwan by eradicating communist agents and suppressing Taiwanese dissidents, organizing efficient military defense against future PLA attack, and ensuring economic stability and growth. To these ends, they proposed a regional anti-communist alliance that later evolved into the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and informal bilateral U.S. security agreements with Japan, South Korea, and the ROC.

  • As director of the secret police from 1950 to 1965, Chiang Ching-kuo used his control of internal security, intelligence, and paramilitary organizations to surveil the entire ROC general staff with the aim of eliminating CPC spies and moles. In just the first half of 1950, more than 3,000 people were arrested and about 15% of them were executed as alleged communist spies. Chiang Ching-kuo claimed that almost all communist infiltration had been eliminated by 1951.

  • KMT officials tended to distrust běnshěngrén due to the lingering influences of the kōminka policy and the not insignificant degree of collaboration with Japan during its fifty-year rule. They also insisted on suspending National Assembly elections until the mainland was recovered, replacing běnshěngrén civil servants and government officials with wàishěngrén, diverting much of Taiwan’s resources into war preparations, and forcibly instituting Mandarin education to the detriment of local languages.

  • As a result, discontent with the KMT was common especially during the early years of their rule in Taiwan for varied different reasons. KMT conscripts from the mainland were some of the poorest people on the island and wanted to return to their families and homes; poor běnshěngrén who had suffered under Japanese rule for decades found the KMT unsympathetic to their plight; and the běnshěngrén (petty-)bourgeoisie keenly felt their loss of political power, especially those who had collaborated with the Japanese. Such class divisions were often masked by the wàishěngrén-běnshěngrén dichotomy.

➤ 1950 January 5: In his “Statement on Formosa,” U.S. President Harry Truman indicates his intention not to intervene militarily in any cross-strait conflict between the PRC and ROC and to withhold additional military aid from the latter.

➤ 1950 June 10: KMT lieutenant general and deputy defense minister General Wu Shi (​​吴石), his two deputies Chen Baocang (陈宝仓) and Nie Xi (聂曦), and CPC officer Zhu Feng (朱枫) are executed by firing squad for spying for the CPC. Wu had been a secret CPC informant since April 1947 and was instrumental in helping defeat the KMT on the mainland, but chose to go to Taiwan because he felt he had not done enough for the people. While in Taiwan, he passed key confidential military information to Zhu Feng, who passed it to the CPC.

  • In early 1950, an underground party member named Wang Mingde defected to the KMT and exposed Cai Xiaoqian, the Taiwanese CPC cadre who was leading the underground communist movement on the island. Cai was captured, but as a seasoned intelligence officer he first pretended to defect by agreeing to lure in his higher-ups and managed to escape. The KMT then re-captured, tortured, and blackmailed him by threatening the life of his sister-in-law. This time Cai actually defected, revealing the names of thousands of Taiwanese communists and decimating the entire underground party organization. A search of Cai’s possessions uncovered Wu Shi and Zhu Feng’s contact information, leading to the arrests, torture, and martyring of the four CPC spies.

  • After his betrayal, Cai Xiaoqian would join the Kuomintang and assist its anti-communist counterintelligence work, eventually rising to the post of deputy director of the ROC’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau and dying in Taipei in 1982 at the age of 75.

➤ 1950 June 14: Writing from Tokyo, Douglas MacArthur (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) issues a top secret memorandum on the strategic importance of Taiwan. MacArthur observes that Taiwan represents a key link in the U.S. “western strategic frontier” comprising Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. In an infamous turn of phrase, MacArthur describes Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” whose loss to a U.S. adversary would put U.S. interests in “serious jeopardy.” 

➤ 1950 June 25: The Korean War begins. The UN Security Council condemns the "armed attack on the Republic of Korea by forces from North Korea” (Res. 82) and calls on member states to supply military support to south Korea (Res. 83). Both resolutions pass unanimously because the veto-wielding Soviet Union is boycotting the Security Council to protest the ROC’s continued occupation of China’s UN seat. 

  • The outbreak of the war also leads President Truman to reverse his earlier position and order the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, to “prevent any [PRC] attack on Formosa” while also nominally urging Chiang Kai-shek’s regime “to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland.” Chiang offers to contribute 33,000 ROC troops to the invasion of Korea in hopes of expanding the war into the Chinese mainland and retaking power from the CPC, though the U.S. declines his proposal. A few hours after the war begins, Chiang also orders an end to all military negotiations with the PRC regarding Taiwan (which he had initiated a few months earlier out of frustration with lack of U.S. military support).

➤ 1951 May: The ROC government enacts a law that caps arable land rent for Taiwanese tenant farmers at 37.5% of crop yield. (Interestingly, this was the exact same percentage cap that the CPC instituted during the Second Sino-Japanese War in an effort to build a cross-class united front with “patriotic” landlords.) This marks the first stage of the KMT’s top-down land reform in Taiwan which would eventually see large estates broken up and redistributed to tenant farmers. Formerly Japanese-owned properties, which at one point constituted 66.7% of all land in Taiwan, are the first to be expropriated and sold on cheap credit to poor Taiwanese farmers under Premier Chen Cheng (陳誠). While far less sweeping and participatory than Communist land reform on the mainland, these policies stoke resentment among dispossessed běnshěngrén landlords who go on to form an early social base for Taiwanese separatism. They also help to undercut popular support for the CPC underground and win part of its rural base to the KMT instead.  

  • To tackle hyperinflation, the government issues the New Taiwan Dollar and pegs it to gold. The state avoids large-scale privatization and retains the commanding heights of the economy (particularly finance, heavy industry, and infrastructure) to ensure stability and prepare for eventual reconquest of the mainland. This model of state-guided developmentalism (tolerated and encouraged by the United States due to its secure neocolonial position) becomes the basis for Taiwan’s strong economic growth in subsequent decades. It would also establish a sizable base of KMT supporters among both běnshěngrén and wàishěngrén. 

  • Many of these early 1950s KMT reforms were inspired by CPC policies. Chiang Kai-shek underscored the importance of mobilizing and inspiring the youth by establishing organizations like the National Salvation Anti-Communist Youth Corps and Academy of Revolutionary Study and Practice (both managed by Chiang Ching-kuo). Party journals cited the CPC when proposing the integration of KMT cells into the government, military, private corporations, factories, schools, and nonprofits to carry out party policies and ensure alignment with national goals. Again following the CPC example, KMT members were expected to be loyal, self-critical, honest, and dedicated to party principles.

➤ 1951: The KMT government re-designates highland yuánzhùmín in Taiwan as “mountain compatriots” (山地同胞) and initiates an assimilationist policy called 山地平地化 (lit. “making the mountains into the plains”). This policy involves compulsory Mandarin-only education, the introduction of capitalist social relations and Han Chinese cultural customs, and nationalization of traditional yuánzhùmín lands.

➤ 1952 April 28: The Treaty of San Francisco comes into effect, restoring peaceful relations between Japan and the United States as well as most WWII Allied Powers – with some notable exceptions. In particular the Soviet Union rejects the final text, and owing to sovereignty disputes no Chinese or Korean delegates are even invited despite being the foremost victims of Japanese imperialism. Both the PRC and ROC strongly object to the treaty on the grounds that it leaves the final status of Taiwan undetermined, rather than explicitly affirming its retrocession to China.

  • On the same day the Treaty of Taipei is signed (later ratified on August 5) as a separate peace treaty between Japan and the ROC, the latter under significant U.S. pressure. The text states that “nationals of the Republic of China shall be deemed to include all the inhabitants and former inhabitants of Taiwan and Penghu … who are of the Chinese nationality.” Modern-day Taiwan separatists argue that this too was not an explicit territorial cession.

➤ 1953 February: More than three years after the founding of the PRC and its immediate recognition by the USSR, the ROC regime in Taiwan officially abrogates the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. In particular this means rescinding its recognition of Mongolia, which it would officially claim as part of its territory (along with all of mainland China) until 2002. The only veto ever exercised by the ROC in the UN Security Council was to block Mongolia’s admission in 1955; to this day the emblem of the ROC Marine Corps shows a map of China that includes outer Mongolia and parts of Russia.

  • This is just one example of why critiques of Chinese territorial “expansionism” are fundamentally misplaced, as the PRC has simply inherited the territorial claims of the ROC and in fact asserts strictly more modest ones. Another example is the South China Sea dispute, where the PRC’s “nine-dash line” modified the ROC’s original “eleven-dash line” so as to recognize Vietnam’s claim to the Gulf of Tonkin. PRC and ROC claims in the South China Sea otherwise mirror each other almost exactly; both firmly rejected a 2016 arbitration ruling against China in its dispute with the Philippines.

➤ 1954 March 22: Xu Fulin (徐傅霖) of the China Democratic Socialist Party (中國民主社會黨, CDSP) unsuccessfully runs against Chiang Kai-shek for ROC president, winning 3% of the votes in the National Assembly. (The CDSP was founded in Shanghai in 1946 and became one of two minor legal parties in KMT-ruled Taiwan.) Chiang would subsequently run unopposed until his death, with term limits suspended under the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion. 

  • Later that year, the KMT expels liberal anti-Chiang dissident Lei Chen (雷震) for advocating term limits and a strong opposition party in Free China, a party publication he had co-founded. Lei and other anti-KMT liberal politicians found the China Democratic Party (中國民主黨) to oppose the KMT’s increasing stranglehold on power. After publishing more anti-KMT criticisms in Free China, Lei and several others are arrested and imprisoned. Other members of the China Democratic Party would go on to start the dǎngwài (黨外, “outside the party”) movement to oppose the KMT.

➤ 1954 June 15: Chiang Kai-shek meets with his south Korean and Filipino counterparts in Jinhae, Korea to announce the formation of the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League. In 1966 this international network of far-right forces would expand to become the World Anti-Communist League. At its height it would include the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, the Nicaraguan Contras and other U.S.-backed Central American death squads, and a rogues’ gallery of Western neo-Nazis and fascists. It still exists today and has been headquartered in Taipei since its founding.

➤ 1954 September 3: In what becomes known as the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, the PLA attempts to dislodge ROC forces from the Kinmen (金門), Matsu (馬祖), and Dachen (大陈) islands after they were garrisoned with over 70,000 KMT troops, posing a direct threat to the mainland. These island groups are located across the strait from Taiwan, just a few miles off the coast of mainland China; they were still in ROC hands because the PLA had failed to take them by amphibious landing in 1949. After several months of shelling, ROC forces are forced to evacuate Dachen on May 1, 1955, but they retain the other two island groups to this day. 

➤ 1954 December 2: The United States and Republic of China sign the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which commits each party to provide military support in the event that the other comes under attack. Specifically, it commits U.S. military forces to defend the Taiwan and Penghu islands (but not Kinmen or Matsu). As part of its formal military commitment to Taiwan, the U.S. forms the United States Taiwan Defense Command. Headquartered in Taipei, the Command would host an estimated 19,000 U.S. troops at its peak in 1958 and later serve as a support base for the U.S. war on Vietnam.

  • Taiwan quickly became the principal U.S. base for intelligence gathering and clandestine hybrid war against the PRC. The CIA was the most reliable patron for the ROC government within the U.S. state apparatus (regularly bypassing even the U.S. ambassador) and provided “a cornucopia of money, arms, equipment, and training.” For the next several decades, CIA and military personnel and their families constituted the majority of U.S. nationals in Taiwan.  

➤ 1955 January 29: In response to the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, the U.S. government adopts the 1955 Formosa Resolution, which extends the mutual defense treaty to include other offshore islands that may be targeted by the PRC (specifically Kinmen and Matsu).

➤ 1955 August 20: With the help of his son, Chiang Kai-shek, who is quite reasonably suspicious of potential U.S.-backed coup plots against him, has senior KMT general and ROC military commander Sun Li-jen (孫立人) arrested for plotting with the CIA to unseat him. 

  • Chiang Ching-kuo, who was made head of the secret police in 1950, had earlier initiated Soviet-style restructuring of the ROC military to reassert the KMT’s political and ideological control and eliminate threats to his father’s authority. By 1954, more than a third of the armed forces were KMT members. Sun Li-jen complained to his U.S. counterparts that such politicization created “an almost insuperable barrier to the achievement of good military discipline, high morale, and effective combat potential.” Neither Chiang had any intention of acquiescing to U.S. demands on this matter, but Chiang Ching-kuo eventually made a few superficial concessions.

  • Chiang Kai-shek had a complex relationship with the United States. He had strong connections with Washington’s China lobby (funded by his brother-in-law) and welcomed U.S. aid in fighting the CPC and reclaiming the mainland, but cared very little for U.S. advice on how to govern Taiwan and prosecute the civil war. He firmly believed that Taiwan was part of China and was extremely hostile to U.S. schemes that would codify its political separation from the mainland (e.g. independence, UN trusteeship over Taiwan, and a “two Chinas” arrangement with UN seats for both the PRC and ROC).

➤ 1957 May 24: U.S. Army Sgt. Robert Reynolds kills ROC Army Major Liu Ziran (劉自然) outside Reynolds’ home, sparking a mass protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Taipei known as the May 24 Incident (五二四事件). The protests, which result in destruction of government property in and around the Embassy, reflect growing disenchantment with the U.S. military presence in Taiwan and resentment at the diplomatic immunity afforded to U.S. troops who commit crimes in Taiwan. 

➤ 1958 August 23–December 2: The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, a renewed attempt by the PLA to force ROC withdrawal from Kinmen and Matsu, culminates in a ceasefire and an informal arrangement where PRC and ROC forces would fire non-lethal shells at each other on alternating days until 1979 (symbolically signaling to the United States that the Chinese Civil War remained an internal affair). In response, the U.S. covertly deploys nuclear-capable missiles to Taiwan, which would be stationed at Tainan Air Base until 1974. In 2021, declassified documents revealed that U.S. military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China. (See also Where They Were, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 1999). 

  • During the conflict, Chiang Kai-shek sends Zhou Enlai a message indicating that if the PLA did not stop shelling, he would have to submit to U.S. pressure and withdraw from Kinmen and Matsu. This would in turn threaten both sides’ shared commitment to the indivisibility of China, because Taiwan’s geographical separation from the mainland would then correspond exactly to the political separation between PRC- and ROC-held territory.

➤ 1961 February: Ngô Đình Cẩn (brother of South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm) visits Taiwan to arrange for the Chiang regime to provide military training to South Vietnamese forces. Twenty ROC instructors would go on to train the Liên Đội Người Nhái (LDNN, literally “frogman unit”). By 1964, the CIA reported that “several hundred military and paramilitary personnel” from Taiwan were operating in South Vietnam.

➤ 1961 April: Chiang Kai-shek launches Project Guoguang (National Glory), a large-scale mobilization to prepare for the military reconquest of mainland China. Concrete plans are limited to the invasion of Fujian province, with a vague combination of U.S. military support and domestic political instability in the PRC expected to finish the job. On at least three occasions (1961 during the Great Leap Forward and early Sino-Soviet split; 1965 at the start of the U.S. war on Vietnam; and 1967 at the height of the Cultural Revolution), Chiang seeks U.S. approval to invade but is denied every time. In 1972, the Guoguang planning office is abolished, though the ROC would not formally renounce the aim of military reunification until 1991.

➤ 1964 September 20: Liberal anti-KMT activist and political science professor Peng Ming-min (彭明敏) and his students Hsieh Tsung-min (謝聰敏) and Wei Ting-chao (魏廷朝) call for Taiwanese independence in the Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation, but they are arrested before the declaration can be published. The declaration advocates for a centrist third path between the “extreme right” of the KMT and the “extreme left” of the CPC, calls for the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek, and criticizes the KMT policies of land reform, state-enforced Mandarin education, and wàishěngrén domination in government.

  • Under U.S. pressure, Peng was released soon after his arrest and remained under heavy surveillance until his eventual exile in the U.S. He returned to Taiwan after the lifting of martial law and ran as the Democratic Progressive Party's presidential candidate in the 1996 election. 

➤ 1965 March 8: 3,500 U.S. Marines land near Da Nang, marking the beginning of the U.S. ground war in Vietnam. Besides providing covert military training, Taiwan under the ROC was also a major destination for U.S. servicemen on “R & R” (rest and relaxation) during the U.S. war on Vietnam. The New York Times reported in 1967 that some 5,000 U.S. servicemen arrived in Taipei each month; this influx of visiting soldiers built on the presence of some 13,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Taiwan. 

➤ 1965 June: Chiang Kai-shek orders ROC atomic weapons research (which began in 1958) to move into the development phase. Following the PRC’s successful detonation of a nuclear bomb in October 1964, there was a renewed push in the ROC to demonstrate a similar capability. 

➤ 1966 March: Chiang Kai-shek is re-elected unopposed to his fourth and final term as president. Chiang Ching-kuo also pushes for a constitutional amendment that provides for elections to some new seats in the National Assembly and another chamber called the Legislative Yuan (立法院). This move is intended to court more political participation from běnshěngrén, though it still leaves in place all delegates who had served since 1947 until “the Chinese mainland is recovered.”

➤ 1966 November 12: On the centenary of Sun Yat-sen’s birth, and with the Cultural Revolution sweeping the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek initiates the “Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement” (中華文化復興運動) to safeguard traditional Chinese culture from the supposed threat of eradication by the communists. Through this initiative, Chiang’s fusion of neo-Confucian morality, Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, and rhetorical commitment to “science” is promoted through state educational and cultural policy as well as a new Code of Youth Conduct. 

  • The “movement” was overseen by a Promotion Council formed in July 1967 and helmed by Chiang himself. His son Chiang Ching-kuo declined to take up this position when he became ROC president in 1978. Eventually the younger Chiang’s successor Lee Teng-hui would downsize it, rename it as the General Association of Chinese Culture (中華文化總會), and ironically convert it into a vehicle to “enhance and cultivate Taiwan’s cultural power” in distinction to mainland China.

➤ 1971 October 25: The United Nations issues General Assembly Resolution 2758, which recognizes the People’s Republic of China as “the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations” and “expel[s] forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy.” The vote passes with 76 votes in favor, 35 votes against, and 17 abstentions. (Earlier that day, the General Assembly had rejected a U.S.-backed “compromise” proposal that would have deleted the second quoted passage, thus allowing the ROC some form of separate representation.) 

➤ 1972 February 27: Following U.S. President Richard Nixon’s watershed visit to Beijing, the U.S. and PRC governments issue the Shanghai Communiqué, intended to de-escalate tensions and increase cultural and economic contact between the U.S. and China. Within the Communiqué, the U.S. declares that it “acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” It also affirms that the withdrawal of U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan is part of the “ultimate objective” of a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese people themselves. 

➤ 1972 May 15: The United States returns the Ryukyu Islands to Japan, having occupied and administered them since the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Controversially, the territory returned to Japan includes the Diaoyu Islands, an uninhabited archipelago northeast of Taiwan that was annexed by Japan in 1895 (and administered as the “Senkaku Islands”) but also claimed by both the PRC and ROC. The Diaoyu Islands Protection Movement erupts among ROC students in the U.S. and Taiwan to demand the islands’ return to Chinese sovereignty. This soon becomes a common rallying cry for Chinese people on both sides of the strait and a favored cause for multiple generations of Taiwan’s pro-unification left.

➤ 1972 May 26: Chiang Ching-kuo becomes ROC premier.

➤ 1974 September 7: The World Federation of Taiwanese Associations (WFTA), an alliance of pro-independence groups based in Western and Western-aligned countries, is founded in Vienna, Austria.

➤ 1975 April 5: Chiang Kai-shek dies. After a month of official mourning his body is “temporarily” entombed in a mausoleum in Taoyuan, awaiting final burial in his hometown of Fenghua, Zhejiang province (pending “recovery” of mainland China from the CPC). Chiang is succeeded as ROC president by his vice president Yen Chia-kan (嚴家淦) and as KMT chairman by his son Chiang Ching-kuo. 

  • Reaction is muted on the mainland, where Mao is said to have reacted simply by saying “understood.” U.S. obituaries tend to be critical of Chiang, while the Japanese government praises its former wartime enemy as “a great benefactor in the reconstruction of Japan … repaying evil with kindness.” 

➤ 1976 September 9: Mao Zedong dies in Beijing. Chiang Ching-kuo responds with a “Message to Mainland Compatriots” calling on the people of mainland China to “rise up against the communists and retake our freedom.” This message is broadcast to the mainland using radio and balloon-dropped leaflets, to no discernible effect.

➤ 1978 May 20: Chiang Ching-kuo officially assumes the ROC presidency, two months after being almost unanimously elected by the National Assembly and after Yen Chia-kan finishes serving out his father’s final term. 

  • Many of the White Terror policies that the younger Chiang helped implement during his father’s presidency were phased out during his own. Having thoroughly destroyed the communists as a political force, he could safely increase běnshěngrén representation in government and lift many restrictions on liberal anti-KMT activism, allowing the dǎngwài movement to flourish. 

  • Economic policies such as the “Ten Major Construction Projects,” focused high-tech development, and price controls on food and other key commodities helped ensure sustained economic growth through the 1980s. Chiang’s government also implemented labor reforms that repealed anti-strike laws, limited union-busting, strengthened occupational safety codes, and promoted women’s employment and maternal leave. These policies helped maintain a firm KMT support base even with the growth of the dǎngwài movement.

➤ 1978 December 18-22: At the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the CPC, Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) consolidates his status as paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China. This also marks the beginning of his landmark “Reform and Opening Up” (改革开放) policy, which entails a shift toward economic liberalization under “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色社会主义).

➤ 1979 January 1: The United States and People’s Republic of China normalize diplomatic relations for the first time since 1949, opening embassies in Beijing and Washington, D.C. In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, the U.S. recognizes the PRC as the sole government of China and acknowledges that Taiwan is a part of China. As a consequence, the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty expires.

  • The National People’s Congress issues a Message to Compatriots on Taiwan, calling for cross-strait reconciliation, the re-establishment of transportation and postal services, and the promotion of familial, academic, cultural, sports, and technological exchanges. Thousands of people in mainland China, many of whom were former KMT members or soldiers, write letters to friends and family in Taiwan and the greater Chinese diaspora.

  • Chiang Ching-kuo believes that cross-strait social, cultural, and economic engagement will inevitably erode communist rule in the mainland, a perspective with which U.S. officials agree. But with the stinging loss of U.S. recognition he decides to focus on consolidating power in Taiwan instead, issuing a policy of “three no’s” (no compromise, no contact, and no negotiations with the CPC). Later he quietly begins to allow private individuals and businesses in Taiwan to connect with their mainland counterparts with the aim of facilitating gradual, peaceful reunification under the ROC.

➤ 1979 January 25: James Soong Chu-yu (宋楚瑜), longtime personal secretary and trusted friend to Chiang Ching-kuo, is promoted to head of the Government Information Office where he manages censorship and propaganda. 

➤ 1979 April 10: The United States Congress passes the Taiwan Relations Act, assuring its commitments to the KMT regime in Taiwan despite the normalization of relations with China. The act allows for the continuation of de facto diplomatic relations with Taiwan through the American Institute in Taiwan, a non-profit organization created to serve the functions of the former U.S. embassy. The act also allows for the continued sale of military armaments to Taiwan.

➤ 1979 November 26: The International Olympic Committee approves the Nagoya Resolution, which would allow athletes from Taiwan to compete in international sporting events separately from mainland China under the English name “Chinese Taipei.” The former ROC Olympic Committee initially protests but ultimately accepts the name change in 1981.

  • See Qiao Collective’s article “Beijing 2022 and China’s Challenge to Sports Imperialism” for a more detailed history of cross-strait sovereignty disputes in the context of international sport.

  • The ROC/Taiwan has also participated in some non-sporting international organizations under the name Chinese Taipei, for example Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

  • Interestingly the two sides of the strait use different Chinese translations of this name: 中華台北 in Taiwan (中華 Zhōnghuá referring to the Chinese cultural sphere), and 中国台北 in the mainland (中国 Zhōngguó referring to the Chinese state, a more literal translation being “Taipei, China”).

➤ 1979 December 10: Anti-KMT liberal activists from underground dǎngwài newspaper Formosa Magazine hold a demonstration to celebrate Human Rights Day in Kaohsiung, precipitating the so-called Kaohsiung Incident. A major trigger for the demonstration was Chiang Ching-kuo’s suspension of planned elections after the U.S. withdrew diplomatic recognition from the ROC. The KMT government arrests and imprisons most of the dǎngwài leadership after protestors clash with the police and military. 

  • The main group of activists arrested for the incident are known as the “Kaohsiung Eight”: Annette Lu Hsu-lien (呂秀蓮, 2000–2008 ROC vice president), Chen Chu (陳菊), Yao Chia-wen (姚嘉文), Huang Hsin-chieh (黃信介), Lin Hung-hsuan (林弘宣), Shih Ming-teh (施明德), Chang Chun-hung (張俊宏), and Lin Yi-hsiung (林義雄). Each of them would go on to serve at some point as chair of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), other than Lin Hung-hsuan who never formally joined the party.

  • Several of their defense lawyers also go on to become major figures in the DPP, including Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁, 2000–2008 ROC president), Frank Hsieh (謝長廷, 2008 DPP presidential candidate), and Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌, 2008 DPP vice presidential candidate).

➤ 1981 September–December: Chiang Ching-kuo appoints Taiwanese lawyer Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) as deputy director of the First Bureau of the Presidential Office, luring him away from a lucrative position at a bank in Boston. Ma, who would become ROC president in 2008, first caught Chiang’s attention through an essay affirming the latter’s opinion that communism in mainland China would naturally and inevitably collapse.

➤ 1982 February 14: The Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) is founded in Los Angeles by anti-KMT liberal activists and later moves to Washington, D.C. FAPA maintains close ties with U.S. officials and has consistently lobbied for Taiwan independence since its founding, arguing that it would serve U.S. interests in the region. 

  • Liberal anti-KMT independence activist and future DPP presidential candidate Peng Ming-min became president of FAPA in 1983.

➤ 1982 August 17: The United States and China issue the U.S.–PRC Joint Communiqué, in which they pledge to deepen economic, cultural, educational, scientific, and technological connections between the two countries. The U.S. also promises to reduce arms sales to the ROC provided that the Taiwan Strait remains peaceful. After strong backlash from conservatives, U.S. President Ronald Reagan then relays Six Assurances to the ROC government regarding arms sales, cross-strait negotiations, and the sovereignty question. These assurances would be formally adopted as non-binding resolutions by both houses of Congress in 2016.

➤ 1983 June 26: On a visit to Seton Hall University in New Jersey, Deng Xiaoping articulates six points regarding Taiwan's peaceful reunification with the mainland as a “special administrative region.” They include a degree of autonomy far outstripping any other administrative unit in China, with “the party, governmental and military systems of Taiwan … administered by the Taiwan authorities themselves.” Though he does not explicitly use the phrase, this proposal for Taiwan becomes the core of the “one country, two systems” (一国两制) schema through which Hong Kong and Macau would eventually return to Chinese sovereignty.

➤ 1984 October 15: Henry Liu (劉宜良), a Chinese-born writer and critic of the KMT, is murdered by members of the KMT-affiliated Bamboo Union gang in Daly City, California. Liu had previously worked as a U.S. State Department interpreter and written an unofficial biography of Chiang Ching-kuo which drew the gang’s ire. His murder sparks outrage in overseas Chinese communities over the long arm of KMT repression and sours relations between Chiang and the U.S. government.

➤ 1985: The Taipei Credit Affair (also known as the Tenth Credit Affair), in which the government-owned Tenth Credit Cooperative collapses due to illegal banking practices and unbacked loans, becomes a major scandal for the government and leads to the resignation of several KMT officials. Because it is the largest organization of its kind in Taiwan, the cooperative’s 100,000 members see their savings disappear and many companies go bankrupt or face significant financial difficulties.

➤ 1986 September 28: The Democratic Progressive Party (民主進步黨, DPP) is founded in Taipei. Still technically illegal until the lifting of martial law, the DPP drew from the dǎngwài movement, which since the 1970s had contested martial law and KMT one-party rule. The DPP would grow to become the primary political alternative to the KMT, with a platform emphasizing Taiwan localism and nominal independence.

➤ 1987 February: After returning to Taiwan from a 25-year career at Texas Instruments, electrical engineer Morris Chang (張忠謀) founds the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) with generous support from the ROC government, including 48% of the startup capital. TSMC is the world’s first dedicated semiconductor foundry, meaning that it primarily manufactures chips based on other firms’ design specifications. Today it is possibly the most important node in the entire globe-spanning semiconductor supply chain, producing around 60% of the world’s chips including a commanding 90% share of the most advanced chips.

➤ 1987 July: Chiang Ching-kuo lifts martial law. A few months later, KMT officials also end the ban on travel to the Chinese mainland, ending thirty-eight years of cross-strait isolation. 

d. Democratization, De-Sinicization, and the New Cold War arrow_upward

➤ 1988 January 1: Chiang Ching-kuo ends the ban on independent newspapers and non-KMT parties in Taiwan. Within a few days, ~200 new publications are registered and more than 60 political groups applied to register as parties, although only 20 would actually follow through.

➤ 1988 January 13: Chiang Ching-kuo dies and is succeeded as ROC president and KMT chairman by his handpicked successor Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). Lee is the first Taiwan-born běnshěngrén to serve in either position, and hardline wàishěngrén cadres in the KMT almost block his ascent. They are persuaded to back down by James Soong, Chiang Ching-kuo’s former personal secretary and head of the Government Information Office. (Lee would in turn promote Soong to KMT Secretary-General in 1989.)

➤ 1988: Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer Foxconn opens its first mainland factory in Shenzhen, kicking off the first wave of “foreign” direct investment led by Taiwanese capital, known as Táishāng (台商). As part of Deng Xiaoping’s reform policy, investment from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Chinese diaspora would be essential in developing mainland China's historically neglected light manufacturing sector.

➤ 1989 March 29: The Labor Party of Taiwan (勞動黨) is founded by striking trade unionists in Hsinchu County. They initially consider naming it the “Taiwanese Communist Party” in homage to the island’s last organized pro-unification left force, but decide against it given the still-prevailing atmosphere of anti-communism. Nonetheless, many high-profile communists imprisoned during the White Terror join the party, making it in many ways the ideological and spiritual successor to the TCP of 1928-31.

➤ 1989 June 4: Lee Teng-hui condemns the Chinese government’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests as a “mad action” that “moved us to incomparable grief, indignation and shock.” The New York Times reports actual popular reaction in Taiwan as considerably more “muted and controlled,” especially with raw memories from four decades of martial law under the KMT.

➤ 1990 March 16–20: The six-day Wild Lily movement takes place, with student protestors advocating for direct elections for ROC president and vice president as well as new popular elections for all National Assembly seats. The day after the protests, Lee Teng-hui welcomes some protestors to the Presidential Office Building and expresses his support for the movement.

➤ 1991 May 1: In one of its final acts, the National Assembly “elected” in 1947 finally repeals the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion. It also adopts a number of Additional Articles to the ROC Constitution which provide for fresh elections to the National Assembly and Legislative Yuan. These are explicitly limited to the “Free Area” under de facto ROC jurisdiction, finally ending the legal fiction of “representation” for constituencies in mainland China.

  • 1992 May 28: Another set of Additional Articles introduce direct elections to the offices of ROC president and vice president, starting in 1996. They also guarantee yuánzhùmín “legal protection of their status and the right to political par­ticipation,” including three reserved seats each for highland and lowland peoples in both the National Assembly and the Legislative Yuan.

  • Further constitutional amendments transfer more and more responsibilities from the National Assembly to the Legislative Yuan (or to direct popular vote), until the former becomes completely moribund starting in 2000. The last National Assembly is elected in 2005, for the sole purpose of approving an amendment to abolish itself until “national unification.”

➤ 1992 November: Cross-strait talks between the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (PRC) and the Straits Exchange Foundation (ROC) take place in Hong Kong. The talks result in what became known as the “1992 Consensus,” which states that both the PRC and ROC recognize that Taiwan and the Chinese mainland are part of “One China.” Each side recognizes that the other has different interpretations of this One China principle, with the PRC claiming sovereignty over both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan as a Special Administrative Region (SAR), and the ROC claiming de jure jurisdiction over the Chinese mainland, and practical jurisdiction over Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu. While succeeding governments in Taiwan have contested the agreement, the PRC considers the 1992 Consensus to be the precondition for continued cross-strait dialogue. 

➤ 1992 September 2: In violation of the 1982 U.S.–PRC Joint Communiqué, the U.S. sells 150 F-16 fighter planes to the ROC government.

➤ 1993: A mass grave for hundreds of victims of the Kuomintang’s White Terror is discovered at the Liuzhangli Cemetery in Taipei. Public discussion of this event is muted for another two decades or so, since the majority of these victims were mainland-born communists (including members of underground CPC cells that survived the 228 uprising and subsequent White Terror) – a fact that sits uneasily with both KMT and separatist historical narratives.

➤ 1993 March 20: Lee Teng-hui appoints James Soong as Chairman of the Provincial Government, i.e. the government of Taiwan province within the ROC.

➤ 1993 August 22: The New Party (新黨) is founded by members of the New Kuomintang Alliance, which broke away from the KMT in protest of Lee Teng-hui’s moves away from Chinese unification. 

  • The New Party lost all parliamentary representation in 2008 but still exists to this day. In 2019, they announced a "one country, two systems" proposal that includes an end to US arms purchases; a ban on separatist political activity; inclusion of Taiwanese firms in the Belt and Road Initiative; and positive references to the CPC, Xi Jinping, and the "rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." Labor Party chairman Wu Rong-yuan (吳榮元) was in attendance at the event.

➤ 1993 September: At the request of Lee Teng-hui’s government, seven Central American countries that still recognize the ROC request that it be readmitted to the United Nations under its official name; the General Assembly refuses even to consider the proposal. This has since been an annual exercise. 

➤ 1994: The U.S. government upgrades the protocol level for treatment of “unofficial” ROC officials and diplomats. 

➤ 1994 January: In an effort to limit and counterbalance Taiwan’s growing economic integration with mainland China, Lee Teng-hui launches a “Go South” strategy to develop trade, investment, and political ties with various Southeast Asian countries. While it does not prove particularly effective, subsequent ROC administrations under Chen Shui-bian and Tsai Ing-wen would enact similar policies.

➤ 1994 December 20: James Soong is directly elected by voters as Governor of Taiwan Province. He proves to be a widely popular politician among wàishěngrén, běnshěngrén, and yuánzhùmín voters alike, garnering approval ratings upwards of 80%. 

➤ 1995 April–June: U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher assures Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen that granting a U.S. visa to Lee Teng-hui would be “inconsistent with [the United States’] unofficial relationship” with the ROC. However, the Clinton administration issues the visa anyway so Lee can speak about Taiwan’s “transition to democracy” at a Cornell University alumni event, claiming this is “completely consistent with the…three communiqués that form the basis” of U.S.-China relations. Lee’s speech advocates for Taiwan to “break out of diplomatic isolation” and “enhance mutually beneficial relations” with the U.S..

➤ 1995 June 26: ROC officials offer to pay $1 billion into a “special fund for developing countries” in exchange for readmission to the United Nations.

➤ 1995 July 21–1996 March 23: The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis occurs. Responding to moves by Lee Teng-hui and the U.S. to undermine the one-China principle and the 1992 Consensus in the lead-up to the 1996 ROC presidential election, China conducts a series of military exercises and missile tests in the Taiwan Strait

  • 1995 August 1: U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and PRC Foreign Minister Qian Qichen (钱其琛) meet in Brunei. China asks for the U.S. to reaffirm its commitment to the one-China principle and commit to no further visits from Taiwan officials. The U.S. presents a confidential letter from Clinton reiterating its own one-China policy, but pledges only that future visits “would be considered on a case-by-case basis.” Christopher also states that China's military exercises in the strait “do not contribute to peace and stability.”

  • 1995 August 25: U.S. officials rebuff China’s request for a fourth U.S.-China communiqué that would categorically rule out Taiwan independence and future visits to the U.S. by ROC officials. 

  • 1995 September–October: The ROC armed forces conduct missile tests as well as ground, naval, and air exercises meant to simulate a response to a hypothetical PLA landing in Taiwan. This is repeated in early 1996.  

  • 1996 March: In response to further PLA missile tests and military exercises, the U.S. deploys two carrier battle groups to areas around Taiwan.

➤ 1996 March 23: Incumbent Lee Teng-Hui wins the first-ever direct election for president of the ROC, defeating Peng Ming-min who runs for the DPP on a platform of open support for Taiwan independence. Lee also supports Taiwanese localism in defiance of the KMT line on reunification, for which the party would eventually expel him in 2001. 

  • Throughout his career Lee would also endorse rightwing revisionist narratives about Japanese militarism in World War II, boasting of his voluntary service in the Imperial Japanese Army and denying such atrocities as the Nanjing massacre and enslavement of “comfort women.”

  • Lee’s brother Teng-chin (李登欽) had voluntarily enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Navy and been killed in the Battle of Manila, later being enshrined alongside over a thousand war criminals in Japan’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Lee visited Yasukuni in 2007, where he was greeted by flag-waving Japanese supporters shouting banzai (long life) and “Taiwan forever.”

  • Following the 2012 protests in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan over Japan’s occupation of the Diaoyu Islands, Lee expressed support for Japan's territorial claims in open defiance of the official ROC position. He has reiterated this stance multiple times since, eliciting widespread outrage on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

  • In 2015, Lee condemned celebrations of Japan's defeat in World War II as excessively pro-mainland, claiming Taiwanese people were loyal subjects who fought for their “motherland” Japan.

  • Bizarrely, Lee was also the only ROC president to have joined the Communist Party of China, which he briefly did twice in 1946 and 1947. He claimed to have done so because it was the leading opposition to KMT rule (a rare admission from the localist camp), but considerable evidence suggests that he was in fact a mole who betrayed dozens of his erstwhile party comrades.

➤ 1996 December: During the National Development Conference, Lee Teng-hui and other officials decide to dissolve the Provincial Government and thus eliminate the position of Governor of Taiwan starting in 1998. This is widely suspected to be an attempt by Lee to limit James Soong’s political power and undermine his popularity in Taiwan, a conflict that would come to a head in the 2000 presidential elections.

➤ 1997: Historian Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) systematically revises school textbooks to suggest that every previous government in Taiwan, including that of the KMT itself, was colonial in nature. He recasts the Republic of China as a brutal foreign occupation, comparing it unfavorably with Japan’s supposedly more “benign” colonial rule.

  • The campaign of cultural de-sinicization begins with the support of Lee Teng-hui and accelerates under his DPP successor, forming the ideological foundation for Taiwanese localism and pro-independence agitation. This narrative claims European and Japanese colonialism as positive contributions to Taiwan’s history while denigrating China’s “backwards” culture as antithetical to Taiwanese modernity. It also artificially separates Taiwan’s history from its Chinese context and characterizes Mandarin as an oppressive import from mainland China, promoting instead the use of “Taiwanese” Hokkien (a dialect that also originates in mainland China).

  • In historical study and research, the terms “Japanese occupation” (日据) and “Japanese colonization” (日本殖民统治) are systematically edited to “Japanese rule” (日治). Japan’s ostensible contributions to Taiwan’s industrialization are uncritically lauded, erasing their basis in colonial extraction and militarism. Some organizations like the Taiwan History Association consider Taiwan’s history to be part of Japanese rather than Chinese history, while others like the Taiwan Historical Study Association vehemently disagree.

➤ 1997 July 1: Hong Kong returns to Chinese sovereignty after 156 years of British colonial rule dating back to the First Opium War. Under the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Declaration, its existing political and economic systems are to remain substantially unaffected during a 50-year transitional period. Alongside the 1999 handover of Macau after 442 years of Portuguese colonial rule, this marks the first practical implementation of a “one country, two systems” reunification scheme along the lines of what the PRC has offered to Taiwan since 1979.

➤ 1998 July: During talks with PRC President Jiang Zemin (江泽民), U.S. President Bill Clinton promises that the U.S. will adhere to “three no’s” on the question of Taiwan: that the U.S. would not support Taiwan independence, a "two Chinas" or "one China, one Taiwan" system, nor support Taiwan's membership in any international organization of which statehood is a requirement.

➤ 1999 May: The DPP ratifies the “Resolution on Taiwan’s Future,” outlining a sharp break from the 1992 Consensus. The document states that Taiwan “is an independent and sovereign state,” rejects the “One China” or “One Country, Two Systems” principles, and calls for Taiwan to seek international recognition, including admission to the UN.

➤ 1999 July 9: In an interview with German journalists, Lee Teng-hui claims that there is a “special state-to-state relationship” between mainland China and Taiwan, a statement that other officials quickly confirm to be the government position.

➤ 1999 November: James Soong is expelled from the KMT when he announces an independent presidential campaign after losing the party’s nomination to Lien Chan (連戰). The KMT also launches a three-month smear campaign accusing Soong of embezzling party funds. During the campaign Lee Teng-hui supports the accusations; after the election he admits that he had in fact authorized Soong’s transfer of the funds. Soong is ultimately vindicated by internal KMT documents signed by Lee himself.

➤ 2000 March 18: Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic Progressive Party is elected ROC president, ending 55 years of uninterrupted KMT rule in Taiwan. He goes on to govern for two terms, during which cross-strait relations are consistently strained.

  • It is widely suspected that Lee Teng-hui engineered a split in the KMT by endorsing Lien Chan over the far more popular James Soong, thus intentionally enabling Chen to win with only 39% of the vote in a three-way race.

  • In his inauguration speech, Chen Shui-bian makes his famous “Four Noes and One Without” pledge, claiming that he will not (1) declare independence, (2) change the national title “Republic of China,” (3) amend the constitution to describe cross-strait relations as “state-to-state relations,” (4) push for a referendum on unification or independence, or (5) abolish the Guidelines for National Unification with mainland China.

  • Chen appoints lifelong independence activist and 1996 DPP presidential candidate Peng Ming-min as senior presidential advisor shortly after his inauguration.

➤ 2000 March 31: James Soong and his supporters leave the KMT and form the People First Party (親民黨, PFP) after his loss. He would later repair relations with Lien Chan to become his running mate in 2004, and subsequently run as the PFP’s own presidential candidate in 2012, 2016, and 2020 (garnering between 3% and 13% of the vote). The PFP still exists to this day but lost all parliamentary representation in 2016.

➤ 2001 August 12: After the KMT expels Lee Teng-hui for his pro-independence stance, his supporters form a new party called the Taiwan Solidarity Union (台灣團結聯盟, TSU). They consider Chen Shui-bian and the DPP too moderate and instead call for outright independence as the “Republic of Taiwan.” Lee later campaigns for TSU candidates as the party’s “spiritual leader,” though he never formally joins. 

  • In 2005, TSU chairman Shu Chin-chiang (蘇進強) visited the controversial Yasukuni shrine to pay respects to Taiwanese soldiers who “sacrificed their lives for Japan” and was greeted by Japanese supporters waving TSU and Japanese flags. Pro-unification yuánzhùmín legislator Kao Chin Su-mei (高金素梅) sharply condemned the visit because Imperial Japan “launched over 160 battles to destroy Taiwan's [yuánzhùmín] tribes.” A few months later, she and other yuánzhùmín protested at Yasukuni to demand that the names of their ancestors be removed from the shrine.

  • The TSU lost all parliamentary representation in 2016 but still exists to this day. In 2020 it notably urged Taiwanese-Americans to support Donald Trump for re-election as U.S. president, calling him “the most Taiwan-friendly U.S. leader since World War II.” 

➤ 2001 December 2: The World Taiwanese Congress is founded in Washington, D.C. to coordinate Taiwan independence organizations like FAPA and WFTA.

➤ 2002 August 3: Speaking to the pro-independence World Federation of Taiwanese Associations, Chen Shui-bian declares that “Taiwan has always been a sovereign state” and calls for a referendum to enshrine this claim in law. He also sends Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), then head of the ROC’s Mainland Affairs Council, to the United States to assure nervous officials that this does not represent a serious departure from the one-China policy. When asked by journalists, she confirms that the ROC government is following a policy of “doing it but not saying it” with regard to independence.

➤ 2003: Lee Teng-hui campaigns for the removal of “China” from the names of government agencies, businesses, and other organizations. He also advocates for Taiwan independence and the adoption of a new constitution. Chen Shui-bian also supports these proposals, requiring various government organizations and overseas offices to comply and report back on progress. 

➤ 2003 September: Following a year of bitter debate between the status-quo and pro-independence camps, Chen’s administration adds “Taiwan” to the official ROC passport. In 2020, the English term “Republic of China” (though not the Chinese name 中華民國) would be removed from the passport entirely after lobbying from overseas independence supporters.

➤ 2004 March 19: Chen Shui-bian and his running mate Annette Lu survive an assassination attempt while campaigning in Tainan the day before the 2004 election. DPP supporters claim that the shooting was planned by mainland Chinese officials to disrupt the election while others suspect that it was faked to garner sympathy votes for Chen, who had been trailing in the polls. KMT candidates Lien Chan and James Soong would lose the election by only ~30,000 votes (a margin of only 0.2%), sparking large protests in Taipei; they would never formally concede.

  • Chen Yi-hsiung (陳義雄), the prime suspect, is found drowned in Tainan ten days after the assassination attempt. His death is ruled a suicide, but his family allegedly burned the suicide notes that may have clarified the situation.

  • A consultative referendum is held on the same day as the presidential election, asking voters to approve (1) the acquisition of “advanced anti-missile weapons” and (2) a “‘peace and stability’ framework” for cross-strait negotiations. Due to a KMT boycott, neither question reaches the required 50% turnout threshold and thus both proposals fail to pass.

➤ 2005 March 14: The National People’s Congress of the PRC passes an “Anti-Secession Law” that reiterates the one-China principle, lays out a pathway to peaceful reunification that affords Taiwan “a high degree of autonomy,” and – most controversially in Taiwan and the West – explicitly sanctions the use of “non-peaceful means” should the island unilaterally secede or otherwise render peaceful reunification impossible.

➤ 2005 April 26: Kuomintang chairman Lien Chan leads a 70-member delegation on the party’s first visit to mainland China since 1949. Pro-independence rioters affiliated with the DPP and TSU attempt to prevent their flight from leaving the Taipei airport, triggering a massive brawl with KMT supporters. The delegation first visits the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, then flies to Beijing where Lien meets with PRC President and CPC General Secretary Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) – the first such meeting between KMT and CPC leaders since 1945. Lee Teng-hui and the DPP condemn the visit, with Chen Shui-bian initially claiming it violated ROC law.

➤ 2006 February 27: In violation of his inauguration pledge, Chen Shui-bian dissolves the National Unification Council and the associated Guidelines for National Unification.

➤ 2007: Tu Cheng-sheng, the historian who had previously revised history textbooks to whitewash Japanese imperialism, is appointed Minister of Education in Chen Shui-bian’s second term. He aims to “clear away the ‘remnants of Greater China consciousness’ (大中國意識的沉屙)” by removing references to “mainland China” and introducing separate textbooks for Taiwanese and Chinese history. The textbook revisions also recast Han migration to Taiwan during the Qing dynasty as a colonial process.

➤ 2007 March 4: In a speech for a FAPA event, Chen Shui-bian proposes the “Four Wants and One Without,” advocating for Taiwan to seek independence, ratify a new name, revise the constitution, and seek further development. He also claims that Taiwanese politics is divided not along left-right lines but only on the question of unification vs. independence.

➤ 2007 September 7: Chen Shui-bian’s government applies for UN membership, for the first time ever under the name “Taiwan” rather than “Republic of China.” As usual, the General Assembly overwhelmingly refuses to even consider the bid. 

➤ 2008 March 22: Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the KMT is elected ROC president in a landslide, bringing eight years of DPP rule to an end and overseeing a marked improvement in cross-strait relations. In his inauguration speech, Ma highlights his "three no's" policy -- no unification with mainland China, no declaration of independence from China, and no use of force to resolve differences across the Taiwan Strait.

  • Two referendums on UN membership are held concurrently with this election: one from the DPP proposing to apply “under the name ‘Taiwan,’” and a rival one from the KMT proposing to apply “under the name ‘Republic of China,’ or ‘Taiwan,’ or [any] other name that is conducive to success and preserves our nation’s dignity.” Neither comes close to meeting the 50% turnout threshold.

➤ 2008: The first and second Cross-Strait High-Level Talks take place in June in Beijing and in November in Taipei. Chen Yunlin (陈云林) of the PRC Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) and Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) of the ROC Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) sign agreements concerning cross-strait commercial flights, tourism, and trade.

➤ 2009 May 16–22: The first annual Straits Forum commences in Xiamen, Fujian province. The forum aims to promote grassroots interaction, economic exchange, and cultural integration between the people of mainland China and Taiwan. 

➤ 2009 September 11: Chen Shui-bian is sentenced to life in prison, receives a fine of NT$200 million (US$6.1 million), and has his political rights annulled for life after a series of financial corruption scandals centering on him and his family came to light during his last two years in office. The sentence is later reduced to 20 years, but after a 2013 suicide attempt and insufficient prison treatment of his neurological illness, Chen is released on medical parole in 2015.

➤ 2010 June 29: Ma Ying-jeou signs the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) to increase bilateral trade between Taiwan and mainland China. 

➤ 2011 November: In a speech to the Australian parliament, U.S. President Barack Obama announces a repositioning of U.S. diplomatic and military assets away from the Middle East and towards East Asia and the Pacific in order to counter China’s growing influence – a landmark policy shift known as the Pivot to Asia. 

➤ 2012 September 25: Amid large protests in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong over Japan’s moves to nationalize the disputed Diaoyu (“Senkaku”) Islands, the Japanese coast guard attacks Taiwanese fishing vessels off the islands with water cannons.

➤ 2014 March–April: The Sunflower Student Movement erupts against Ma Ying-jeou’s proposed Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, which is intended to expand the 2010 ECFA free trade deal into the service sector. Motivated by a combination of anti-mainland xenophobia and grievances about neoliberal globalization, the protests escalate into an occupation of the Legislative Yuan (a scene repeated with Hong Kong’s Legislative Council in 2019) and lead to the eventual scrapping of the agreement. 

  • Leaders of the movement later become major figures in the DPP and the New Power Party (時代力量, NPP), which is founded in 2015 as an alternative pro-independence force. The NPP would displace the PFP as the third-largest party in the 2016 legislative election but eventually lose all its seats by 2024.

➤ 2015 July 23: Ma Ying-jeou’s modest attempts to partially reverse the de-Sinicization of history textbooks draw strong protests from separatists. His curriculum guidelines would be repealed by the DPP shortly after the end of his presidency.

➤ 2015 November 7: Ma Ying-jeou and PRC President Xi Jinping (习近平) meet and shake hands in Singapore, the first meeting between leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait since 1949.

➤ 2016 January 16: Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the DPP is elected president of the ROC, four years after her first unsuccessful run against Ma Ying-jeou in 2012. Her inauguration brings the eight years of relatively warm cross-strait relations under her predecessor to an almost immediate end.

➤ 2016 December: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump breaks diplomatic protocol by accepting a congratulatory call from Tsai Ing-wen. He asserts that he will not be “dictated to” by China and later questions why the U.S. should be bound by the one-China policy. 

➤ 2017 April 6–7: After affirming the United States’ commitment to the one-China policy in a February phone call, Trump invites Xi Jinping to a summit at Mar-a-Lago.  

➤ 2018 March 16: Trump signs the Taiwan Travel Act, which allows U.S. officials at all levels to travel to Taiwan to meet their ROC counterparts and vice versa.

➤ 2018 June 12: The American Institute in Taiwan (the de facto U.S. “embassy” in Taipei) opens a new office compound.

➤ 2018 November 24: The DPP loses local elections to the KMT in a landslide.

➤ 2019 August 6: Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) founds the Taiwan People’s Party (台灣民眾黨, TPP), which is named in explicit homage to the 1927-31 anticolonial party – indeed the founding date is chosen to coincide with the birthday Ko shares with Chiang Wei-shui, co-founder of the original TPP. The party adopts turquoise as its color to symbolize the “middle road” it purports to pursue between the blue (KMT) and green (TPP) camps. Since 2020 it has been the third-largest party in the Legislative Yuan.

➤ 2019–2020: Under Trump the number of U.S. Navy incursions into the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait more than doubles compared with previous years.

➤ 2020 January 11: Tsai Ing-wen is re-elected ROC president with 57% of the vote, despite having presided over massive DPP losses in the 2018 local elections. In the presidential campaign she had also trailed to her KMT challenger until summer 2019, when the first large-scale anti-extradition bill protests erupted in Hong Kong. 

  • Notably, the government of Hong Kong had introduced said bill because it was legally unable to extradite city resident Chan Tong-kai (陳同佳) to Taiwan to stand trial for murdering his pregnant girlfriend there in 2018. Considerable evidence suggests that Tsai stalled law enforcement cooperation in this case (even refusing Chan’s offer to surrender in October 2019) in a largely successful effort to discredit Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” framework to Taiwanese voters for her own electoral gain.

➤ 2020 March 26: Trump signs the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act, which directs the State Department to strengthen Taiwan's diplomatic relationships and partnerships around the world.

➤ 2021 January 22: The European Parliament passes two resolutions calling on EU members to “revisit their engagement policies with Taiwan” and to “protect democratic Taiwan from foreign threats.” 

➤ 2021 June 29: The U.S. and Taiwan hold the eleventh Trade and Investment Framework Agreement Council meeting, which is intended to lead to a full free-trade agreement. However this is considered unlikely given increasing U.S. protectionism.

➤ 2022 August 2: Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Speaker of the House and second in the presidential line of succession, visits Taiwan with a congressional delegation to give a speech to the Legislative Yuan and meet with Tsai Ing-wen. At the same time, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command conducts RIMPAC naval exercises in Hawai’i with forces from all the G7 countries. China strongly condemns the visit and conducts a series of military drills around Taiwan reminiscent of the 1995-96 Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. The visit draws large crowds from both pro- and anti-U.S. groups. Several other groups of U.S. officials visit Taiwan in the weeks and months after.

➤ 2022 September 18: In an interview with 60 Minutes, U.S. President Joe Biden promises that U.S. forces would defend Taiwan militarily from any attempt at armed reunification with the mainland. Coming amidst the escalating proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, this statement appears to break with decades of official “strategic ambiguity” on the question of committing U.S. troops to defend Taiwan. Biden had previously made similar remarks in August 2021, October 2021, and May 2022. (In an effort at damage control the White House has consistently walked back these comments, claiming they do not represent a change in U.S. policy.)

➤ 2022 December 6: TSMC breaks ground on a new chip fabrication facility in Arizona, which the U.S. government strong-armed the company into opening despite much higher production costs than in Taiwan. This “re-shoring” of U.S. semiconductor supply chains strikes many in Taiwan as an attempt to weaken the island’s “silicon shield” – the protection that TSMC’s key position supposedly affords against armed reunification (see “Contemporary Economics and Geopolitics” for a more detailed discussion). Such fears are not assuaged when U.S. congressman Seth Moulton later publicly muses about “making it very clear to the Chinese that if you invade Taiwan, we’re going to blow up TSMC.” This elicits an angry pledge from ROC Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) to defend the company militarily from U.S. attack in such a scenario.

➤ 2022 December 23: In a continuation of decades of U.S. arms sales and military support to Taiwan, Biden signs the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. The spending bill includes for the first time a "Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act,” which would further militarize Taiwan by authorizing up to $10 billion in security assistance and fast-tracked weapons procurement for the island. 

➤ 2022 December 27: Tsai Ing-wen announces that mandatory military service will be lengthened from four months to one year starting in 2024, warning that “Taiwan stands on the frontlines of authoritarian expansion, at the vanguard of the global defense of democracy. Only by preparing for war can we avoid it – only by being capable of fighting a war can we stop one.”

➤ 2023 August 7: Biden signs the United States-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade First Agreement Implementation Act to bolster trade ties and guide future negotiations. 

➤ 2023 February 1: Newly elected President of the Philippines Bongbong Marcos announces the locations of four new bases to be used by the U.S. military under the U.S.-Philippines Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. They will be built on the island of Luzon, noted for its “strategic location” facing north towards Taiwan.  

➤ 2023 March 27: Ma Ying-jeou becomes the first current or former leader of the ROC to visit mainland China since 1949. In public remarks at the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, he asserts that Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are “descendants of the Yan and Yellow Emperors” (炎黄子孙). His use of this phrase, while considered antiquated in both Taiwan and the mainland for its perceived exclusion of non-Han ethnicities, constitutes an impassioned plea for de-escalation, peace, and eventual reunification.

➤ 2024 January 13: Lai Ching-te (賴清德) of the DPP, a self-described “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence,” is elected president of the ROC. He wins with only 40% of the vote, prevailing over an opposition split between KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih (侯友宜) and TPP candidate Ko Wen-je after the latter two failed to agree on a joint ticket. Even this failed attempt to unite opposition forces had drawn threats of prosecution from DPP authorities.

  • Notably, Lai’s running mate Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) has a biography laden with symbolism for the independence camp’s geopolitical alignments. She was born in Japan to a Taiwanese father and American mother; attended high school, college, and graduate school in the United States; retained U.S. citizenship until 2002; and served as the ROC’s representative to the United States from 2020-23. Lai himself has also claimed that “Taiwan and Japan are like a family.”

  • In concurrent elections to the Legislative Yuan, the TPP increases its representation and denies both the KMT and DPP a parliamentary majority. Although the DPP wins a plurality of the popular vote, the KMT secures a plurality of seats largely due to the continued strength of the yuánzhùmín vote for the pan-Blue camp.

➤ 2024 February 8: The U.S. confirms that it has begun permanently stationing Army Green Berets in a “training” capacity on ROC-held Kinmen island, just 10 kilometers from the coast of mainland China.  

3. Resources arrow_upward

The following linked readings and resources provide further context and analysis on the history of Taiwan as outlined in the above timeline. While not every included resource comports fully with Qiao’s analysis of Taiwan, each contains useful context that we hope will inform readers’ further investigation.  

a. Perspectives from the Pro-Unification Left arrow_upward

Chen Mingzhong (陳明忠). “A Taiwanese Person’s Path For ‘Left-Unification’.” Interview by Lu Zhenghui (呂正惠) and Chen Yizhong (陈宜中), originally published in Chinese on Taihainet.com, June 26, 2008. English translation by R. Huang published August 6, 2022.

  • Wide-ranging interview with a veteran of the Taiwanese pro-unification left, who was imprisoned under the KMT’s White Terror from 1950-60 and went on to co-found the Labor Party of Taiwan. He strongly rejects the separatist camp’s historical revisionism regarding the 228 uprising of 1947, insisting that it was not a conflict between “Taiwanese” běnshěngrén and “mainland” wàishěngrén but a united struggle against KMT despotism in which communists played a leading role. Chen further points out that the White Terror’s victims were disproportionately wàishěngrén, and that the social base of early Taiwan separatism was the běnshěngrén landlord class which lost out from KMT land reforms. He decries the domination of modern Taiwanese politics by the pan-blue (KMT) and pan-green (DPP) camps as well as the historical amnesia surrounding Japanese colonialism and U.S. neocolonialism.

Chen Yingzhen (陳映真, under the pseudonym Xu Nancun). “Back alleys: the creative journey of Chen Yingzhen.” Originally published 2001. Translation by Petrus Liu published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, Issue 3, November 3, 2014.

  • A short personal and political autobiography by the doyen of Taiwan’s pro-unification left, often considered to be the island’s greatest 20th century writer. Chen recalls the 1947 anti-KMT uprising and subsequent White Terror as formative childhood traumas, which led him to take solace first in Lu Xun and then the whole body of Chinese communist literature. His own blossoming literary career was temporarily cut short by his arrest and imprisonment from 1968-75, during which he encountered hundreds of other political prisoners. Later he became involved in Taiwan’s xiangtu (native/rural) literature movement and actively combated separatism as a co-founder of the Labor Party and the Alliance for the Unification of China, eventually passing away in Beijing in 2016. As he succinctly put it, “the division between Taiwan and mainland China was the combined result of a rapacious Japanese imperialism and the rise of American imperialist interventions in the post-Korean War period. The political left-wing in Taiwan should focus on overcoming ethnic tensions created by imperialism, and prioritize the peaceful unification of the people under the principle of national self-determination.”

Chen Yingzhen. “台湾的美国化改造” [The Americanization of Taiwan]. Originally published in 回歸的旅途 [The Journey Back], 1997. Republished in 爱思想 (Aisixiang), July 10, 2013. 

  • Chen Yingzhen contributed this foreword for the Taiwanese publication of Dan Yang’s The Journey Back (回歸的旅途), a memoir recounting the Shanghai-born author’s disillusionment with Western cultural hegemony during her experience as a graduate student and academic in the United States. Chen provides a historical survey of Japanese and U.S. imperialism in Taiwan and its impacts on local culture, politics, and ideology. As Chen puts it, the lingering historical structures of the unfinished Chinese Civil War and the global Cold War produced Taiwan independence as “essentially a pro-imperialist, anti-China, anti-communist, and de-Sinicizing movement.”

Chung, Lawrence. “Memorial in Beijing sheds light on Communist spies executed in Taiwan.” South China Morning Post. February 16, 2014.  

  • On June 10, 1950, KMT lieutenant general and deputy defense minister General Wu Shi, his two deputies Chen Baocang and Nie Xi, and CPC officer Zhu Feng were executed by firing squad for spying for the CPC. Along with hundreds of other underground CPC agents they had been betrayed under torture by Cai Xiaoqian, who had founded and led the party’s Taiwan Provincial Working Committee since shortly after the island’s retrocession in 1945. In 2013, a monument in Beijing’s Unsung Heroes Memorial Square was built to honor the underground communists’ memory and sacrifice, including statues of the four martyrs of June 10, 1950 and names of 846 others.

de Ceukelaire, Wim. “‘Stop U.S. interference’: Interview with the Labour Party of Taiwan.” Interview with Wu Rong-yuan (吳榮元). Originally published by No Cold War. Republished by Friends of Socialist China, January 25, 2023.

  • Wu Rong-yuan is the current chairman of the Labor Party of Taiwan and longtime comrade of Chen Yingzhen, Chen Mingzhong and other veteran pro-unification leftists, many of whom he met as fellow political prisoners at the infamous Green Island Prison. In this interview with Wim de Ceukelaire of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, he discusses the Labor Party’s (pre)history, rejects facile comparisons between Taiwan and Ukraine, and denounces the rise in both U.S. interference and anticommunist repression under the current DPP regime.

de Ceukelaire, Wim. “Will Taiwan voters choose further confrontation with China?” Interview with Wu Rong-yuan (吳榮元), published in Asia Times. January 7, 2024.

  • In the lead-up to the January 2024 election in Taiwan, Wim de Ceukelaire conducted a follow-up interview with Labor Party chairman Wu Rong-yuan. Regarding the ruling DPP, Wu asserts that “Since they came to power 23 years ago, they managed to create a distinct Taiwanese identity out of nothing.” He concludes by endorsing reunification under a “one country, two systems” framework and assures that this arrangement must necessarily afford Taiwan more autonomy than Hong Kong due to its historically unique situation.

Kao Chin Su-mei (高金素梅). “赴北京看阅兵，来去都光明正大” [“I visited Beijing for the military parade, and all my travels were aboveboard”]. Interview with Guancha. September 7, 2015.

  • Kao Chin Su-mei (also known by her Atayal name Ciwas Ali) is a lifelong advocate for Taiwanese yuánzhùmín rights who holds one of the six seats in the Legislative Yuan reserved for yuánzhùmín representatives. In this interview she discusses her motivations for visiting Beijing to join China’s 70th anniversary celebrations of victory over Japan, for which she was severely (and as she notes, hypocritically) criticized by both pan-Blue and pan-Green politicians. In particular she decries the DPP’s historical revisionism regarding Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, especially its whitewashing of the especially severe oppression and land theft suffered by yuánzhùmín peoples. The Guancha interviewers also note her previous meeting in 2009 with then-President of the PRC Hu Jintao, as well as the 2005 protests she led at Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine against the involuntary enshrinement of Taiwanese yuánzhùmín conscripts alongside Japanese Class A war criminals.

Lin Shiwei (林世偉). “原住民立委候選人狂飆髒話　罵蔡英文政府” [“Yuánzhùmín legislative candidate hurls obscenities, mocks Tsai Ing-wen’s government”]. YouTube video, 15:43. January 5, 2024. 

  • In this extraordinary invective-filled speech, an ethnic Atayal legislative candidate excoriates the DPP, the KMT, and the entire ROC government for their treatment of Taiwan’s yuánzhùmín. Unfortunately there are no English subtitles, so we provide here a translation of the key passage starting at 11:05: “Taiwan’s ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ trample on us yuánzhùmín’s heads and bodies. I tell you, the Japanese were so cruel. We Atayal people were the best at headhunting the Japanese! Under my home are buried some two hundred Japanese heads; did you [Han people] dare behead them? The Tsai Ing-wen government wants to sell us out to Japan and the United States, is that right? Why can’t we be brothers with mainland China? Aren’t your ancestors from mainland China? … This is the politicians’ trap: provoking ethnic antagonism … War will go on indefinitely and it won’t care about your ‘human rights.’”

Lan Bozhou (藍博洲). “我从小接受“反共”教育，后来发现杀台湾人的不是共产党” [I was raised anti-communist, but later realized it wasn’t the communists who killed Taiwanese people]. YouTube video interview with China Content Creator, 24:28. October 7, 2023.

  • Taiwanese writer Lan Bozhou explains how uncovering the long-buried stories of Taiwan’s underground communists and combating “pro-independence” historical revisionism became his life’s work. He relates the extreme anti-communist indoctrination his generation underwent as children in the 60s, then the disorienting introduction of Western liberalism in the 80s as an “alternative” ideology unmoored from Taiwan’s realities. Right as four decades of martial law came to an end in 1987, he began working for Chen Yingzhen’s magazine Renjian and was assigned to gather firsthand accounts of the 228 uprising. Unsurprisingly he found that participants and survivors of that event were largely unwilling to talk, until he finally secured an interview with the widow of communist martyr Guo Xiucong (郭琇琮).

Lan Bozhou (藍博洲). “A Beautiful Century.” Originally published as “美好的世紀” in 人間 (Renjian), July 1987. English translation by Kevin Li published February 7, 2024.

  • Qiao Collective is pleased to present Lan Bozhou’s “A Beautiful Century”, a landmark investigative piece originally published just weeks after the end of 40 years of brutal martial law in the short-lived left-leaning magazine Renjian. One the first journalists to publicly detail the 228 Incident in Taiwan (news of the incident had spread across Mainland China as events unfolded), Lan Bozhou profiles Dr. Guo Xiucong, a martyr of the White Terror period through the lens of his widow, Chen Zhihui [pseudonym], and comrade-in-arms Cai Hanting [pseudonym], survivors of the same period. Recounting the lives of Guo and his family, comrades Chen Zhihui and Cai Hanting piece together the components of post-colonial Taiwanese identity and resistance rooted firmly in the legacies of the Chinese May Fourth Movement, Marxism, and the CPC.

Lin Shuyang (林書揚). “苦澀的台灣五四精神──60年代到70年代台灣知青五案的啟迪” [The Bitter Spirit of May Fourth in Taiwan: The Inspiration of the Five Cases of Taiwan's Intellectual Youth in the 1960s and 1970s]. Originally published 1990. Republished in 兩岸犇報 (Chaiwan Ben Post). October 7, 2022. 

  • In 1950, Lin Shuyang was sentenced to life imprisonment for his work as a member of the Taiwan Provincial Working Committee of the Communist Party of China. This article, written six years after his release in 1984, studies the emergence of five left-wing Taiwanese youth movements in the 1960-70s after the decimation of the White Terror and analyzes the neocolonial structure of contemporary Taiwanese society in hopes of helping young people develop a conscious and progressive perspective on the future.

Qin Feng (秦风). “台湾地下共产党员的命运” [The fate of Taiwan’s underground communists]. 光明网 (Guangming Online). December 10, 2001.

  • An article synthesizing oral histories collected from underground CPC members in Taiwan who endured the KMT’s White Terror in the early 1950s. Among other interesting details, it shows the close level of coordination between the Taiwanese Communist Party and CPC dating from the 1930s; the crushing impact of the Korean War (and the U.S. 7th Fleet’s entry into the Taiwan Strait) on underground communists’ hopes for liberation by the PLA; the role of KMT land reform in undercutting their rural support base; and their success in “turning” high-ranking officers in the ROC military, such as deputy chief of staff Wu Shi. The article also discusses the 1993 discovery of a mass grave of White Terror victims at Liuzhangli Cemetery in Taipei, facilitated by the Mutual Aid Association for Former Political Prisoners in the Taiwan Area.

Wang Hui (汪晖). “两岸历史中的失踪者——《台共党人的悲歌》与台湾的历史记忆” [Missing Persons in Cross-Strait History—‘The Elegy of the Taiwan Communists’ and Taiwan's Historical Memory]. 爱思想 (Aisixiang). August 19, 2014.

  • Tsinghua University scholar Wang Hui explores the buried stories uncovered by Lan Bozhou in “Elegy of the Taiwan Communists,” which undermine the separatist narrative that reduces the island’s history to an unbroken succession of “colonial” regimes. Ironically this narrative erases the historical memory not just of Taiwanese communism (and its close partnership with the CPC), but also of previous “independence” movements that sought to liberate the island from Japanese rule and reunify with the mainland in 1895, 1915, and 1928-31. Instead it cultivates anti-mainland chauvinism and nostalgia for Japanese colonialism, while intentionally severing the fight against KMT dictatorship from contemporaneous anti-imperialist struggles.

b. Cold War Anti-Communism, Imperialism, and Ideology arrow_upward

Chen Kuang-Hsing (陳光興). “Deimperialization: Club 51 and the Imperialist Assumption of Democracy.” In Asia As Method, 161-285. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.  

  • In Chen Kuang-Hsing’s influential book Asia As Method, the Taiwanese cultural studies scholar examines the influence of U.S. ideology in Taiwan through the case of Club 51, a political organization founded to seek U.S. statehood for Taiwan as the 51st state. Though a relatively fringe group, Chen argues that Club 51 reflects the internationalization of imperialist culture and ideology and the need for a process Chen refers to as “deimperialization.”

Chiang Min-Hua (江敏華). "The U.S. Aid and Taiwan’s Post-War Economic Development, 1951-1965.” African and Asian Studies, Vol. 13, Issue 1-2 (2014): 100-120. 

  • Chiang documents the extent of U.S. military and economic aid to Taiwan, arguing that “massive U.S. military and economic aid actually formed the critical basis of state capacity.” As Chiang shows, Taiwan’s entrance into the Western-led capitalist system was shaped by the ideological and geopolitical imperatives of Cold War anti-communism.  See also: Wayne Robert Hugar.

Cox, Thomas R. “Harbingers of Change: American Merchants and the Formosa Annexation Scheme.” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May 1973): 163-184.

  • Cox traces the forgotten efforts of U.S. merchants in China, and later of U.S. commissioner to China Peter Parker, to annex Taiwan as a U.S. colony in the mid-19th century. Though the scheme was never formally pursued, the motivations for U.S. control over Taiwan – specifically its strategic location in proximity to mainland China’s coast – were clearly antecedents for U.S. strategy during the Cold War. 

Craft, Stephen G. American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.

  • This book examines the May 24th Incident in the broader historical context of U.S.-Taiwan Cold War relations and the U.S. military presence in Taiwan. As Craft argues, the murder of Liu Ziran revealed fissures in the U.S.-ROC relationship, public distrust of U.S. military personnel, and the extent of U.S. extraterritorial power in Taiwan.

Hugar, Robert Wayne. “Cold War Economic Ideology and U.S. Aid to Taiwan, 1950-1965.” PhD diss. Liberty University, 2022.

  • Robert Wayne Hugar tracks the economic and ideological relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan during the early decades of the Cold War, emphasizing that anti-communism undergirded a massive transfer of foreign aid ($1.4 billion between 1950-1965 alone) . As Hugar notes, the “Taiwan miracle” of sustained economic growth rested on a foundation not of neoliberal policy but of statist developmentalism, Cold War militarism, and U.S. largesse. See also: Min-Hua Chiang.

International Relations Center / Interhemispheric Resource Center. “World Anti-Communist League.” Militarist Monitor. January 9, 1990.

  • Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT regime in Taiwan was instrumental in the 1954 formation of the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League, which expanded into the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in 1966. Since its founding, the international network of far-right forces (now renamed as the World League for Freedom and Democracy) has been headquartered in Taipei. This article details the sordid role played by the WACL, and in particular the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Beitou, Taiwan, in funding and training the Nicaraguan Contras as well as Salvadoran and Guatemalan death squads.

Naya, Seiji. "The Vietnam War and some aspects of its economic impact on Asian countries." The Developing Economies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1971): 31-57.

  • Historians have shown how U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia provided a critical market for industrial goods from south Korea and Japan, spurring economic modernization in both key U.S. allies. Similarly, the Vietnam War opened a critical export market for Taiwan, as the overwhelming majority of Taiwanese exports in commodities such as chemical fertilizer, concrete, iron and steel went to south Vietnam. As of 1966-1967, exports to south Vietnam represented 13.4 percent of Taiwan’s total exports, making Taiwan’s export economy more dependent on Vietnam than south Korea, Japan, and Singapore.

Wu Xiuquan (伍修权). “People's China stands for peace: Speech at the United Nations Security Council.” Translated by the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. November 28, 1950.

  • PRC diplomat Wu Xiuquan addressed the UN Security Council a month after China’s intervention in the Korean War, though the ROC regime in Taiwan would continue occupying the country’s seat for 21 more years. His speech linked the United States’ intervention in the Taiwan Strait to its simultaneous aggressions against Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines, charging that “American imperialism … follows the beaten path of the Japanese imperialist aggressors” (including by restoring Japanese war criminals to positions of authority in Taiwan). Notably, Wu accused the U.S. of already stoking Taiwan separatism and claimed the February 28, 1947 anti-KMT uprising as a patriotic Chinese movement against U.S. imperialism.

c. Contemporary Economics and Geopolitics arrow_upward

“Briefing: The U.S. Tech War Against China.” No Cold War. 2023. 

  • This briefing explains why the semiconductor industry is so central to the United States’ efforts to kneecap mainland China’s technological progress by “decoupling” it from Taiwan and other U.S. vassals. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have conducted a multifront assault on China’s access to (and ability to domestically produce) semiconducting chips, through sweeping export restrictions and strong-arming of TSMC and other key players in the semiconductor supply chain.

Lee, Peter. “Taiwan’s Silicon Shield Collides with its Silicon Lance.” Peter Lee’s China Threat Report. February 12, 2021.

  • Peter Lee analyzes the DPP government’s support for the United States’ tech war on China, and its use of TSMC as a geopolitical bargaining chip – which has spurred not just China but also Europe and the U.S. itself to attempt to “re-shore” domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Though the analysis is a bit dated (here is an update from October 2022) and does not cover 2023 industry developments, the articles provide a good overview of the economic angle of American neocolonialism in Taiwan. It is also worth noting that SMIC, the PRC’s domestic chip foundry, was founded and co-managed by Chinese engineers from Taiwan who once worked for TSMC.

Varman, Rahul. “What Do We Learn about Capitalism from Chip War?” Monthly Review. November 2023.  

  • Rahul Varman of the Indian Institute of Technology reads between the lines of economic historian Chris Miller’s recent book Chip War, detailing how U.S. hegemony over the semiconductor supply chain is a key arm of its imperial project in Asia. The U.S. has played an outsize role in shaping the differential industrialization of its client regimes in Japan, south Korea, and Taiwan; China’s rapid advances in the field threaten to upend this carefully constructed order, leading directly to the current tech war.

Griffith, Rasheed. “The Taiwanese Debt Trap.” China in the Caribbean. May 24, 2021.

  • Amid unsubstantiated claims of “Chinese debt-trap diplomacy”, a real case of weaponized loan contracts by the Taiwan government has gone overlooked. Rasheed Griffith, a researcher and analyst at U.S. think tank Inter-American Dialogue, studies Chinese geoeconomic and financial engagement with the Caribbean. This article by Griffith explains how the ROC (at the time Grenada’s largest bilateral lender) retaliated to Grenada’s diplomatic recognition of the PRC by first refusing to allow debt restructuring in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Ivan (2004) and Hurricane Emily (2005) as well as suing Grenada to gain immediate repayment of the loans.

Hu Shaohua (胡少华). "Small State Foreign Policy: The Diplomatic Recognition of Taiwan." China: An International Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2015): 1-23.

  • Since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the unresolved status of the Chinese Civil War has taken on a much more international dimension. This article analyzes the ideological, economic, and geographical factors that motivate countries to recognize the ROC rather than the PRC. Anti-communist and religious motivations were especially strong during the Cold War and even endure today (e.g. Tuvalu). Economic aid in the form of trade, tourism, infrastructure investments, and direct donations has motivated both governments as whole (e.g. St. Lucia) and leaders as individuals (e.g. Guatemala) to switch diplomatic recognition between the ROC and PRC, sometimes even multiple times to extract more benefits (e.g. Central African Republic, Nauru). Lastly, geopolitical factors such as security relationships with the U.S. (e.g. Marshall Islands, Palau) or leverage against U.S. regional influence (e.g. Paraguay) will affect diplomatic relations.

Ives, Kim. “Taiwan Tries to Bolster Jovenel, Albeit Briefly.” Haïti Liberté. July 17, 2019.

  • Haiti is another of the last 11 UN member states to recognize the ROC. This article from 2019 details Tsai Ing-wen’s diplomatic and (rather paltry) financial support for the deeply unpopular far-right regime of then-President Jovenel Moïse. In February 2021 Moïse would go on to retain power unconstitutionally after the expiration of his presidential term, triggering a mass national uprising. That August he was assassinated by a professional hit squad; bizarrely, 11 of its members fled to the ROC embassy before Haitian police arrested them with the approval of diplomatic staff.

Mullen, Joseph. “A prologue to the Swazi revolution, one year in the making.” MR Online. July 7, 2022.

  • The only remaining country in Africa to recognize the ROC is Eswatini, a brutal absolute monarchy also known by its former name Swaziland by opponents of the regime. This article recounts the role of Taiwan in assisting King Mswati III’s bloody crackdown on the 2021-22 pro-democracy movement: supplying helicopters and drones, providing military training, and offering around $18 million in “development aid.” The general secretary of the Communist Party of Swaziland is quoted as saying “the people of Swaziland face a great enemy in Taiwan’s colonization.”

Macleod, Alan. “Tanks and Think Tanks: How Taiwanese Cash is Funding the Push to War with China.” Mint Press News. April 22, 2021.

  • When Chiang Kai-shek’s ROC lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan, it was their financial and military links with the U.S. that sustained their political claims of representing all of China. Today, those same connections are used to justify U.S. imperialism in Asia as a defense of “free and democratic societies” and to fuel political support for militarization, intervention, and war against China. The influx of cash from the ROC government, pro-independence NGOs, and Taiwanese private companies to support war is rarely openly disclosed and the U.S. is undoubtedly an enthusiastic partner in escalating tensions with China on military, economic, and ideological fronts. 

“Notified Taiwan Arms Sales 1990-2023.” Taiwan Defense & National Security. Updated December 15, 2023.

  • This tabulation of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, as notified to Congress on an annual basis, reveals the massive scope of its effort to garrison the island in preparation for war with China. Since 1990 alone, $69.5 billion in arms have been earmarked for transfer to Taiwan. $10.72 billion worth was transferred in 2019, the largest single year total, reflecting the increasing militarization of the island.

Prashad, Vijay. “Making Taiwan the Ukraine of the East.” Consortium News. February 9, 2023. 

  • Vijay Prashad analyzes contemporary U.S. strategy vis-a-vis Taiwan in light of analogies to the proxy war in Ukraine, a recent deal for military base expansion in the Philippines, and continuing arms sales to Taiwan. 

Rigger, Shelley. The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China's Economic Rise. New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. 

  • Though far from an anti-imperialist critique, Rigger’s book provides a useful English-language account of the role of Taiwanese business interests in “opening” China to global capitalist forces during the 1990s. Ironically, given the tendency of some to paint China as an imperialist threat to Taiwan, it was Taiwanese business leaders (台商) who, facing rising costs of production in Taiwan, tapped the low-hanging fruit of Chinese cheap labor, a dynamic that transferred surplus value from the Chinese mainland to Taiwanese capitalists and Western investors and consumers.  

Shoup, Laurence H. “Giving War A Chance.” Monthly Review. May 2022. 

  • This article critically engages with Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, a recent book by former Defense Department official and influential foreign policy “expert” Elbridge A. Colby. Shoup writes that Colby’s text provides a concrete opportunity to observe “how the monopoly capitalist ruling class is preparing the people of the United States for what could be a catastrophic world war” with China. Central to Colby’s vision of a “strategy of denial” is brinkmanship with China over Taiwan. This article thus reflects how Taiwan is understood as an essential part of a “first island chain” of U.S. allies and client states surrounding the Chinese coast.  

Tu Zhuxi (兔主席). “中美关系的四个阶段——台湾问题与中美关系 (8)” [The Taiwan question and Sino-US relations (8)]. WeChat. October 14, 2022.

  • Pseudonymous political commentator “Chairman Rabbit” describes how the United States’ role in cross-strait relations has shifted between stabilization and provocation, tracing the evolution of China-U.S. relations over four historical periods since Nixon’s 1972 visit and the Shanghai Communiqué. The author concludes that the status quo will hold as long as the U.S. and Taiwan authorities do not jointly seek to confront China. As an example he cites the U.S. opposition to Chen Shui-bian’s UN membership referendum in 2008, as a needless provocation at a time when the former’s imperial designs centered on the Middle East.

Tu Zhuxi (兔主席). “白营：台湾年轻人的“第三条道路”？” [White Camp: A Third Way for Taiwan’s Youth?]. WeChat. January 18, 2024.

  • Chairman Rabbit argues that the youth-backed Taiwan People’s Party led by Ko Wen-je represents a political shift away from the “independence vs. reunification” dichotomy of the DPP and KMT camps. This new political force focuses on practical solutions and domestic interests, including an increase in political, economic and cultural exchanges with the mainland, which could build a profound, broad and resilient foundation for cross-strait peace. However, the author argues the mainland needs to realize that "peace" does not automatically lead to "reunification."

d. Sinophobia, De-Sinicization, and Classism in Taiwan arrow_upward

Chen Kongli (陳孔立). “台灣「去中國化」的文化動向.” [Taiwan’s cultural trend of ‘de-sinicization’]. 海峽評論 (Straits Review), Issue 128. August 2001.

  • Chen Kongli, a professor at the Taiwan Research Institute at Xiamen University, analyzes the theory and practice of Taiwan’s de-sinicization and how it provides a foundation for Taiwanese localism and separatism. De-sinicization involves whitewashing European and Japanese colonization into positive and authentic aspects of Taiwanese identity, as well as the portrayal of Chinese culture as inferior and antithetical to Taiwanese modernization. It entails artificially separating Taiwan’s history from its Chinese context and characterizing Mandarin as an oppressive import from mainland China while promoting the use of “Taiwanese” Hokkien (a dialect that also originates in mainland China). 

Ching Leo T. S. “Between Assimilation and Imperialization: From Colonial Projects to Imperial Subjects.” In Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, 89-132. Oakland: University of California Press, 2001.

  • With the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, colonial authorities introduced a new “Japanization” or “imperialization” policy called kōminka (皇民化, lit. “becoming subjects of the emperor”) that aimed to forcibly assimilate or subordinate all Han Taiwanese and some yuánzhùmín into Japanese society. This entailed bans on Chinese-language press and education, to be replaced with Japanese; the adoption of Japanese names; renunciation of Chinese ancestry for the adoption of new Japanese ancestors; and suppression of Han and yuánzhùmín spiritual customs in favor of State Shinto and emperor worship. There was also heavy emphasis on volunteering for the Imperial Japanese military and dying for the Japanese emperor. By the early 1940s, it had become common for Taiwanese youth to include "desires written in [their own] blood" (kessho shigan) in their applications for military service. 

Duan, Lei. “Contested Memories of the Past: The Politics of History Textbooks in Taiwan.”  ASIANetwork Exchange, Vol. 28, Issue 2. July 15, 2023.

  • Duan details the political controversies surrounding the de-sinicization of Taiwanese history textbooks from 1997 to 2016. Under Lee Teng-hui’s administration, a new set of secondary school textbooks entitled Getting to Know Taiwan asserted that every previous government in Taiwan, including that of the Dutch, the Kingdom of Tungning, the Japanese, and KMT, was colonial in nature. Japan’s “contributions” to Taiwan’s industrialization were uncritically praised without acknowledging their basis in colonial extraction and militarism. Later, under Chen Shui-bian, phrases deemed insufficiently supportive of Taiwan’s “sovereignty” vis-à-vis China were systematically revised (e.g. “both sides of the Taiwan Strait” to “both countries,” “the retrocession of Taiwan” to “the end of World War II”). Ma Ying-jeou’s attempts to reverse this de-sinicization were met with strong protests from separatists and repealed soon after DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen won the 2016 election.

Hao Zhidong (郝志东). “Imagining Taiwan (1): Japanization, Re-Sinicization, and the Role of Intellectuals.” In Whither Taiwan and Mainland China: National Identity, the State and Intellectuals, 11-48. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

  • Hao Zhidong documents Taiwanese resistance to Japanese colonization and the development of Chinese nationalism in Taiwan in response to the kōminka (“Japanization” or “imperialization”) policy and later under KMT dictatorship. In the first decades of colonial rule, armed resistance was brutally suppressed by the Japanese military leading to the deaths of an estimated 40,000 to 90,000 people. Later, Taiwanese revolutionaries were inspired to organize left-wing anticolonial formations by epochal developments in mainland China like the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, and the founding of the Communist Party in 1921. As Japan escalated its aggression in China in the lead-up to the Second Sino-Japanese War, it suppressed these formations and imprisoned and/or executed most of their leaders. Lastly, under the KMT, Hao details the development of critical support for Chinese nationalism among Taiwanese socialists as well as the anticommunist and sinophobic underpinnings of Taiwanese independence activism.

 

Hao Zhidong. “Imagining Taiwan (2): De-Sinicization under Lee and Chen and the Role of Intellectuals.” In Whither Taiwan and Mainland China: National Identity, the State and Intellectuals, 49-74. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

  • Hao documents Taiwan’s decades-long educational de-sinicization campaign, in which history textbooks were revised to describe the Republic of China as an occupying foreign power while praising Japanese colonial rule as an overall positive. Terms like “Japanese occupation” or “Japanese colonization” were edited to “Japanese rule” in order to retroactively legitimize their seizure of the island and whitewash the exploitative nature of their developmental policies. At the same time, references to “mainland China” or “the mainland” were replaced simply with “China” in order to negate any implication that Taiwan too is part of China. This effort to “clear away the ‘remnants of greater Chinese consciousness’” (大中國意識的沉屙) also entailed the reframing of Chinese migration during the Qing dynasty as an intentional colonial project.

Lin, James. “Nostalgia for Japanese colonialism: Historical memory and postcolonialism in contemporary Taiwan.” History Compass, Vol. 20, Issue 11. October 10, 2022.

  • Despite questionable political claims of “KMT colonization in Taiwan,” this article usefully illustrates how the Japanese colonial period is today invoked to reposition Taiwan as trans-historically separate from China in politics, culture, literature, music, and art. Indeed, all that fundamentally distinguishes Taiwanese localism from the KMT ideology it claims to reject is the former’s rank Sinophobia (extending to the use of Japanese fascist slurs for China, see e.g. this talk show at the 12:42 mark). It is otherwise just as firmly rooted in anticommunism and Western imperialist conceptions of “democracy.” 

Ma Zhen (馬臻). “台灣左翼的逃避與「四化」運動” [The escape of Taiwan’s left wing and the ‘Four Modernizations’ movement]. 兩岸犇報 (Chaiwan Ben Post). March 16, 2023.

  • This piece identifies a major lacuna in modern-day “left” historiography in Taiwan, namely the forced separation of working-class and anti-KMT struggles on the island from their mainland counterparts. Reviewing a recent history of Taiwanese workers’ movements in the 1940s, Ma Zhen finds scant mention of the named protagonists’ membership in the CPC underground or their stated adherence to Mao Zedong Thought. As such, this work sits comfortably with the increasingly hegemonic ideology of Taiwan separatism and is all the poorer for it analytically. (Previous installments of Ma Zhen’s series address the fundamental dishonesty of DPP narratives around the White Terror.)

Wang Hui. “当代中国历史巨变中的台湾问题” [The Taiwan issue amid the great historical changes in contemporary China]. 爱思想 (Aisixiang). July 9, 2015.

  • Tsinghua University scholar Wang Hui situates the 2014 Sunflower Movement and other contemporary Taiwanese political developments in a complex matrix of historical, geopolitical, and cultural forces. He identifies in particular the PRC’s retreat from class politics and the language of national liberation; the decline of pro-unification forces in Taiwan; and the limitations of appealing to shared Chinese culture without a common cross-strait political program. He also notes that the Sino-Soviet split, Sino-U.S. rapprochement, and post-Cold War global U.S. hegemony irreversibly conditioned Taiwan’s “democratization” process. Under these circumstances the Sunflower Movement unsurprisingly took a hard anti-China turn, attributing legitimate economic grievances not to neoliberalism but to “dependency” on the mainland (a dynamic reproduced even more explosively in Hong Kong in 2019). Wang concludes with an intriguing world-systems analysis that connects Taiwan’s history under Dutch/Spanish colonial and Qing rule to today’s Belt and Road Initiative.

e. Demographics and Public Opinion arrow_upward

“People: Fact Focus.” Government Portal of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

  • As of June 2022, the ROC reports that out of Taiwan’s population of 23.2 million, 95% are categorized as “Han Chinese,” 2.5% are categorized as “Indigenous peoples,” and 2.5% are categorized as “new immigrants.” Within the Han Chinese umbrella category, a 2008 report from the Council for Hakka Affairs cited here reported that 70% of Taiwan’s population are Hoklo, 14% are Hakka, 9% mainlander (外省人 wàishěngrén, or Chinese arriving during and after the Chinese Civil War), and 2% are yuánzhùmín. Taiwan’s Hoklo and Hakka populations are often grouped together as 本省人 (běnshěngrén, lit. local peoples), and are descended from waves of Chinese migration to Taiwan beginning in the 17th century up to the end of Japanese colonization.  

  • Taiwan’s demographics are highly politicized. The Taiwan independence movement has attempted to coalesce a unified Taiwanese identity (in distinction to a Chinese identity). Taiwan’s population is composed of various ethnicities and migration histories, often with conflicting ideas about Chinese/Taiwanese identity. While Anglophone media has frequently attempted to use the language of ethnic difference or “indigeneity” in support of claims of Taiwan independence (see: here and here), the reality is that the overwhelming majority of Taiwan’s population are of Han Chinese origin (indeed a higher percentage than the mainland). Nonetheless, the běnshěngrén-wàishěngrén distinction has important cultural and political relevance: by and large, běnshěngrén tend to be associated with the DPP; and wàishěngrén are traditional supporters of the KMT. Interestingly, yuánzhùmín have historically been considered “iron voters” for the KMT.                

“Taiwan Independence vs. Unification with the Mainland.” Election Study Center, National Chengchi University, July 12, 2023. 

  • As these annual surveys conducted by Taiwan’s National Chengchi University show, people in Taiwan generally oppose both reunification and Taiwan independence in the short-term. As of 2023, a majority (53%) of respondents want to maintain the status quo “indefinitely” or “decide at a later date,” while 21.4% support “maintain[ing] the status quo, mov[ing] towards independence.” 7.6% of respondents support some form of reunification, and only 4.5% support a move towards independence “as soon as possible.” These divergent views are also reflected by a 2021 poll that found that 43.1% of Taiwanese respondents think U.S. military sales to Taiwan will increase tensions across the Taiwan Strait, compared to 37.8% who think such sales will help maintain peace.

f. Official Government Statements arrow_upward

Standing Committee of the Fifth National People's Congress. “Message to Compatriots in Taiwan.” Issued January 1, 1979.

  • Soon after the beginning of mainland China’s reform period and of Chiang Ching-kuo’s ROC presidency, the PRC national legislature issued this New Year’s message to the people of Taiwan. It announced a unilateral cessation of PLA military hostilities, in particular the ritualized back-and-forth shelling around Kinmen and Matsu since the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. Furthermore it expressed a shared desire for renewed cross-strait transport and postal links and for eventual reunification. Notably, while short on specifics, the message offered to “take present realities into account in accomplishing the great cause of reunifying the motherland and respect the status quo on Taiwan.”

Ye Jianying (叶剑英). “Taiwan's Return to Motherland and Peaceful Reunification.” Interview with Xinhua. September 30, 1981.

  • In this statement, the chairman of the NPC standing committee clarified some points in the reunification offer made two years earlier. He proposed not only complete freedom of movement and restoration of all cross-strait links but that “Taiwan's current socio-economic system will remain unchanged, so will its way of life and its economic and cultural relations with foreign countries.” Moreover, after reunification “Taiwan can enjoy a high degree of autonomy as a special administrative region and it can retain its armed forces [emphasis ours].” For several decades this almost unbelievable degree of non-interference remained the cornerstone of various “one country, two systems” schemes proposed by the PRC, but successive ROC governments refused to engage.

Deng Xiaoping. “An Idea For the Peaceful Reunification of the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan.” Interview with Prof. Winston L.Y. Yang at Seton Hall University. June 26, 1983.

  • Further elaborating on Ye Jianying’s statement two years earlier, the by-then established paramount leader of the PRC promised Taiwan “independent judicial power” and “its own army, provided it does not threaten the mainland … the party, governmental and military systems of Taiwan will be administered by the Taiwan authorities themselves.” Only foreign relations would be reserved for the central government in Beijing. He emphasized that this was a degree of autonomy far outstripping any other province-level administrative unit of China.

Tenth National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China. “Anti-Secession Law.” Adopted March 14, 2005.

  • After its passage this law was pilloried in the Western press for Article 8, which sanctions the use of “non-peaceful means” to achieve reunification in the event of unilateral secession by Taiwan. Though this was arguably the clearest and most legally actionable statement yet of China’s “red line” on independence, the bulk of the law simply restates long-standing official positions: the one-China principle, cross-strait division as an internal matter left over from the civil war, and a pathway to peaceful reunification under “one country, two systems” (albeit not explicitly named as such).

Cao Ruitai (曹瑞泰). “台湾原住民族权益与自治区发展的法制规划研究” [“Policy planning research for the development of the rights, interests and autonomous regions of Taiwan’s yuánzhùmín”]. China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification (中国和平统一促进会). December 26, 2017.

  • In this report written for the official organ of the CPC United Front Work Department dedicated to reunification, Taiwanese scholar Cao Ruitai reviews the history of the yuánzhùmín struggle for self-determination under KMT and then DPP rule. While acknowledging the halting progress of the ROC government towards securing political, cultural, and educational rights for yuánzhùmín, Cao judges it inadequate to the tasks set out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Instead he proposes a framework closely modeled on the PRC’s system of regional ethnic autonomy, wherein yuánzhùmín will have substantial autonomy over their own legislative, judicial, economic, and cultural affairs (notably law enforcement). He judges that this would be practicable upon reunification with the PRC under the “one country, two systems” framework.  

Xi Jinping. “Working Together to Realize Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation and Advance China’s Peaceful Reunification.” Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, January 2, 2019. 

  • Address by PRC President Xi Jinping commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1979 New Year’s message. He hailed the practical advances made since then: the 1992 Consensus around the one-China principle; the full restoration of cross-strait air, sea, and mail links; the growth of people-to-people exchanges; and the practical implementation of “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong and Macau. He again pledged non-interference in Taiwan’s social, political, and legal system after reunification, while quietly dropping the earlier offer of a separate Taiwanese military. As separatist forces had grown considerably in strength since the 1980s, he naturally took a far more explicit line against “independence” than Ye Jianying or Deng Xiaoping did.

Tsai Ing-wen. “Statement on China’s President Xi’s ‘Message to Compatriots in Taiwan.’” January 2, 2019.

  • In her near-immediate response to Xi’s speech, ROC President Tsai Ing-wen (DPP) flatly rejected both the 1992 Consensus and the concept of “one country, two systems.” She insisted as a precondition for negotiations that Beijing recognize the existence of “the Republic of China (Taiwan)” and its “democratic system” and agree to hold such talks on a “government-to-government basis.”

Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council (PRC). “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era.” August 2022.

  • This white paper reiterates China’s stance on reunification for the New Era. It highlights the importance of reunification and the shared bond between Chinese people across the straits. Reunification is a necessary step towards rejuvenation, and furthermore ensures both peace and strength through unity. The paper reviews the progress towards peaceful reunification since 1949 and explains that China would use force only as a last resort to deter external interference and separatism.

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