Taiwan FAQ History

Modern Taiwan's free and democratic society is the hard-won fruit of its people's struggle to cope with a legacy of rule by a succession of alien regimes. Political repression and the imposition of first one and then another set of social and linguistic norms delayed the development of a collective Taiwanese identity that has now empowered Taiwan's diverse ethnic groups to be the masters of their destiny.

Dramatic progress in that direction has occurred in recent decades, however. Most significantly, the Republic of China (ROC) government that took over Taiwan in 1945 and sought refuge on Taiwan in 1949 has evolved from an authoritarian regime bent on recovering "the mainland" from communist rebels into a democratically constituted defender of the rights and interests of Taiwan's 23 million people.

The Original Residents

Until just four centuries ago, the main island of Taiwan was home to mainly Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) peoples. Although they have left no written records or reliable oral history of their origins, archaeological evidence indicates that their ancestors came to the main island of Taiwan several thousand years ago. Beginning in the early 17th century, lowland tribes were inexorably driven into the island's mountainous interior, overwhelmed by alien conquerors from both Europe and Asia, and by wave upon wave of immigration of Han peoples fleeing poverty and war in China. Over the centuries, many indigenous people have been assimilated into Han-immigrant communities, and many Taiwanese have both Han and indigenous ancestry.

The European age.

Moved by the sight of Taiwan's blue-green mountains jutting out of the Pacific, Portuguese navigators passing by the island on their way to Japan in the mid-15th century dubbed it "Ilha Formosa," or beautiful isle. For centuries thereafter, it was known to the West as Formosa. The next Europeans to come to Taiwan were from the Netherlands via bases in the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia), and from Spain via colonial holdings in the Philippines. In 1622, the Dutch East India Company established a base on the Penghu Islands (Pescadores), but was promptly driven away by Ming Dynasty Chinese forces. They then set up a base in Taiwan in the vicinity of today's Tainan City in 1624, from which they extended their hegemony—not absolute control—over the island's southwestern coast.

Meanwhile, in 1626, a rival Spanish consortium occupied areas in northern Taiwan corresponding with today's Keelung City and Danshuei Township, only to be driven away by the Dutch in 1642. Under Dutch control, Taiwan's seaports became important entrepots for maritime trade and transshipment of goods between Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Persia, and Europe. Although settlements of Chinese are known to have existed as far back as the 15th century, they were scarce and very small until the Dutch East India Company imported laborers from China to work its sugarcane and rice plantations in the southwest. This marked the beginning of large-scale, intensive cultivation in Taiwan.

Taken as a whole, the company's trading and agricultural enterprises on the island accounted for 26 percent of its worldwide profits in 1649. The sugarcane and rice cultivation initiated by the Dutch continued to be mainstays of the island's economy and export business until as recently as half a century ago. Protestant missionaries accompanying the Dutch East India Company established schools where religion and the Dutch language were taught. Records indicate that, as of 1659, 60 percent of the company's 10,000 colonial subjects had been converted to Christianity.

While the Dutch were colonizing Taiwan, Ming Dynasty China was experiencing a series of rebellions, followed by the invasion of Manchu conquerors, who wreaked havoc throughout China for many years. The resultant toll in human suffering, exacerbated by famine and banditry, prompted thousands of Chinese in the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong to risk the dangers of crossing the Hei Shueigou, or "Black Ditch" (today's Taiwan Strait) to reach the mystery island of which they had heard by word of mouth. By 1662, an estimated 40,000 of them had successfully done so.

Koxinga

As troops poured into northern China from Manchuria beginning in 1644, Ming loyalists fled southward, where they resisted Manchu incursions for over two decades. One of the best-known resistance fighters was Jheng Cheng-gong (Koxinga). The offspring of a Chinese father and Japanese mother, he inherited his father's position as the "godfather" of a syndicate of traders, pirates, and private armies whose operations ranged from Japan to Southeast Asia.

In 1661, when forces of the deposed Ming Dynasty were on its last legs, a fleet and army commanded by Jheng laid siege to the Dutch East India Company headquarters in Taiwan, and the two sides negotiated a treaty that allowed the Dutch to leave with honor in 1662. Jheng's aim, it is said, was to establish a secure base from which to carry on the fight against the Manchu invaders and eventually restore the Ming government.

Under the rule of Jheng Cheng-gong, his son Jheng Jing, and grandson Jheng Ke-shuang, a mini-kingdom with a Chinese-style political system was created, and Han culture became more deeply rooted. A steady stream of Han refugees fled to Taiwan, and settlements sprang up along the western coast. By some estimates, under the rule of the Jheng family, the population of Han peoples in Taiwan reached about 120,000.

Though short—existing for 22 years before surrendering to Manchu forces—the Jheng family's rule was significant for being the first time in which Taiwan was ruled as an independent state.

Ching Dynasy

During the two-plus centuries of Ching Dynasty (Manchu imperial) rule over China and Taiwan, hundreds of thousands of impoverished Hans in China's Fujian and Guangdong provinces flouted the Ching Dynasty's bans on immigration to the island and became "boat people" who bet their lives to get there and make a fresh start.

The bulk of these illegal aliens were farmers who, like the Hans hired by the Dutch East India Company, mostly engaged in rice and sugarcane cultivation. Most of the steadily growing agricultural exports were shipped to China and Japan, while some went to Australia. As a consequence of the Second Opium War (1856-1860), four ports in Taiwan were forced to open up by the Manchu government to Western traders. Thereafter, tea and camphor, which enjoyed large global demand, became major cash crops for export. Being the production base of these hot new money-makers, as well as of coal, northern Taiwan overtook the southwest as the island's economic and political hub, with Taipei superseding Tainan as the Manchu colonial capital.

As in the preceding eras of rule by the Dutch and the Jheng family, during the era of Manchu rule, the desire of Han refugees to stake out a piece of land for themselves in their new homeland came into conflict with the indigenous Austronesian peoples' determination to defend their ancestral homelands from invasion. This conflict was exacerbated by the international demand for tea and camphor, which could be produced only in highland areas inhabited by indigenous peoples.

Taiwan's resources attracted growing international attention. Japan dispatched a punitive expeditionary force to southern Taiwan in 1874 on the pretext of teaching a lesson to indigenous people who had killed shipwrecked Okinawan sailors. A decade later, the French briefly invaded northern Taiwan from 1884 to 1885 during the Sino-French War.

The Manchu government in Beijing strengthened its claim of sovereignty over Taiwan by buttressing the island's defenses, developing its coal mining, and laying telegraph lines between northern and southern Taiwan as well as an undersea telegraph cable between the island and Fujian Province. It declared Taiwan a province of the empire in 1885, appointing Liu Ming-chuan as its first governor.

Japanese Rule 1895-1945

In 1894, war broke out between the Manchu Empire and the Japanese Empire after the latter invaded Korea, which the Manchu court, as well as Chinese rulers before them, regarded as their satellite state. By the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki that concluded the conflict, known as the First Sino-Japanese War, Taiwan was ceded to Japan. Rejecting this outcome, Taiwanese intelligentsia proclaimed the establishment of the "Democratic Republic of Taiwan." This bid for self-rule failed, however, as Japanese troops crushed all resistance offered by local militias within half a year.

Broadly speaking, the Japanese colonial era can be divided into three periods:

1. Pacification (1895-1919)

In addition to "hard" measures taken to suppress and deter rebellion, the Japanese colonial government in Taipei instituted a number of "soft" legal measures designed to ease the transition from existing conditions to those deemed more desirable. These included a phased ban on opium smoking and a land reform program whose main feature was "one person, one farm." In addition to taking control of opium distribution, the government nationalized the production and marketing of camphor, salt, and a number of other commodities. It also strove to expand sugar and coal production.

2. Assimilation of Taiwan as an Extension of Japan (1919-1936)

Tokyo proclaimed that the Taiwanese enjoyed the same legal rights as Japanese citizens in the home islands. Compulsory Japanese-language education was enforced and programs for cultural assimilation were promoted. At the same time, economic development accelerated, partly with a view to building the island into a secure forward base for southward projection of power.

3. Kominka or Japanization (1936-1945)

Tokyo implemented a policy to grant Japanese citizenship to all Taiwanese, while encouraging them to adopt Japanese names and customs, including Shinto religious practices. To meet wartime needs, the development of heavy industries accelerated, and Taiwanese men were recruited into the Japanese imperial army.

By the time the United States declared war against Japan in December 1941, Taiwan boasted what some scholars describe as the most modern industrial and transportation infrastructures in Asia outside of Japan, and its agricultural development was second to none. Public health programs had eradicated diseases common to other countries in southern Asia, sophisticated banking and business practices were in place, and literacy levels had greatly improved. Despite such admirable material progress, Taiwanese engaged in widespread protests against persistent discrimination that denied them positions of authority in all sectors of society. A movement seeking autonomy for Taiwan and the establishment of a "Taiwan Assembly" was launched in the 1920s and continued into the 1930s, promoted mainly by Taiwanese university students in Japan. This, however, came to nothing.

A short but bloody conflict, known as the Wushe Uprising, began in October 1930 in the mountain village of Wushe in today's Nantou County. In outrage at Japanese colonial administrators' humiliating treatment of the Seediq people (considered an Atayal sub-group), their chief, Mona Rudao, led hundreds of warriors in all-out war against the Japanese. Ultimately, the uprising was crushed not only by virtue of superior numbers but by the use of poison gas bombs dropped from aircraft.

In China (the ROC), meanwhile, a shooting incident at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing occurred in July 1937, by which time Japan had added both Korea and Manchuria to its empire. This marked the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), which became one of the fronts in the Asia-Pacific theater of World War II. In December 1943, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ROC leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Cairo to discuss the future disposition of Japanese territories. Soon thereafter, their governments released an unsigned joint communiqué, or position paper, that became known as the "Cairo Declaration." In part, the document reads, "The Three Great Allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan. They covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion. It is their purpose that...all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China."

After Japan announced its surrender in August 1945, ROC troops and administrators took over Taiwan on behalf of the Allied Powers and accepted the surrender of Japanese troops on Taiwan on October 25, 1945.

The ROC

Shortly after occupying Taiwan on behalf of the Allies in 1945, the Nanjing-based ROC government declared Taiwan a province of the ROC, citing the unsigned Cairo Declaration as its justification. October 25, the date upon which Japanese troops in Taiwan surrendered to ROC administrators, was officially proclaimed "Retrocession Day."

Only four years later, the ROC government under Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), was defeated in the Chinese Civil War that had been going on since the late 1920s. It vacated the mainland and took refuge on the island of Taiwan. The lost mainland territories became the People's Republic of China (PRC), established in 1949 by the victorious Communist Party of China (CPC) revolutionaries under Mao Zedong. In terms of actual exercise of sovereignty, the ROC was thereby downsized from a vast territory to one that comprised, and comprises, only Taiwan and a few small islands.

Over the six decades since then, the ROC and PRC have coexisted as separate sovereign states, universally known by their popular names, Taiwan and China, and their societies have developed in radically different directions. Taiwan has become one of the world's freest countries, rated as Asia's freest by Freedom House.

The influx of around one and a half million soldiers and civilian refugees from the Chinese Civil War turned the island into a frontline of the Cold War. With the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, the United States dispatched its Seventh Fleet to protect Taiwan from attack by PRC forces and provided it with increased economic and military assistance. Taiwan became the focus of attention again in August 1958, when the PRC attempted to take over the Taiwan-held islands of Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu. Hostilities eventually ended, and in October 1958, the US and Taiwan governments issued a joint communiqué reaffirming their solidarity.

Political and economic developments inside and outside Taiwan since 1945 have dramatically transformed the self-perceptions of everyone in Taiwan. Events such as the seating of the PRC to the exclusion of the ROC in the United Nations in 1971, the lifting of martial law in 1987, the repeal of restrictions on travel and investment in China, and measures taken to redress injustices perpetrated in the earlier authoritarian era—these and other factors have prompted people in every social stratum to acknowledge a number of on-the-ground realities:

* Taiwan and China are distinctly different sovereign nations.
* The government should not compete with the Chinese authorities for the right to rule China.
* What unites the people of Taiwan—irrespective of their differing concepts and hopes vis-à-vis the Taiwan-China relationship—is their affirmation of the imperative to pursue and defend freedom and democracy.

Recent Developments
The KMT's withdrawal from the mainland to Taiwan at the close of the Chinese Civil War marked the beginning of the period of martial law (1949-1987) in Taiwan. Under martial law, the KMT-controlled government imposed press censorship, banned new political parties, and restricted the freedoms of speech, publication, assembly, and association. Direct elections for some local government heads and legislative council representatives were initiated in 1950, however.

Following the death of President Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, Yen Chia-kan briefly served as president, succeeded by Chiang's son, Chiang Ching-kuo. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the formation and development of an informal coalition of democratic opposition politicians and democracy activists known as the dangwai, or "party outsiders," referring to those who are not KMT members. In December 1979, a rally in Kaohsiung City organized by leading dangwai figures and Formosa Magazine to commemorate International Human Rights Day turned into a violent confrontation when thousands of participants were hemmed in by military police. In connection with this event, known as the Kaohsiung Incident, prominent dissidents were detained, convicted of sedition by a military tribunal, and sentenced to long prison terms.

Ultimately, however, the incident and the repression that followed added steam to the democracy movement. In September 1986, dangwai leaders established the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in defiance of the ban on formation of new political parties. Recognizing that the demand for democracy in Taiwan could only grow, President Chiang Ching-kuo rescinded martial law in 1987, shortly before his death. His successor, Lee Teng-hui, took vigorous action to reform the political system and dismantle the party-state machinery that had been in place in Taiwan for the preceding four decades. Under his administration, press freedoms were respected, opposition political parties developed, private visits to China increased dramatically, and the Constitution was revised to allow for the direct election of all legislators and the president. In 1996, incumbent President Lee Teng-hui became Taiwan's first popularly elected president.

The most telling moment in Taiwan's democratic progress, however, came in 2000, when DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian was elected president, marking the first-ever transfer of power between ruling parties. He was re-elected in March 2004. In May 2008 power returned to the hands of the KMT under the leadership of President Ma Ying-jeou.

Diplomatic Concerns
The ROC was a founding member of the United Nations, established in 1945. With passage of General Assembly Resolution 2758 in 1971, however, the PRC succeeded in ousting "the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek" and taking over the UN seat. Since then, most UN members have severed diplomatic ties with Taipei in favor of ties with Beijing. When the United States established diplomatic ties with China in 1979, it discontinued formal ties with Taiwan.

With the emergence of "Taiwan-centric consciousness" and rising political and civic awareness in the 1990s, citizens began to have higher expectations of their government. Consequently, efforts have been made to increase Taiwan's participation in international affairs and develop closer ties with the community of democratic nations. Taiwan's pursuit of pragmatic arrangements that will enable it to participate in affairs of the United Nations and its affiliated organizations, however, continues to be frustrated forcing relations between Taiwan and other countries to be conducted in a semi-official manner.

Taiwan and China—whose official titles, respectively, are the Republic of China (ROC) and People's Republic of China (PRC)—are separate sovereign states. Taiwan is a democratic oceanic nation of 23 million people, China a continental nation of 1.3 billion people ruled by an authoritarian regime. Although the PRC has never exercised sovereignty over Taiwan, it claims Taiwan is a province of the PRC and threatens to "liberate" it by force.