Most of you remember Formosa being the name often used for the island that lies between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. That name came from Portuguese sailors, who, upon sighting the island in 1542, reportedly exclaimed “Ilha Formosa!” – “Beautiful Island.” But ever since that island came under Chinese sovereignty, the official name has been Taiwan.
Taiwan was incorporated into China’s Qing
Empire in 1684 and
remained under Chinese sovereignty until it was ceded to Japan in 1895. At the
close of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the Treaty of Shimonoseki
contained a provision that ceded Taiwan to Japan “in perpetuity.”*
On October 25, 1945, the Republic of
China (ROC) accepted Japan’s surrender in Taipei, Taiwan, and took over the
island’s administration and unilaterally declared Taiwan a province of China
and termed it “Retrocession Day.” The Allied powers, though, did not formally
recognize that unilateral annexation.
One of my faculty colleagues at Seinan
Gakuin University from 1968 to the 1990s was born in Taiwan in the 1930s. He
was one of the roughly half a million Japanese residents living in Taiwan at
the end of WWII. Almost all these Japanese civilians were sent back to Japan,
and this process was largely completed by the end of 1946.
Chiang Kai-shek relocated the Republic
of China (ROC) government to Taiwan
in December 1949, following the Nationalists' defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Mainland
China under Mao Zedong (or Tse-tung until 1958) officially became the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, and remains so to this day.
Chiang became the sole head of the ROC
in a de facto sense by 1928, but he was not formally inaugurated as the first president
of China until May 1948, and then he resigned after eight months. After relocating
to Taiwan, though, he was re-elected and served as the ROC president for 25
years, from March 1950 until his death (at age 87) in April 1975.
Chiang’s arrival in 1949 was opposed/resisted
by many Taiwanese, who viewed Chiang and the leaders of the Nationalist Party
as outsiders imposing mainland authority over the island. And indeed, most
Taiwanese citizens were unable to vote directly for their president from the
ROC’s relocation to Taiwan until the first direct presidential election in
1996.
Taiwan is now under direct political
threat from PRC President Xi Jinping, who insists the island will eventually be
“reunited” with the mainland and refuses to renounce the use of force.
At the same time, President Trump’s
assertive foreign policy has demonstrated a willingness to use military power
for strategic objectives, from operations in Venezuela to repeated statements
that the United States “needs” Greenland, leaving open the possibility of
force.
With Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae
Takaichi—who has led Japan since October—openly stating that a Chinese attack
on Taiwan could justify Japanese military action alongside the United States,
the growing normalization of force by major powers risks lowering the threshold
for Xi Jinping to pursue reunification of Taiwan by military means.
This piece has been a brief summary of Taiwan’s past from 1684 until 1996, and a bit about the current situation there. But who knows what will happen in the near future! Let’s pray that the uncertain present doesn’t lead to a major conflagration.
