https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TaiwanAKA Hipster China - China Before it was coolI suppose there are two ways of looking at a state which is not officially nation state nor, despite the best efforts of the PRC to convince people otherwise, a rebel province. One is to look at the state itself and what it claims to be, that is the Republic of China, the inheritor of the state and territory of 'China' and thus of its 2000 year history and more especially, the history of the whole of China since it was awkwardly established in 1911. The second is look at the territory, that is the Island of Taiwan, its history and its development, the fact that is in many ways a postcolonial state. The same could also be argued for the Republic of China; but that would be a
very different sort of postcolonial state. I suppose either analysis would be considered 'political' and thus controversial in ROC/Taiwan itself. That tends to be the thing about states which define themselves by their political status and not being 'a nation'. Below I shall try to cover both views.
The Republic of China was from its inception an intellectual project, despite the climate of contemporary climate in China being particularly unfavourable to such a project. It was inspired by European romantic nationalism and had its own Mazzini-like figure, right down Mazzini's hilarious incompetence and inability to understand politics, in Sun Yat Sen. Its sense of the nation as a unifying force can be seen in one of the first flags, the first stripped flag with each colour representing a different people in China: Han, Hui, Mongol, Tibetan, and Manchu. Like European nationalism in practice it cannot be said to be a unifying force. The Revolution against the Qing Dynasty first led to generalized chaos, then a hilarious attempt to reform a new dynasty as an effective military dictatorship under Yuan Shikai, then warlordism and then emerging out of the rubble and generalized mayhew, Sun Yat Sen's party under the very unromantic and unintellectual figure of Chiang Kai-Shiek. Chiang's China was Han centered, authoritarian and a promoter of 'traditional values', whatever those are in the China context. He was a corrupt hypocrite who funded his campaigns against warlords and later the Communists on money from the opium trade, the very trade detested by nationalists and which he constantly promised to many of his followers and, more importantly, to the outside world to suppress. In the end, despite regular duplicitousness and the somewhat inconsistent support of both the United States and the Soviet Union, the regime, having had its economic core destroyed and almost conquered in the war against Japan, collapsed on mainland China and fled to Taiwan.
It remains there today despite almost once being the cause of global nuclear annihilation and now generally seen as a Cold War relic in an area where Communist China is the world's most capitalist state. Anyway the Republic survived on the island where Chiang Kai Shek ruled until his death in 1975, a big year for the death of 1930s relics, suppressing leftists, having the longest period ever of martial law imposed and crushing anyone who supported Taiwanese independence as potential communists while imposing the values of his Chinese mainland on the island, including the speaking of Mandarin hitherto rare. His son succeeded him but protests by the 1980s had led to a formation of democracy which was became divided very quickly on Pro-China/Pro-independence lines. Taiwan, now one of the richest countries in Asia, is independent in all but name but is recognized by very few, a smattering pacific islands, small Central American states, and Burkina Faso of all places. Independence though means a country called 'Taiwan' without recognition that it is part of China, never mind just being the rebel province it is at present. Needless to say, Beijing does not approve and so this issue is just likely to run and run if it does not on the off chance cause a nuclear holocaust, which it might one day.
Taiwan, on the other hand, is an island whose history in many ways is more similar to a small Asian version of Australia or some other European settler colony than anywhere on Asian mainland. That is to say, the bulk of the population (about 98%) descend from settlers from a large powerful state (in this case, China) who completely submerged an indigenous population of very different descent (in this case, Austronesian) reducing them to marginal land and peripheral status, much poorer and backward compared to the rest of the country. Like most European settler colonies, the period of settlement began in the Early Modern period when the island came bizarrely involved in power struggles both of Asia and of Europe. Up until the 1620s the islands inhabitants were entirely aboriginals. This may seem strange given its closeness to the mainland but the winds are unfavourable to eastward travel in this part of the South China Sea and the island was never really an attractive place to settle. Then in the 1620s both the Spanish and Dutch, then at war with each other, arrived to set up bases for trade in the region. After jousting in the region the Dutch became dominant on the island, subdued some local kingdoms and tried to turn it into a colony. During this period of rule the first Chinese settlers began to arrive for trading purposes. Then in the 1640s the Ming Dynasty collapsed in Northern China due to the Manchu invasion. This led to great struggle in the south of the country with Ming loyalists trying to maintain their power. In 1662 one of those loyalists, a pirate called Koxinga, fled the mainland and landed in Taiwan with 30,000 followers and tried to establish a headquarters for resistance for the Manchus. After a long siege he expelled the Dutch and proclaimed his own kingdom on the island, with the assistance of anti-Dutch aboriginals. So like three centuries later, Taiwan's political and demographic status was determined by people feeling political chaos in mainland China and trying to hold onto the old regime.
Unlike Chiang Kai-Shek, however, this effort to restore the Ming failed and by 1683 the island was under Manchu rule. But, despite later edicts prohibiting immigration to the island, was the beginning of the Sinicization of the island which would now happen apace. Most of the migrants were from Fujian province and so spoke Hokkien as their first language, which is now the basis for Taiwanese, the spoken language of about 70% of the population. A smaller number were from further west, and so spoke Hakka, a minority language in the country. Both languages or dialects if you will are now though being somewhat submerged by the Mandarinization which has taken place since 1949. The rest of Taiwan's history between 1683 and 1949 is gradually sinicification due to gradual migration interrupted by another period in which the island between the play thing of global powers, primarily Japan who annexed the island to its greater co-prosperity sphere in 1895 following the First Sino-Chinese war. Japanese rule on Taiwan was as brutal as it was anywhere else in Asia although its rule did see a dramatic increase in population and greater investment. Although the attempted Japanification of the island was not a success.
The Republic of China, of course, still hypothetically considers itself the government of all China and not just Taiwan. Not only that but it claims more or less the boundaries of the Qing Dynasty although 'five races under one union' theory has long been abandoned in both the PRC and the ROC. Below is a map of its current claims.
