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The exceptional complexity of relations between Taiwan and China derives from the intertwined and conflictual history of the two countries and contributes to making the Taiwan issue one of the most sensitive at an international level. Understanding this relationship can make the political disputes between the two countries clearer: it can help to understand, for example, why China considers it unacceptable that Taiwan declares itself “independent”, and why the United States, despite being the strongest military supporter of Taiwan, do not have official diplomatic representation in the country.
Taiwan is an island in the Pacific Ocean located about 180 kilometers off the coast of China, separated by the Taiwan Strait. In addition to the main island, which is called Formosa Island, the Taiwanese government also controls other small nearby archipelagos, such as those of Penghu and Matsu. Taiwan is in fact a state that enjoys full sovereignty, has a parliament and a government, a currency and an army. It controls its borders and its trade. It is also an extremely vibrant democracy, probably the freest in all of Asia. Yet his situation is very complicated.
To put it very simply, China governed by the Communist Party believes that Taiwan is its rebellious province destined to “reunify” with the rest of the country, peacefully or violently. For this reason it has an extremely aggressive attitude towards anyone who goes against this claim and treats Taiwan as a sovereign state. To avoid conflicts with China, most countries in the world do not officially recognize Taiwan and have adopted stratagems and expedients to continue having political and commercial relations with Taiwan without provoking protests from China.
Paradoxically, China itself accepts a whole series of peculiar political ambiguities to maintain trade relations with Taiwan, which are very strong and mutually interdependent: bilateral trade they were worth it in 2022 more than 200 billion dollars.
To understand how these strange and complicated relationships work, we must start from the history of Taiwan.
1949
One rather notable issue about Taiwan is that although Communist Party-ruled China claims it as its own, in reality Taiwan is not May was ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Considered for centuries a remote and peripheral part of the Chinese Empire, conquered by Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century, Taiwan assumed fundamental importance in international politics in 1949. In that year the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war against the Kuomintang, the Nationalist administration that had governed China up to that point.
The leader of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek, pursued by Mao Zedong’s communist army, took refuge in Taiwan with what remained of his army and his administration, as well as many civilians. In Chiang Kai-shek’s plans, the stay in Taiwan should have been temporary: the nationalists would have stopped on the island long enough to recover their strength and plan the reconquest of all of China. Obviously it didn’t happen, and Chiang and his family’s stay in Taiwan became permanent.
In 1949, over two million Chinese—mostly members of the military and the Kuomintang administration, with their families—fled from mainland China to Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek installed his government in the capital Taipei, called it the Republic of China, and presented it to the world as the legitimate government of all China, albeit in exile on the island of Taiwan. From tiny Taiwan, Chiang’s regime claimed full sovereignty over the enormous China inhabited by hundreds of millions of people and ruled by communists, called the People’s Republic of China.
Despite this, in the context of the Cold War that pitted the communist bloc against the Western bloc, the United States and most countries around the world recognized Taiwan’s sovereignty over all of China, and recognized Chiang’s government as the true Chinese government.
Things began to change in the 1970s, when the United States approached communist China and, accepting a consolidated state of affairs, recognized the sovereignty of the communist government over China. In those years, more or less all the countries that recognized Taiwan as the legitimate government of China broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan and began to establish them with China.
This created an extremely complicated situation for the United States and other Western countries: to establish diplomatic relations with China they were forced to break them with Taiwan, but at the same time they did not want to completely abandon Taiwan, which was a military ally and had a enviable strategic position. For this reason, with the more or less implicit approval of all parties, a series of rather ambiguous policies were created to regulate relations between Taiwan and the West, and above all between Taiwan and China.
The United States, for example, developed the “one China” policy, according to which it recognizes the Communist Party government as the only legal government of China, but at the same time “recognizes that the Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait they claim that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China.” If this formulation, expressed in 1972, seems ambiguous it is because it is deliberately so: the United States does not specify of which China Taiwan is part of it, and they simply recognize that there are claims on both sides of the strait.
This policy (defined as “strategic ambiguity”) allowed the United States to establish relations with communist China but not to abandon Taiwan entirely. In 1979, Congress passed a law requiring the United States to maintain informal diplomatic relations and provide defensive weapons “to the people of Taiwan.” Similar policies are now adopted by most countries in the world, including Italy.
As for bilateral relations between China and Taiwan, China maintains its rock-solid position that Taiwan is an inalienable part of its territory.
But in 1992 the two governments, while not recognizing each other, made an agreement in which they both agreed that there is “one China”, but acknowledged that they disagreed on what the meaning of “China” should be. : whether the People’s Republic of China (Communist China) or the Republic of China (Taiwan). In practice, China and Taiwan agreed to disagree. This 1992 agreement was later contested by the more progressive part of Taiwanese politics.
This complicated situation today means that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign and independent country, but which on a formal level is not recognized as such by practically any country in the world. However, most countries in the world continue to maintain relations with Taiwan using expedients: Taiwan does not have ambassadors abroad, because ambassadors are exchanged only between recognized sovereign states, but it has “representative offices” that perform the exact same function , without the name. Taiwan can also participate in the Olympics, but only under the strange name of “Chinese Taipei”.
This also creates a whole series of rather strange situations: for example, flights departing from China to arrive in Taiwan are treated as internal flights (because China believes that Taiwan is its own) but depart from international flight terminals (because in fact Taiwan it is not).
Sovereignty and independence
Over the last thirty years this situation, which was already very complicated, has become even more so as the Taiwanese people have begun to take on an ever more marked and increasingly autonomous identity from that of mainland China.
Between 1949 and the 1980s, Chiang Kai-shek’s regime continued to support the increasingly surreal theory that Taiwan was the legitimate government-in-exile of all of China. A well-known anecdote is that Chiang’s most loyal comrades lived in houses with low-quality furniture, convinced that it was not worth buying fine furniture because they would soon return to their homes in China. For decades, therefore, Taiwan’s identity was shaped by the idea that the island was just a place of passage, waiting to reconquer China: children at school were not taught the geography of Taiwan, but the geography of all the China. This caused, among other things, enormous discrimination between the “Chinese” Taiwanese who arrived in 1949 with Chiang and the aborigines who had lived on the island for centuries, and who were brutally repressed.
Between the 1980s and 1990s, however, the regime of Chiang and his successors – which was a brutal and bloody dictatorship – collapsed and Taiwan gradually became a democratic country. The Taiwanese began to understand that the claim of taking back all of China was unachievable, and that their future lay in Taiwan. This awareness radically transformed the identity of the Taiwanese population, who stopped considering themselves Chinese and began to create their own history and autonomy.
According to the surveys, in 1992, 25.5 percent of the population considered themselves Chinese, 17.6 percent Taiwanese, and 46.4 percent both. Today 62.8 percent of the population consider themselves Taiwanese, and just 2.5 percent consider themselves Chinese.
Today, in fact, all the political forces and the entire Taiwanese population have rejected the idea of claiming sovereignty over territories other than Taiwan (even if formally the claim still exists), and the majority of Taiwanese would like to live in peace in own country.
This trend was accentuated with the rise to power of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP in the English acronym), the party of the outgoing president Tsai Ing-wen: the DPP is an originally pro-independence party, that is, in favor of cutting all ties with China and transform Taiwan into an independent and sovereign state, but over the years it has moderated its positions, once again for fear of provoking tensions with China. Today Tsai Ing-wen believes that Taiwan does not need to declare itself independent, because it already is de facto.
Paradoxical as it may be, for China the possibility that Taiwan renounces its now only formal claims on Chinese territory and declares its independence is the most unwelcome and unbearable option of all, because it would mean that Taiwan directly opposes the dream of “reunification ” of the Communist Party and renounces the ambiguity adopted so far, which has allowed all parties to maintain their superficial position.
On more than one occasion the Chinese leadership has made it clear that if Taiwan were to declare independence, a military response, and perhaps even an invasion of the island by the Chinese army, would be inevitable.