[nucklepunche]

I always knew that Taiwan was the place the nationalists fled after the communist victory in China and thus was culturally Chiense but it was not until recently that I came to understand how sensitive an issue it was. I didn't know much about it and just assumed China didn't care, but when I researched into it I realized that they really do care a lot about getting Taiwan back.

On the other hand it is a sensitive issue on Taiwan. I never realized Taiwan actually never declared itself independent and that there are two main factions, one that wants Taiwan to integreate itself with China under "one country, two systems." There is another faction that seeks independence for Taiwan and has a sense of Taiwanese culture.

The USA has a bit of a funky position on the subject, because it maintains official relations with Beijing it has to acknowledge the One China Policy but at the same time it maintains close diplomatic relations with Taiwan albeit unoffiically through a "cultural representative" which is an ambassador in all but name and the US has tended to be one of Taiwan's biggest allies and is generally closer to Taipei than Beijing.

I was wondering why China, a nation of 1.3 billion, cares so much about this tiny island of 23 million. As I have researched into it more I have concluded a lot of it is through a sense of national pride and unification of all Chinese people under one nation. To them as long as Taiwan is not under mainland control, China feels "incomplete." This is why they can't give up on Taiwan, although they haven't taken active steps to get it back.

On the other hand the mainland's terms of return seem perfectly reasonable. One country two systems has worked well in HK and Macau, and if anything the mainland is moving closer and closer to their system than it is drawing them toward socialism. Really the question is what capitalism will do. Capitalism has a tendency to make people more focused on material matters and less focused on abstract matters like nationalism. The mainland's economic transition to a more open society could either make reunification more likely or less likely. On one hand it could make the Taiwan Chiense more open to reunification when they see their two systems are not radically different. On the other hand young Chinese might grow less concerned with nationalism due to economic prosperity leading to a future generation of leaders to care less about Taiwan.

As for me, as a non-Chinese the way I see it the Taiwanese are still for the most part Chinese. There are some distinctives in Taiwan's culture but this is essentially a part of being a region of a very large geographic culture. Different areas of the USA have their own cultural tendencies but we still consider them to be American. I personally don't care what the ultimate result is as long as war is avoided. Ideally I'd like to see a fully democratic China with Taiwan as an autonomous region within it. It is quite clear that mainlanders want Taiwan back, but what is not clear is what people on Taiwan want. Anybody (who knows more about the situation) care to enlighten me?

[Rei Murasame]

Yes. I've said this before so it's worth repeating. The KMT is basically a foreign entity that landed in Taiwan with US blessing in 1945, just it doesn't show very often because they are not often asked to explain their position. KMT is part of the pan-Blue coalition of parties, a coalition of parties which believe that Taiwan is actually not Taiwan, but instead is an extension of China, a China that KMT is supposedly (read: crack pipe) 'the legitimate government' of.

Many people in Taiwan don't like the KMT either, since they remember well enough what happened immediately after the KMT landed - yes, disembarked from ships and planes - there. The carpetbagging KMT immediately confiscated any business owned by a non-Han, started beating people up for their own sport, raised taxes on everything, disbanded town councils (Japan had allowed these to persist as networks and did not centralise them, KMT arrived and saw it and decided to 'fix' things that weren't broken, thus breaking them), crashed the economy twice, and then forced people to become monolingual in simplified Chinese at rifle-point.

The idea that Taiwan was even 'a Chinese country' in any serious way, is a post-war fantasy, from the outset.

On the other side, the pan-Green coalition (separatists), believe that Taiwan is actually Taiwan (radical! Taiwan is Taiwan, imagine that!), an island in the pacific ocean that should be able to ally with any other island it feels like, and opposes the sinification of the people of Taiwan.

Whether the pan-Green parties can succeed, is a difficult one, since maybe Taiwan has been made Chinese, since that time. In which case it's already over.

[nucklepunche]

My research indicates that the native Taiwanese are perhaps at most 2% of the population. Taiwan is 98% Han Chinese although some intermingled with the natives but Han remains the dominant group. The original inhabitants were genetically and culturally more similar to Malays than to Chinese people. However the island was sparsely populated until the 1600s when the Dutch arrived. The Dutch brought in most of the Chinese to work on the island and since then the island has grown steadily culturally Chinese.

Technically Taiwan was not always Chinese but has been for 400 years. In the same way the USA and Canada are culturally European and native Americans have little influence in society. It appears to me that most of the Taiwanese independence parties (pan-Green) tend to be Han (although most of the few remaining natives support pro-independence parties) and the argument for independence seems to be regionalist, cultural and political as opposed to ethnic.

They can't deny that most Taiwanese and mainland Chiense are part of the same Han ethnic group, but it seems that according to them over 400 years the two have "grown apart" culturally and Taiwan has developed its own culture. 400 years is certainly a long enough time for certain unique cultural traditions to develop, as we se there are some cultural differences between the UK and the USA and Canada, but even so all three remain culturally similar, although Canada is an independent dominion within the commonwealth and America would almost certainly never consider reuniting with the UK.

It really is not a simple situation. Still it appears as if Taiwan is essentially a Chinese-derived culture that has developed many of its own cultural traditions over the centuries. Thus if it is integrated in the mainland it will require a certain degree of regional autonomy because as I pointed out, 400 years is plenty of time for a unique cultural tradition to develop.

[LolitaPlus]

Being a mainlander who is studying in US, I have several Taiwanese friends and treat them the way I treat anyone else from mainland. If people speak only English and people speak only Spanish can both call themselves American, I see no reason that mainland and Taiwan cannot become a single country.

With that being said, Beijing is not in any hurry to make this happen, because they believe time is on their side and eventually it will happen. As long as Taiwan doesn't declare itself as an independent country, Beijing won't do anything (that you can see on the news).

I haven't lived in Taiwan so I cannot say for sure, but what I know is majority of them are not seeking to be independent or become part of PRC.

[ThirdTerm]

It's an ideological split and Taiwan was founded by the Chinese Nationalists who lost the Chinese Civil War to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and Chiang Kai-shek subsequently evacuated his government to Taiwan, which was the most negative consequence of the Japanese military intervention in China as Japan inadvertently assisted a Communist victory. Under the pressure from Beijing, the international community has not been able to recognise Tawain's independence officially and a peaceful reunification could only be possible when China ceases to be a Communist country someday. Under Japanese rule, the Taiwanese economy grew exponentially, laying the groundwork for today's Taiwan that rivals South Korea, and most Taiwanese people speak favourably about the bygone era when Taiwan was a part of the Japanese Empire. Japan and the US would jointly intervene militarily when Taiwan is attacked by China and it's been speculated that the Chinese military could use an electromagnetic pulse to deal a knockout blow to all defensive electronics of the Taiwanese military upon invading Taiwan. Moreover, Taiwanese Aborigines are not ethnically Chinese and they are Melanesian people of Denisovan ancestry, which further invalidates China's territorial claims on Taiwan, and the country has already been returned to the Taiwanese people who abhor the prospects of Communist rule by Beijing.

Although it is unclear that the real purpose of the Chinese medical experiments is to learn the potential human effects of exposure to powerful EMP and HPM radiation, an antipersonnel RF weapon system falls short of an adequate explanation of this activity.
http://media.washtimes.com/media/misc/2011/07/22/ngic-emp.pdf

[nucklepunche]

The thing is aren't the vast majority of Taiwanese still Han Chinese? I know the aborigines exist but they seem to be in numbers to today's native Americans, although I have heard elsewhere there is significant ethnic mixing. Still it seems the Dutch were really the ones who began to make Taiwan cuturally Chinese by bringing in mainland labor. This is an issue of Chinese nationalism, however the history is steeped in western colonialism.

My understanding is that many people in Taiwan are very pro-Japanese in spite of being Chinese in culture, in contrast to mainlanders who have always had an uneasy rivalry with the Japanese. Obviously they are great friends of the USA, and even with the mainland's economic might the collective forces of NATO and their allies are still more powerful which is why they haven't really been able to make any moves on Taiwan.

It does seem that the mainland's position with regards to Taiwan is that they see them as Chinese brothers who are temporarily misguided, not necessarily enemies. From their perspective they are temporarily wandering in the western fold and it is inevitable (from their nationalist perspective on history) that one day Taiwan will return. From their perspective agitators for full independence are merely puppets of western interests.

I've only ever known one person from Taiwan and I never talked about this issue with him and he never brought it up. The thing I am getting is that probably the plurality of people on Taiwan really don't care whether or not they go back to China, their main commitment is to retaining the capitalist social system they have set up, and a lot of the fear of going back to China is that the mainland will break its pledge to allow it to remain under a separate system (which it has repeatedly made). Really it seems most people think it is too early to tell. One thing to keep in mind is in spite of genetic and cultural similarities the people of Taiwan have been culturally westernized much more than mainland Chinese have been which may explain some of the divide.