Taiwan

History

Austronesian groups constituted the indigenous population by the time the first significant numbers of Han Chinese settlers arrived in the 17th century. At that time, both the Dutch and the Spanish had already established military bases and trading posts in the southern and northern parts of Taiwan, respectively. The Dutch ousted the Spanish in 1642, before being themselves driven off the island by Chinese forces in 1662. In 1683, the island came under the administration of the Qing Dynasty, which had taken over the Chinese Empire from the Ming Dynasty. The following 212 years of Qing rule witnessed a steadily growing immigration of Han settlers from the Chinese mainland, mostly speakers of Hokkien and Hakka dialects from the southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. The aboriginal population was progressively pushed back into the mountains, while the Chinese opened the fertile plains of western Taiwan for agriculture. In 1885, the Qing government granted Taiwan the status of a province but only 10 years later had to cede it to Japan following the Chinese defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War. For 50 years, from 1895 to 1945, Taiwan remained a Japanese colony, to be returned to China only after the Japanese defeat in World War II. As the Chinese civil war was about to end in a Communist victory and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, parts of the defeated Nationalist army led by Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek (1887–1975) withdrew to Taiwan. Taipei was proclaimed the provisional capital of the Republic of China, with the explicit agenda to reconquer the mainland as soon as possible. Chiang's Nationalist party (Kuomintang, KMT) ruled Taiwan unopposed until the lifting of martial law in 1987. The KMT was dominated by mainlanders and for a long time severely restricted political participation for the Taiwanese (i.e., the descendants of Han Chinese settlers who had come to Taiwan from the 17th to the 19th centuries). Mainlander dominance also expressed itself in the championing of Mandarin as the national language and the suppression of the local Hokkien and Hakka dialects. The conflict between the mainlander elite and the Taiwanese remained a key element of the political dynamic of Taiwan until recently.

At first, most Western nations continued to recognize Chiang's regime in Taipei as the legitimate government of China, but following the rapprochement between China and the United States, most transferred their recognition to the Communist government in Beijing. At present, only a handful of smaller nations in the Caribbean, Central America, the Pacific islands, and Africa, and also the Vatican, formally recognize the Taipei government. These conditions have not, however, hampered Taiwan's economic development, which has propelled it from a largely agrarian society to a postindustrial one within a few decades. Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, the Republic of China has undergone an equally rapid process of political liberalization and democratization, with an opposition party winning presidential elections for the first time in 2000.

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