For centuries, mainland China and the island of Taiwan have had an interconnected relationship that has been both close and contentious at times. Rana Mitter, an expert on historical and contemporary China and the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at HKS, explains some of the history and current issues involved in this relationship.
Q: Can you talk about Taiwan’s history in relationship to mainland China?
Today, the island of Taiwan, just a couple of hundred miles off the coast of China, is claimed by the People's Republic of China as an inalienable part of traditional Chinese territory. In contrast, Taiwan's population and leadership say that they operate under their own autonomous status. They have a very different system from what exists on the mainland—Taiwan is a liberal democracy and China, of course, is a one-party state.
Taiwan has always had a sense of connection but separation from the mainland. Of course, today, mainland China would stress the connection, and many people in Taiwan would stress the separation. Nonetheless, both sides come from a shared history, splitting at some key historical moments. Over the last 150 years, a variety of different powers and interest groups have taken Taiwan over in turn.
If you go back a little further than that, into the 18th century, the island of Taiwan was always broadly regarded by the imperial dynasties of China, including the Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty, as being part of their imperial territories. However, they had relatively little control over it. At one point it was controlled by a renegade pirate king. At other times, the indigenous Malayo-Austronesian population were more numerous, and they still very much exist today as a minority community.
Q: How did the relationship change in the 20th century?
In 1894-5, Japan and China fought their first war. The Japanese had industrialized very heavily by this stage. The Chinese hadn't, and so the Chinese lost and essentially had to cede the island of Taiwan to Japan as a colony, and there it stayed for the next 50 years. So, until 1945 at the end of World War II and the destruction of the Japanese Empire, Taiwan was essentially a Japanese colony, just as India was a British colony, for instance.
Many of the major events, such as the Communist Revolution, on the mainland never happened on Taiwan at all. Many people from an older generation in Taiwan, who were still alive 20 or 30 years ago, grew up speaking Japanese, not Chinese, as their first language.
When World War II ended, Chiang Kai-shek was the nationalist leader of China. He had been a wartime leader, fighting on the victorious Allied side that defeated Japan and Germany, and was finally able to reclaim Taiwan. However, even at that time when there was unification briefly under Chiang Kai-shek in 1945, relations between mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese were very unhappy. The islanders, although they are Chinese ethnically, spoke a different dialect and felt that the mainlanders had sought to exploit them and treated them with immense brutality. There was a massive massacre of the intelligentsia of local Taiwanese Chinese in 1947, two years before the Communist Revolution happened on the mainland.
When Chairman Mao took over on the mainland, 2 million Chinese nationalists, opponents of Communism, including Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek plotted during the Cold War to try and get the mainland back. He never managed it. With American protection during the Cold War, he stayed in Taiwan and established his own anti-Communist dictatorship there.
Things started to change in the 1980s. For a brief period, both the island of Taiwan and mainland China were liberalizing dictatorships. Chiang Kai-shek’s successors were dictators on the island, and Mao Zedong's successors were dictators on the mainland, but they were both relatively liberalizing dictators. In the case of Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo authorized full democracy on the island, which went into place in the early 1990s. There was never full democracy on the mainland, but Deng Xiaoping, the economic reforming leader, also allowed a significant amount of political liberalization until, of course, the horrific Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.
So that moment in the 80s was perhaps, in retrospect, when the two systems were most similar and might even have gotten closer to each other. But since the 90s, the two have diverged very significantly politically.
“Overall, if you want to look at the historical trajectory of Taiwan and the mainland over the last 130 years or so, you see them diverging at various points, converging at various points in the late 1940s and mid-1980s, and then diverging again.”
The People's Republic of China has waxed and waned in terms of how liberal it is, but it has always been under the leadership of the Communist Party, a one-party state—sometimes, as under Deng Xiaoping or former President Jiang Zemin, a relatively more liberal authoritarian state, sometimes as under Xi Jinping today, a more hardline one—whereas Taiwan has become one of the most robust liberal democracies in Asia. It has very liberal policies on areas like LGBTQ rights, the internet, social media, freedom of speech, and freedom of media.
Overall, if you want to look at the historical trajectory of Taiwan and the mainland over the last 130 years or so, you see them diverging at various points, converging at various points in the late 1940s and mid-1980s, and then diverging again.
Unless Taiwan and the mainland find points of agreement about unification, a version of the status quo, where the two sides both claim sovereignty but don't acknowledge each other’s cases, is likely to persist for a long time. Most people looking at the situation are also very keen to try and avoid confrontation.
Q: How does mainland China exert influence over Taiwan?
In recent years, the mainland has attempted to put a heavy finger on the outcomes of Taiwan’s elections. The best example is the use of economic boycotts at strategic moments before the last presidential election. China temporarily put embargoes on the import and export of various types of goods such as pineapples, which are central to Taiwan’s agricultural economy. This can be seen as a very clear gesture of saying, if you don’t vote the right way—meaning for candidates who are more willing to talk to the mainland—then we can squeeze your economic windpipe.
Less overt, but still there, is social media disinformation. Taiwan’s free and fair democratic elections are nonetheless heavily influenced by memes and ideas that, in many cases, seem to be sponsored by the mainland. These often pick up on issues on voters’ minds, such as the continuing growth of income inequality in Taiwan. There is a vested interest in China in making sure that the social and political environment of Taiwan is anxious and turbulent and therefore perhaps more inclined to talk to China.
Q: What elements of the relationship between Taiwan and mainland China might come as a surprise to many people?
One thing that tends to be underplayed in reporting about the relationship between Taiwan and China is that, while there is a very clear division and rhetorical confrontation between the two sides, they are also actually very close. On the one hand, it is clear that the Communist Party in China wants to take over the island of Taiwan and, one suspects, doesn’t have great sympathy with its liberal and free way of life, and that’s a real problem for Taiwan’s 23 million-plus citizens. On the other hand, it is also the case that Taiwan’s economy and society are much more heavily tied up with the mainland than is sometimes realized. Something like 80% of Taiwan's businesses are linked to the mainland. Taiwanese students can study at discount rates in the mainland. Many people still have clear and strong links to families on the mainland. The two are very different societies that are still linked in important ways.
—
Banner image: A photo from March 16, 2021 shows farmers harvesting pineapples in Pingtung county, Taiwan. A Chinese ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan has sparked more Taiwanese buying and use in restaurants, but it has also left many questioning Taipei's economic reliance on its giant neighbor. Photo by Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images.
Faculty portrait by Ken Richardson.