( Spanish) — Once again, the high tensions between China and Taiwan occupy the world’s attention, even while the war in Ukraine and the heavy fighting in Bakhmut continues: this time they are led by the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, who has just started a tour of Central America and the United States that has been condemned by Beijing.
“External pressure will not stop our determination to move towards international partnership. We are calm, confident, uncompromising and not provocative,” Tsai said before embarking on her tour, which comes in the context of the recent break in relations between Honduras, which formally established diplomatic ties with China (Beijing does not allow a country to have relations also with Taipei).
In August 2022 Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, generated similar tensions during her visit to the island that has become a recurring symbol of the rivalry between the United States and China in recent years, the two main economic powers of the world.
Pelosi landed in Taiwan as part of her Asia tour, and amid repeated threats from China over the trip, which said some US politicians were “playing with fire.” It was the first time in 25 years that a Speaker of the House of Representatives had visited the island.
Every Washington gesture toward Taipei regularly receives a reaction from Beijing, and in 2022 there were many: the latest came last week, when Pelosi’s intentions to travel to Taiwan became known.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry then promised to take “resolute and forceful action” if they went ahead with the trip.
And, meanwhile, Taiwan has begun its annual Han Kuang military exercises, which are week-long and simulate an enemy invasion.
In May there had been another situation of tension, when the president of the United States, Joe Biden, said that his country would respond militarily if China intervened in Taiwan, in the context that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had raised concerns in Taipei about a possible similar action by Beijing.
“We agree with the One China policy. We signed it and all the corresponding agreements were made from there, but the idea that you can take it by force, just take it by force, is (just not) appropriate.” Biden said.
While in June 2021 a group of US senators flew to Taiwan on a military plane to announce a major donation of covid-19 vaccines, the trip was seen by Beijing as the latest in a series of provocations.
And in October of that same year, meanwhile, some 150 Chinese warplanes flew near Taiwanese airspace in the biggest raid to date, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.
Taiwan Air Force pilots with their Mirage 2000 fighters during an exercise in January 2019. (Credit: SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images)
The tensions are merely a reminder of decades-long hostility between the governments in Beijing and Taipei, with both sides historically claiming to be the rightful rulers of all of China’s territories, including Taiwan.
Here, a look at this historic dispute.
the nationalist government
Taiwan’s official name, the Republic of China, dates back to its founding in 1911 after the collapse of China’s last imperial dynasty.
Under the government of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), led by Chiang Kai-shek, the Republic of China had to face the advances of the Empire of Japan in the early 1930s and later during World War II, as well as also to the growing power of the Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong.
Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan in the 1950s. (Credit Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
In 1945, following the Japanese defeat, the ROC recaptured the island of Taiwan, which China had lost in an earlier war with the Japanese. But four years later, in 1949, the Kuomintang was defeated in a bloody civil war on the mainland by the Communist Party army.
That same year Mao founded the People’s Republic of China, with its capital in Beijing.
About 1.2 million Chinese, mainly military, accompanied Chiang Kai-Shek’s government in its exodus to Taiwan, according to estimates made by the Taiwanese authoritiesand after defeating a brief incursion of the communist troops on the island they managed to establish themselves there.
Mao’s forces, by contrast, expanded their control into the Chinese mainland, and have since regarded Taiwan as a renegade province and a “inalienable part” that at some point it will return to the control of Beijing.
Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong shakes hands with US President Richard Nixon after a historic Cold War meeting in Beijing in February 1972. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)
Regional dispute, global tension
Separated by a strait, conflicting ideologies and a historic conflict, the two Chinas – the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China – have coexisted amid tensions ever since, despite sharing traditions, culture and a common languageMandarin Chinese.
This tension between Beijing and Taipei has always been linked to the equally difficult relationship between Beijing and Washington.
The United States government, an ally of the Kuomintang during World War II, did not initially recognize the legitimacy of the Communist government in mainland China. On the contrary, it continued to give its political support to Taipei.
A Chinese Shenyang J-16 fighter jet.
The member countries of the UN, however, recognized in 1971 the legitimacy of the People’s Republic, including its permanent seat in the Security Council, which until then was occupied by Taipei.
On the other hand, the rapprochement between China and the United States that began in the early 1970s and in the midst of the Cold War led to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing in 1979, and the transfer of the US embassy from Taipei to Beijing.
But far from signifying a break in relations with Taiwan, the US has maintained strong commercial and military ties with the island, which it considers a key ally in the region, within the framework of a “strategic ambiguity”.
This includes the commitment of Washington to help Taiwan, an island democratically governed and with more than 23 million inhabitantsto defend against a possible invasion of the communists in China.
“One Chinese”
For decades the Taiwan Strait has been the scene of military tensions and skirmishes between China and Taiwan, with Beijing going so far as to bomb outlying Taipean-controlled islands on two occasions.
Between 1995 and 1996 the last great crisis occurred after the visit of the then president of Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui, to the United States. China fired missiles into waters near Taiwan in response to the meeting, and the United States ended up sending two aircraft carriers to the area.
At the same time, representatives of mainland China and Taiwan had begun a rapprochement in the early 1990s, capped by the 1992 summit in Hong Kong, then still under UK control.
President Tsai Ing-wen during a rally on Wednesday, January 8, 2020, in Taoyuan, Taiwan, ahead of the presidential election.
Beijing and the pro-reunification parties in Taiwan assure that during that meeting there was an agreement regarding the principle of “one China”, that is, both parties recognize the existence of a single country that must be reunified.
But they disagreed as to who is the legitimate authority to do so and even on the scope of that “1992 consensus”, today even rejected by the president of TaiwanTsai Ing-wen, whose party traditionally advocates formal independence for the island.
“There is only one China and the government of the People’s Republic is the only legitimate one and Taiwan is part of China,” points the Foreign Ministry in Beijing.
In Taiwan, the official position is more ambiguous regarding reunification, and the island’s governments have sought to maintain the status quo. But the Kuomintang and other reunification forces also insist that the ROC is the legitimate government of the entire territory.
With reporting by Simone McCarthy, Eric cheung, Nectar Gan, Brad Lendon, Kevin Liptak, Donald Judd, Wayne Chang, and Ben Westcott.
