Taiwan: Encyclopedia II - Taiwan - History

Taiwan - History

Main article: History of Taiwan

Taiwan - Prehistory and early settlement

Evidence of human settlement in Taiwan dates back 30,000 years, although the first inhabitants of Taiwan may have been genetically distinct from any groups currently on the island. About 4,000 years ago, ancestors of current Taiwanese aborigines settled Taiwan. These aborigines are genetically related to Malay and Polynesians, and linguists classify their language as Austronesian. Records indicate that Han Chinese settled in Penghu since the 1100s, but it was not until later that people other than aborigines permanently settled in the main island of Taiwan.

Records from ancient China indicate that Han Chinese might have known of the existence of the main island of Taiwan since the Three Kingdoms period (third century), having assigned offshore islands in the vicinity names like Greater and Minor Liuqiu (Ryukyu), though none of these names have been definitively matched to the main island of Taiwan. It has been claimed but not verified that the Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He visited Taiwan between 1403 and 1424.

In 1544, a Portuguese ship sighted the main island of Taiwan and dubbed it "Ilha Formosa", which means "Beautiful Island." The Portuguese made no attempt to colonize Taiwan. In 1624, the Dutch established a commercial base on Taiwan and began to import workers from Fujian and Penghu as laborers, many of whom settled. The Dutch made Taiwan a colony with its colonial capital at Tainan.

Taiwan - Koxinga and imperial Chinese rule

Ming naval and troop forces defeated the Dutch in 1662, subsequently expelling the Dutch government and military from the island. They were led by Lord Cheng Cheng-Kung (also known as Lord Koxinga or 鄭成功), a pirate turned Ming navy commander. Following the fall of the Ming dynasty, Cheng retreated to Taiwan as a self-styled Ming loyalist, and established the Kingdom of Tungning (1662–1683). Cheng establishing his capital at Tainan and he and his heirs, Zheng Jing (鄭經) who ruled from 1662-82 and his son Zheng Ke-Shuang (鄭克塽), who served less than a year, continued to launch raids on the east coast of mainland China well into the Qing dynasty in an attempt to recover the mainland.

In 1683, the Qing dynasty defeated the Cheng holdout, and formally annexed Taiwan, placing it under the jurisdiction of Fujian province. Following the defeat of Cheng's grandson to an armada led by Admiral Shi Lang, Cheng's followers were expatriated to the farthest reaches of the Qing empire, leaving approximately 7,000 Han on Taiwan. The Qing government wrestled with its Taiwan policy to reduce piracy and vagrancy in the area, which led to a series of edicts to manage immigration and respect aboriginal land rights. Illegal immigrants from Fujian continued to enter Taiwan as renters of the large plots of aboriginal lands under contracts that usually involved marriage, while the border between taxpaying lands and "savage" lands migrated east, with some aborigines 'Sinicizing' while others retreated into the mountains. During this time, there were a number of conflicts involving Han Chinese from different regions of China, and between Han Chinese and aborigines. The bulk of Taiwan's population today claim descent from these immigrants.

In 1887, the Qing government of China made Taiwan a province by itself, the 20th in the country, with capital at Taipei. The move was accompanied by a modernization drive that included the building of the first railroad and the beginning of a postal service in Taiwan.

Taiwan - Japanese rule

Following its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), Qing China ceded Taiwan and Penghu (the Pescadores) to Japan in perpetuity, on terms dictated by the latter. Inhabitants wishing to remain Chinese subjects were given a 2-year grace period to sell their property and move to the mainland.

On May 25, 1895, the Republic of Formosa was formed with a dynastic name of "Forever Qing" ("Qing" or "Ch'ing" referring to the dynastic name of China at the time: Great Qing Empire) and with capital at Tainan, to resist impending Japanese rule. Japanese forces entered the capital and quelled this resistance on October 21, 1895. As opposed to elsewhere in Asia, Japan attempted to use Taiwan as a model colony and was instrumental in the industrialization of the island; they extended the railroads that had just sprung up in late Qing rule, built a sanitation system and a public school system, among other things. Still, the ethnic Chinese and Taiwanese aborigines were classified as second and third class citizens. Large scale violence continued in the first decade of rule. Around 1935, the Japanese began an island-wide assimilation project to bind the island more firmly to the Japanese Empire. By 1945, just before Japan lost World War II, desperate plans were in place to incorporate popular representation of Taiwan into the Japanese Diet to make Taiwan an integral part of Japan proper.

Japan's rule of Taiwan came to an end with its defeat in World War II. Its signing of the Instrument of Surrender on August 15, 1945, signaled that Taiwan was to be returned to China, one of the Allied objectives from the wartime declarations. On October 25, 1945, ROC troops, representing the Allied Command, accepted the formal surrender of Japanese military forces in Taihoku (today: Taipei). However, due to the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communists, the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty between Japan and the Allies stipulated that the United States as the main occupying power of Taiwan (a former Japanese territory) while not naming the recipient of Taiwan's sovereignty.

Taiwan - Republic of China rule

The ROC administration, led by Chiang Kai-shek, announced October 25, 1945, as "Taiwan Retrocession Day." Reportedly, they were greeted as liberators by the island residents. However, the ROC military administration on Taiwan under Chen Yi, was viewed by many as corrupt. This view, compounded with a period of hyperinflation, unrest due to the Chinese Civil War, and distrust due to political, cultural and lingual differences that had developed between the Taiwanese and the Mainland Chinese, quickly led to the loss of popular support for the new administration. This culminated in a series of severe clashes between the ROC administration and Taiwanese, in turn leading to the bloody 228 incident and the reign of White Terror.

At the same time, the Chinese Civil War was in progress. In 1949, Chiang's Kuomintang (Nationalist Party or KMT), which at the time controlled the government of the ROC, retreated to Taiwan after continued military defeats at the hands of the Communist Party of China drove it from most parts of China. Some 1.3 million refugees from mainland China arrived in Taiwan around that time. Initially, the United States abandoned the KMT and expected that Taiwan would fall to the Communists. However, in 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and in the context of the Cold War, US President Harry S. Truman intervened again and dispatched the 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Straits to "neutralize" the Straits.

In the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which came into force on April 28, 1952, and the Treaty of Taipei, concluded hours before that date, Japan formally renounced all right, claim and title to Formosa (Taiwan) and the Pescadores (Peng-hu), and renounced all treaties signed with China before 1942. Both treaties remained silent about who would take control of the island, in part to avoid taking sides in the Chinese Civil War. Advocates of Taiwan independence have used this omission to call into question any legal claims on Taiwan, and arguing for self-determination, a universal human right.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Taiwan began to develop into a prosperous and dynamic economy, becoming one of the East Asian Tigers while maintaining an authoritarian, one-party government. Because of the Cold War, most Western nations and the United Nations regarded the Republic of China government on Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of China until the 1970s, when most nations began switching recognition to the Communists' People's Republic of China on the mainland.

After Chiang Kai-shek's death in 1975, Vice President Yen Chia-kan briefly took over from 1975 to 1978 according to the Constitution but the actual power was in hands of the Premier of the Executive Yuan, Chiang Ching-kuo, who is a son of Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT Chairman. During the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo from 1978 to 1988, Taiwan's political system began a gradual liberalization in late 1980s. Martial law which had been in effect since 1948 was lifted in 1987, and the opposition party was formed and allowed to explicitly involve in all sorts of political campaigns. The second Chiang died in 1988, and Vice President Lee Teng-hui succeeded him as the first Taiwan-born president of the ROC and chairman of the KMT. The one-party rule was losing its effective dominance after 1991 with the continuation of the peaceful social and political reforms or "Silent Revolution". Lee became the first ROC president elected by the popular vote of the citizens in 1996. In 2000, Chen Shui-bian, the Democratic Progressive Party candidate, won the Presidential election, marking the first ever peaceful democratic transition in power to the opposition party in the Chinese history. After surviving a politically controversial assassination attempt the night before the 2004 election, Chen was re-elected to his second four-year term by an extremely slim margin.

See also

• Timeline of Taiwanese history
• History of the Republic of China
• History of China

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki