Taiwan-China Relations: Historical Overview

As introduced by the Taiwan Yearbook 2007:

Historical Overview

The Republic of China was founded in 1912 in China. At that time, Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule as a result of the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, by which the Manchu Empire -- commonly described in history texts as Ching Dynasty China -- ceded Taiwan to Japan. At the end of World War II, the ROC government, then controlled by the Kuomintang (KMT), declared Taiwan a province of the ROC. Four years later, when the Communist Party of China (CPC) established the People's Republic of China, the ROC government relocated to Taiwan.

Since then, the ROC's effective territory has been limited to the large island of Taiwan and a number of smaller ones, and the ROC and PRC have been governed as separate sovereign entities, with no direct, official contact between them. Now, the ROC has come to be universally known as "Taiwan," while the PRC is known as "China".

During the Cold War years, the two governments each claimed sovereignty over all of China and Taiwan, and each attempted or threatened to use force to resolve the sovereignty issue. In 1979, Beijing began to employ "united front" tactics that stress the use of "peaceful" means to unify Taiwan with China. The government of Taiwan responded to this with the "three noes" policy -- no contact, no negotiation, and no compromise.

Throughout the 1980s, Taiwan underwent economic liberalization, social diversification, and political democratization. Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, its government has adopted progressively more open policies toward China, spurring economic, cultural, and educational exchanges.

In 1990, the KMT-led government established the advisory National Unification Council. In February 1991, the council drafted the non-legally binding Guidelines for National Unification, which outlined a three-phase approach for unification. The Guidelines called for China to democratize and become more highly developed as the precondition for serious talks about steps toward eventual integration. In May of that same year, then-President Lee Teng-hui announced the termination of the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion, thereby acknowledging the reality that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are under separate rule.

In response to the increasing level of exchanges across the Taiwan Strait, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) and the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) were established in 1991 to administer relations between Taiwan and China. The Cabinet-level MAC serves as the official administrative agency responsible for the overall planning, coordination, evaluation, and implementation of the government's China policies, while the SEF is a semi-official organization authorized by the government to handle technical and business matters with China.

Since then, laws and regulations have been enacted and amended many times to facilitate mutually beneficial economic and cultural interaction between Taiwan and China.

Taiwan-China Consultations

In October 1992, the SEF and its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS), held talks in Hong Kong -- the first time authorized representatives of the two sides had done so. The understandings reached in Hong Kong served as the basis for the historic agreements on practical issues such as exchange of mail signed in April 1993 in Singapore by SEF Chairman Koo Chen-fu and ARATS President Wang Daohan.

The PRC authorities indefinitely postponed the second round of Koo-Wang talks, which had been scheduled for July 1995 in Beijing, to protest the United States' decision to permit then-President Lee to accept an invitation of his alma mater, Cornell University, to travel to the United States to receive an honorary doctorate in June 1995. Displaying its paranoia at the results of democratization in Taiwan, Beijing upped tensions in March 1996 by test-firing missiles into waters off the coast of Taiwan in the lead-up to its first direct presidential election.

In October 1998, Koo and Wang resumed talks in Shanghai. Although the SEF and ARATS agreed, in principle, to expand exchanges at various levels, no significant progress was made on thornier issues during the meeting. In July 1999, Beijing once again unilaterally suspended negotiations in protest at President Lee's characterization of the Taiwan-China relationship as a "special state-to-state relationship" during an interview with a German radio station. CPC leaders vehemently criticized the statement as a move toward "Taiwan independence".

This view, of course, is erroneous, inasmuch as the presumption of Taiwan's statehood had always been the existential foundation of its government. In fact, President Lee's words constituted a magnanimous acknowledgement that the PRC is a state, indicative of the Taiwanese government's effective renunciation of any claim to sovereignty over continental territories.

Despite Beijing's ongoing refusal to talk with Taiwan's government, over the past two decades, the latter has progressively liberalized restrictions on the movement of people, goods, capital, and technology between Taiwan and China. Taiwan has shared the faith of other democratic nations that promoting the prosperity of the Chinese people would catalyze the development of a democratic China whose government would want to communicate directly with Taiwan's government and renounce the use of force to settle disputes.

New Efforts and Approaches

In 2000, Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected as the ROC's tenth-term president, and was re-elected in 2004. In his first inaugural address, President Chen made an important goodwill gesture by pledging not to initiate any move -- such as pushing to change the nation's official name -- that would seem to change Taiwan's status quo. On several occasions, he urged China to cooperate in establishing a "peace and stability framework" for interaction.

The Chen administration has taken numerous measures to demonstrate Taiwan's goodwill and commitment to improving relations with China. These include relaxing restrictions on trade and investment, opening the "mini-three-links" of direct transportation, postal services, and commercial interchange between China and Taiwan's Kinmen and Matsu islands; expanding the functions and scope of offshore shipping centers; permitting Chinese journalists to visit Taiwan; opening Taiwan to visits by China's citizens who reside in, or first travel to, a third country; and arranging for passenger and cargo charter flights between Taiwan and China. Additionally, Taiwan's financial institutions have been authorized to open liaison offices in China, and the government has significantly relaxed restrictions on imports from China.

Beijing's Attitude

Despite these concrete expressions of goodwill, Beijing has rebuffed the Taiwanese government's repeated calls for resumption of dialogue. It insists that this will be possible only if Taiwan's government first affirms the "one-China principle", the proposition that Taiwan is a part of China -- namely, the PRC. It advocates a "one country, two systems" formula whereby Taiwan would become a "special administrative region" under Beijing's jurisdiction, like Hong Kong and Macau.

China has refused to renounce the use of force against Taiwan and has continued to expand its military deployments across the Taiwan Strait. It has targeted some 1,000 missiles at Taiwan, and this number is steadily increasing. Annually, China holds large-scale military exercises simulating attacks on Taiwan and its offshore islands. Meanwhile, it relentlessly maneuvers to block Taiwan's participation in international forums and to sabotage Taiwan's diplomatic endeavors, attempting to coerce the international community into accepting its "one-China principle".

On March 14, 2005, China's National People's Congress enacted an "anti-separation law" intended to legitimize military action against Taiwan. In response, President Chen issued a six-point statement, stressing that this move severely and adversely impacted Taiwan-China relations, and that Beijing's use of non-democratic, non-peaceful means to resolve differences with Taiwan could not be tolerated by the international community. On March 26, hundreds of thousands of people from across Taiwan gathered in Taipei to protest the law, and governments the world over expressed grave concern.

Taiwan's Bottom Line

The guiding principle of Taiwan's China policy is to secure peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, premised on maintaining its national status quo as a sovereign democracy and on safeguarding the right of its 23 million Taiwanese people to determine their own future.

On the latter point, President Chen stated in his second inaugural address on May 20, 2004 that "If both sides are willing, on the basis of goodwill, to create an environment based upon peaceful development and freedom of choice, then in the future, the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China -- or Taiwan and China -- can seek to establish relations in any form whatsoever. We would not exclude any possibility, so long as any decision is made with the consent of the 23 million people of Taiwan".

The government of Taiwan is open to all approaches that can foster mutually beneficial relations with China and friendly dialogue on an equal footing.