ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the Ma administration’s efforts to construct legal and historical narratives to justify the ROC’s formal claim to sovereignty over the disputed islands in the East China Sea. In particular, it looks at the ‘1992 consensus’ as the semi-legal basis for not contesting Beijing’s claims to the Diaoyutais and impliedly accepting the Air Defence Identification Zone, announced by the PRC authorities in late 2013. It also looks at the historical narratives the KMT—via state and non-state actors—developed to support its argument that China (and Taiwan as a part of China) owned the disputed islands since the Ming era. The chapter argues that President Ma and his ruling party skilfully resorted to the historical evidence regarding the Diaoyutais in order to construct a broader sovereignty narrative of One China that dated the China-Taiwan connection to a more distant past than the late seventeenth century, when the Qing Empire incorporated Taiwan into its territory.
