ABSTRACT
Located 100 miles off China’s coastline, Taiwan and a few smaller islands that Taipei controls (including Penghu, Mazu and Jinmen) remain the last major territories that the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC/ China) claims sovereignty over but does not yet control. Indeed, at the core of the so-called ‘Taiwan problem’ – whether internationally or in China’s domestic politics – lies the question of sovereignty. From Beijing’s perspective, the PRC as the successor to the Republic of China (ROC) enjoys sovereignty over Taiwan not only because the island’s association with the mainland dates back to the ancient times but also because, in 1945, Japan returned Taiwan to the ROC. From Taipei’s perspective, however, the ROC did not cease to exist after the Chinese Civil War (1946-9), in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang: KMT). The KMT regime moved the ROC’s capital to Taipei in 1949 and continued to enjoy sovereignty over all of China, including the CCP-controlled Chinese mainland. Only in the 1990s did Taiwan’s democratization allow public debate to start on the nature of the ROC statehood, creating uncertainty over the ROC authorities’ commitment to the ‘one China’ policy. Even so, Beijing’s unshaken sovereignty claims over Taiwan, supported by an increasingly credible military and economic threat, have ensured the continuing centrality of the sovereignty dispute in cross-Strait relations.
