ABSTRACT
Taiwan is comprised of the main island, the Pescadores, Matsu, and Quemoy islands. Slightly smaller than Maryland and Delaware combined, the terrain is mostly rugged mountains for the eastern two-thirds, flat to gently rolling plains in the west. “During the 18th and 19th centuries, migration from Fujian and Guangdong provinces steadily increased, and Chinese supplanted indigenous peoples as the dominant population group. In 1895, a weakened Imperial China ceded Taiwan to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki following the first Sino-Japanese war. “Taiwan held legislative elections in 1992, the first in over forty years, and its first direct presidential election in 1996. In the 2000 presidential elections, Taiwan underwent its first peaceful transfer of power with the KMT loss to the DPP and afterwards experienced two additional democratic transfers of power in 2008 and 2016.
