ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Chinese version of the Republic of China (ROC) from 1951 to 2010 as a means to understand ROC territorial strategies, looking at how the ROC authorities defined the 'national territory', tracing changes in the course of sixty years, and addressing the coping mechanisms developed by a nation considered by many to no longer exist. It also considers how and why certain territorial strategies were adopted and changed, what kind of national imagination and narratives were constructed in the yearbooks, the ways in which different versions of 'national territory' were formulated and presented, and the reasons why these have changed, both in the texts and cartographic representation of the yearbooks. In so doing, this chapter aims to understand the politics of state territorialities in postwar Taiwan, rather than focusing on what the ROC guyou territory entails, commenting on its postwar diplomatic policy and predicaments or resolving which piece of land belonged to the ROC.
