En svensk i Taiwan

Taiwan has never been part of the PRC. It was officially and legally ceeded to Japan in 1895, giving Japan full sovereignty over the island, which means that it actually never even was a Japanese colony at all, but a part of Japan as much as Okinawa. And Taiwanese residents were actually allowed to participate in Japanese government, something that almost never, if at all, occurs in a colony, which implies that Japan also treated it as part of Japan and not a colony.

When Japan capitulated at the end of WWII, Taiwan was "returned" to the R.o.C according to the official KMT history, but actually only put under their temporary administration according the governing treaties of the time. No matter, in practice, the KMT took over the island, and the 1.5 million or so soldiers and others that escaped China together with the KMT army started suppressing the local population, killing off the whole local intelligentia, thousands of intellectuals critical to the KMT government, beginning on Feb. 28, 1947.

Anyway, the point is that when the new state of the People's Republic of China was founded and declared by Mao Zedong on the Tiananmen gate on Oct. 1, 1949, Taiwan was already under KMT rule. And that, by the way, was a KMT that acknowledged Taiwan as non-Chinese when it came to power in 1912, after the fall of the Chinese imperial system.

That means that Taiwan has never been under the jurisdiction of the PRC, and so PRC claims are groundless as well as preposterous. Apart from that, Taiwan has its own army, its own fully democratically elected government, full control of its own territory, its own foreign policy, and China has no more say in what is going on in Taiwan than it has in what's going on in the US or in Sweden or in the EU or anywhere else. Any other claims are simply uninformed and wrong.

All these problems of course stem from the old dictatorship under Chiang Kai-shek, who famously (in Taiwan at least) said that the world wasn't big enough for both him and Mao. So when the time was ripe to allow China UN membership and give them the Chinese seat on the Security Council, Chiang and his R.o.C. was offered a normal UN membership in the mold of East and West Germany, which he of course promptly refused. He still clung to the pipe dream that his government represented all of China, and used that pretence to justify martial law and brutal repression of the Taiwanese people.

This old claim -- that the R.o.C. Government which was kicked out of China by Mao -- lies behind all the problems today, since it is hardly possible that any country would recognize two competing governments claiming to rule the same country. But today, this is no longer the current government's policy, and what's more, a majority of the people no longer support this view, which is important in a democracy.

I could go on and on, but I won't. The bipartisan resolution is unlikely, to say the least, to cause Bush to recognize Taiwan, but it could very well start a debate about the ridiculous idea that a fully fledged democracy (well, almost, but then they have only had about 15-20 years to do what Western countries have been able to spend a century perfecting (?), and keep in mind that it is only about 20 years since the old dictatorship was murdering dissidents or giving them decades-long prison sentences) should be forced to submit itself to rule by a communist dictatorship.

I lived in China for a couple of years as well, and still remember the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989, which was what made me decide to leave China, so I can tell you that that's not such a good idea. But that should be clear to any thinking person even if he or she hasn't actually lived there.