Paul Heer
In his inauguration speech last May, Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, evoked the year 1624—when the Dutch East India Company established a fort on the island—as the year that “marked Taiwan’s links to globalization.” His theme was that since then, Taiwan has been an international entity and entrepot with a complex history of interaction with many foreign countries and other actors, including mainland China. Many Taiwanese, especially from Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), assert that Taiwan has “never been part of China,” and emphasize in particular that it has never been part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Since 2006, DPP administrations have issued textbooks that teach Taiwan’s history separately from Chinese history.
The importance of understanding this history is highlighted in a new book by scholar Sulmaan Wasif Khan, The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between. Khan’s narrative records that Taiwan was, in fact, part of the Chinese empire from 1683 to 1895—more than 200 years—because Emperor Kangxi decided that “the idea of a potentially hostile power offshore was not one he would countenance.” The island then became part of the Japanese empire for fifty years after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5).
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