We know that the PRC (Red) China claims Taiwan as part of the full nation. And Taiwan qua The Republic of China used to claim the mainland as part of the RoC. My question is does it still hold true that Taiwan/Taipei still claims all of mainland China as part of the Republic?
Some documents may claim as such, but everyone knows it’s just diplomatic verbese.
I was in Taiwan 20 years ago and I asked one of my local coworkers that very question. He said that Taiwan didn’t claim mainland China to be part of Taiwan, but that they hoped mainland China would become a more democratic country in the future. He said Taiwan is focused on becoming independent of mainland China, although he didn’t think that would happen in his lifetime.
It’s still on the books (e.g. https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode=Q0010001, emphasis added):
The following terms as used in this Act are defined below.
- “Taiwan Area” refers to Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, and any other area under the effective control of the Government.
- “Mainland Area” refers to the territory of the Republic of China outside the Taiwan Area.
And the RoC Constitution itself was written assuming control over the mainland: https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode=A0000001. Article 64:
Members of the Legislative Yuan shall be elected in accordance with the following provisions:
- Those to be elected from the provinces and by the municipalities under the direct jurisdiction of the Executive Yuan shall be five for each province or municipality with a population of not more than 3,000,000, one additional member shall be elected for each additional 1,000,000 in a province or municipality whose population is over 3,000,000;
- Those to be elected from Mongolian Leagues and Banners;
- Those to be elected from Tibet;
- Those to be elected by various racial groups in frontier regions;
- Those to be elected by Chinese citizens residing abroad; and
- Those to be elected by occupational groups.
But nobody really acts that way. They’re just old documents that don’t reflect reality. Day to day, the government of Taiwan certainly doesn’t even try to pretend to manage mainland affairs.
That may be the prevalent feeling among the population, but it’s not the official stance of the ROC government (which realises, of course, that that stance exists merely on paper). In particular, the idea of Taiwanese “independence” is very controversial and very carefully avoided by the ROC government.
Well, Nanjing is still officially the capital of the Republic of China, if that’s any indicator.
Taiwan should grant the mainland its independence.
How is Taiwan not independent? De facto, not de jure.
They can’t join the UN. Foreign countries are sometimes reluctant to have embassies there – the U.S., for example, has a private nonprofit called the American Institute in Taiwan which provides embassy-like services but isn’t an embassy, technically. It complicates the Olympics because they have to compete as “Chinese Taipei”. In general, it is harder for Taiwan to have proper foreign relations with other big countries because China will lobby hard against it.
Those are the small day-to-day annoyances. The big thing is that there’s no guarantee Taiwan can even keep the ambiguity it has now, remaining quasi-independent for long. Tibet and Hong Kong weren’t so long ago, and there’s no guarantee that anybody except the U.S. would step in to prevent Taiwan from being next. The U.N. won’t do anything about it and very few other countries would want to risk upsetting China. Most de-facto countries don’t live under the spectre of its violent dissolution at the hands of a giant enemy across a tiny sea.
All of this is just the daily normal to people living there – you can adapt to anything, I guess – but it’s a relatively unusual political situation. Maybe the Koreas are similar?
All that just means that they’re unpopular; it doesn’t mean that they’re not independent.
No disagreement there. Perhaps I mis-parsed your question as “what are some examples that illustrate Taiwan’s de-facto-only independence”?
I didn’t mean to argue (nor do I believe) that Taiwan is a part of China – or vice versa, given the thread. Sorry if that was unclear.
Taiwan is essentially de facto independent in every way. Its own currency, flag, constitution, military, government, etc. I can’t think of any particular thing in which it isn’t independent in practical real-life terms.
In a public international law exam many years ago, I had to answer the essay question: “Is Taiwan a state in international law?” My reply was that it is, but that the curious case here is that neither the PRC nor the ROC (i.e., Taiwan itself) claims that it is. For all practical purposes (“ex factis jus oritur” - it’s facts that make law in international law) it is, but neither side makes the claim that it is.
Not just sometimes; there’s only a handful countries worldwide that have diplomatic relations with the ROC. The PRC won’t have diplomatic relations with countries that have them with the ROC, so essentially you have to choose between the two, and the vast majority chose PRC. They still have ties with Taiwan, of course, but they’re not formally diplomatic, so the embassies get called something else. The only remaining countries that have official diplomatic relations with the ROC are some developing countries that do it for Taiwanese development aid, and the Holy See, which does it in retaliation for the suppression of Catholicism in Mainland China.
The difference being that Hong Kong and Macau had officially been leased by Imperial China to the UK and Portugal respectively. The UK handed over Hong Kong when the lease on the New Territories expired, and Portugal handed over Macau as part of the decolonization process that began after the fall of the fascist regime in the '70s.
Taiwan isn’t a colonial holdover and the ROC government is unlikely to negotiate any sort of peaceable handover of authority to Beijing. The only way that’s going to happen is if China invades and conquers Taiwan by force - which I’m not sure they have the logistical capacity to pull off, would probably cost them a lot of money and lives, and would turn them into a pariah state as Russia has become.
(And considering how Russia’s latest attempt at Czarist irredentism has turned into a stalemate that has crippled their economy and is slowly bleeding them dry, I seriously doubt Beijing wants to try to imitate them.)
The long (long) history of China was that when the central government was strong, it controlled a vast extent of territory it considered parts of China. When the government became weak, assorted peripheral states broke off and became independent, foreign powers invaded, etc.
So the current government has since the end of the revolution been expanding to claim any territory it might consider part of China. As mentioned, Hong Kong and Macau were leases that stronger European powers imposed on China, as was the Shanghai international zone. The Chinese still have a dispute with Japan over some uninhabited rocks in the ocean between them. They are in the process of trying to establish ownership of the reefs of the South China Sea. And of course, there’s Taiwan, where the Nationalist government fled and China could not take it.
But essentially, to recognize Taiwan’s defacto independence would be to severely lose face, to essentially admit they are not a strong central government of all China. To allow other countries to formally recognize Taiwan would imply the same “humiliation”. There’s the added humiliation that the western world took a lot longer than normal (thanks to the USA) to recognize the PRC as de facto China.
So the status of Taiwan remains frozen. China will try to punish as well as it can any country that defies it over the status of Taiwan, and in the last few decades, trade with China is more important that with Taiwan. For Taiwan itself, declaring independence is a risky move - what will it take to push China over the edge, so it has no choice but to invade, just to save face? Taiwan does not want to find out the hard way, and China isn’t saying. (Chiina probably isn’t sure at any given time either) The status quo of competing pretences is the safest for all - for now.
(Tibet is a prime example of the history of China - it has been at various times in the last millenia or two an independent country, a vassal state of China, and a province of China. That latter provided the grounds for China to claim it as part of their country. Any hint otherwise, even tourist guides that show it separate on a map, will be confiscated at the border. It’s all about saving face.)
But it’s important diplomatic verbese.
Taiwan has indicated that it would be willing to renounce all claims to the mainland and be recognized as a separate country. But the People’s Republic has been very clear that it is not willing to renounce its claims to Taiwan. What’s more the PRC has stated there are two conditions under which it would “reclaim” Taiwan by military means. One is if Taiwan began developing nuclear weapons. The other is if Taiwan ever renounced its claims to be China and declared itself a separate country.
Taiwan’s theoretical claim to mainland China had even domestic constitutional ramifications. Until 2005, Taiwan’s supreme legislative body under its own constitution was the National Assembly. But the government maintained that the last regular election to this body was the one of 1947, because ever since, the ROC citizens in the Chinese mainland were (under their reading) prevented from participating in these election. As a result, the composition of the Assembly remained essentially unchanged (except for Pepe dying) until 1969, long after the ROC had lost control over the mainland. Starting from 1969, Assembly elections were held in Taiwan, but they were always said to be supplemental, and that the mainland delegates elected in 1947 retained their seat. Naturally, as time went on this increasingly became a fiction. The mainland delegates were finally removed from the Assembly in 1991