To pick nits, CKS was a fascist. And as least as brutal as Mao (but not as successful). Not sure how you can say by today’s China standards, he was a Chinese communist? Unless you’re comparing a 1950’s CKS to a 2021 Winnie the Pooh? YMMV, but I don’t think it’s a valid nor relevant comparison.
You do correctly point out that CKS was an invader, and then Taiwan’s leader of “Free China” during the UN walkout. The local Taiwanese and indigenous people had no say in the matter. But same is true of President Xi or Putin orTrump or Biden for that matter. They make international deals as leaders of their countries, and it is frankly irrelevant what the citizenry think today. Same was true when CKS ruled the land.
The bolded part is very complicated and it really depends on what you mean by “Taiwan.” More details before.
The constitution is actually less of an issue than other concerns. Taiwan has amended its constitution to reflect the actual areas of control.
If it were politically possible to become a declared independent country then it wouldn’t be much of an issue.
In addition to the pressure from PRC, Taiwan itself is really divided between the pro-independence Pan Green parties, including the Democratic Progressive Party (DDP), the party of Taiwan’s current president and then the Pan-Blue parties, including the KMT. The question of how independence or being closer to China is the single biggest issue in Taiwan.
The media is a polarized as America’s CNN and Fox on this issue. Everything is either pro-China or anti-China and it colors everything, including the responses to the pandemic.
There isn’t a consensus in Taiwan on what the people want. I’ve had this discussion with many of my Taiwanese friends and students.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but public support is somewhere between these numbers. However, I believe the majority would not support independence if it led to a shooting war with China and with that as a red line, then it’s just not politically possible at the moment. My wife estimates that between 30% and 40% are strong supporters of independence, and the majority would be if there weren’t fear of China’s reaction.
Taiwanese really are divided on the issue. My wife and her best friend are on separate sides and have agreed to disagree about it. I’ve talked to both sides and the emotions run high. Think of progressive and MAGA supporters.
If you ask my pro-independence Taiwanese wife, then she would also use the word “conquer” but as someone who likes military history then I find it a silly stretch. Annexed perhaps? Militarily, I use “conquer” then one sides uses force to cause the other to surrender.
I guess it is a nit, and quite a complicated one. We may have both have read the same biographies and not really disagree. But to make like I do:
CKS sent his son CCK to be educated in Moscow. Maybe this was playing both sides, but CKS did, at times, ally with communists. As for today’s standards, Xi says he’s a communist while being tolerant of capitalism.
I also remember reading about secret cooperation between CKS and Zhou Enlai. The every other day mutual shelling game, into the 1970’s, can be interpreted as CKS’s anti-communism being make-believe.
Taiwan’s currently ruling Democratic Progressive Party really is, however defined, anti-communist.
I also should have mentioned that when CKS took over Taiwan, the KMT merged many existing firms into state-owned enterprises. So, just as in communist China today, KMT Taiwan had a mix of state-owned and private businesses. Then, staring in 1989 there was a Taiwan privatization push.
An example — this might be the one Taiwanese industrial outfit not yet privatized — is the Taiwan Sugar Corporation:
CKS, with his wife Soong Mei-ling, did a great job of fooling Americans, especially Republicans, into thinking that he was a free market democrat. Neither the democrat nor the free market parts were true.
It was definitely a cash grab and my wife’s grandfather lost a good job which was given to a “Chinese.” One of the large supermarket chains here was formerly exclusively for army and other mainlanders who came over.
Reading about the era, there was much more animosity between the Chinese who came over after the fall, and there are various estimates but around 15% of the population and the Taiwanese born Han Chinese. However, there is more intermarrying now and things are less black and white. My wife’s good friend’s father came from China but she is a DPP supporter although the rest of the family is KMT. Apparently is makes for awkward Chinese New Year’s.
I don’t know how much he actually fooled them but rather the US was supporting some pretty terrible people in the name of fighting Communism. Korea wasn’t particularly democratic, but I don’t know much about their history.
PhillyGuy - You are mixing up crony capitalism with communism. And the current crop of communists in crony capitalism clothing these days infesting Beijing.
No historian or any players at the time have ever accused the Generalissimo of being either a democrat or a free market proponent. It is true that Wellesley educated Missimo woo’d congress and media giant Henry Luce. But it was “we know he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard” type faustian bargain. And clearly at that time the US was not going to support Mao and the communists.
And the US was fully aware of Generalissimo Cash My Check. The whole deal was to keep CKS from making peace with the Japanese, thus freeing up forces in the Pacific. Good ol’ CKS avoided fighting the Japanese when they took over Manchuria in 1931, the Xi’an Incident in 1936 and clearly from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937. Peanut Head was clearly focused on the civil war rather than the Japanese.
Conquer is probably the correct word. Not sure how else to call brutally suppressing demonstrations, deliberately killing thousands if not tens of thousands of the native Taiwanese intelligensia, 228, enacting a brutal martial law with thousands disappeared, outlawing all opposition parties, teachers humiliated, beat and fined children for speaking Taiwanese in school, etc.
It certainly was not a bloodless annexation, nor was the general population welcoming.
Martial law was still in place when I first lived in Taiwan in 1982. It was only lifted in 1987. Dissidents accidentally fell out of 6 floor windows in police custody. The opposition party was very much under ground and hunted.
I’ve personally witnessed how the native taiwanese vs mainlander divide has become much less of an issue. Inter-marriage, Chiang Kai-Shek;s son and President for Life Chiang Ching-Kuo died in 1989 and the fiction of taking back the mainland died with him, native Taiwanese Presidents, the Taiwanese language no longer under overt attack, etc.
And it’s worth noting that the native Taiwanese historically had little to no contact with the Mainland. There were no widespread strong family ties. There had been zero Chinese government control since 1895, and prior to that Chinese suzeranity over Taiwan was very weak and only covered part of the island. And as you know, Taiwan was a Japanese colony since 1895 until the US allowed in the KMT for the first time. And Mandarin was an unintelligible foreign language to the vast majority of the population.
Note that I never said it was “bloodless” or that the general population welcomed the mainland Chinese.
One of my former students was a boy when he saw a long line of people with their hands tied together and then forced at gunpoint to walk out into the sea, where they drowned. Those that didn’t wa.lk were shot. The ruthlessness is appalling and for the life of me, I have no idea how anyone can support the KMT.
Had the very same actions been done in a communist country, the US would have been screaming bloody murder and these actions would have been held up as an example of the depravity of godless communists. As it was, the murderous regime was our ally.
I think we agree about everything except for the term “conquer” which I said I wouldn’t use because the actual take over from Japan was accomplished by the stroke of a pen.
I would agree with subjugation.
The brutal years of martial law really have left a lasting trace to this day. I read an account of Northern Ireland during the troubles where the groups would take the law into their own hands, and beat up suspected criminals, for example. It said that it doesn’t take much to go from that to having your goons beat up people because someone (physically) bumped into your mother at church.
A lot of reactions of people seem to reflect that. Many people are still terrified of conflict in public, and I think it comes back from when there was a real danger of disproportionally large responses to personal conflicts. When the government is a band of goons, no one is really safe, except the goons.
And Chiang was a piker? Don’t forget he blew the levees on the Yellow River, which resulted in millions of Chinese drowning or later starving to death to slow the Japanese advance.
CKS wasn’t as successful, but he was as brutal and ruthless. And he had both Mao and Stalin beat when it came to crony capitalism and squirreling away billions of dollars.
Tangent. I first lived in Taipei 40 years ago. Stayed with the extended family of one of CKS’ generals. Now there was definately rank inflation but he had held the rank of general and then retired to join the business world. He was married to a much younger taiwanese woman, and I stayed with their extended family for 6 months or so.
40 years ago, if there was a street argument and one was Taiwanese and the other a “mainlander” (外生人), then it got ugly really fast. Any taiwanese in earshot immediately joined in.
40 years ago companies were largely delineated by language. Taiwanese companies speaking Taiwanese. Mainland companies speaking Mandarin. Hakka’s were the third largest language group, and tended to align with the Taiwanese speakers. Indigenous mountain people were (and are) badly exploited. The lived on tribal lands much like US native american reservations. Women were frequently traffic. Many also worked as domestic help and often treated little more than slaves.
School kids were humiliated and made fun of by teachers if they often started kindergarten only speaking Taiwanese. Ruler on knuckles or fines were still practiced in 1980’s to force kids to speak Mandarin.
Again, things have changed and improved immensely in the past 40 years. The percentage of “mixed” marriages has gone way up, so that kids grow up in bi-lingual and bi-cultural households. That said, the Taiwanese, Hakka and Indigenous people still face systemic barriers today.
All that said, the situation in Taiwan is not that the majority population hope for the Mainland to “liberate” them. And the Chinese press has really amped up the “calls” to help out the Taiwan based compatriots escape from the horrendous self-rule and for what passes as democracy in Taiwn.
Unfortunately, the KMT policy of Mandarin only has been effective at forcing people into that language at the expense of their traditional tongue.
My MIL speaks a heavily accepted Mandarin, but of the three daughters, only my wife speaks some Taiwanese because she spent the first two years with grandma. Her younger sisters spent the their lives in Taipei and can’t really speak any.
Back to the main points of the thread, we will have to wait to see how far the Chinese want to push the issue.
Very true Marvin. And if a Typhoon doesn’t hit the island this year and end the drought, semiconductor production is going to halt anyway.
Just some background. Last summer, for the first time in about 60 years, Taiwan did not get a Typhoon crossing the island. As a result, reservoirs are about as empty as those in California, and farmers are being subsidized to not grow water intensive rice. And the Mainland Chinese Government are highlighting the water shortage as a shortcoming of the Taiwan government. This is one of the recent Mainland rationalizations to the Mainland people as to why the Taiwan government is incompetent and why Taiwan needs saving.
@TokyoBayer You’ll find outside of Mandarin dominant Taipei, that Taiwanese is the linga franca. Another fun story, in 1989 I went to Kenting, in the southern tip of Taiwan. and I tried to talk to some farmers in Mandarin and they really didn’t understand a word. I switched to my very basic Japanese, and they just lit up, broad smiles and then excitedly tried to speak Japanese with me and quickly overwhelmed my limited ability.
Certainly through the 1980’s, it was not difficult to find people that only spoke Taiwanese (outside of Taipei). Not sure these days as it’s been a long time since I’ve been to Taiwan beyond a business trip to Taipei.
They are very water-intensive. Each chip wafer needs to be washed several times with deionized ultra-pure water, in between treatments involving hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, hydrogen peroxide, etc.
True, however, it only took a few days of rain this week for reservoirs to go from 3-8 percent to 55-100 percent. Another week of rain is expected to top some off completely.
True, however, those are mostly pure-play chips, made by American companies. If there were a war over Taiwan, the integrated-design-manufacturers like Samsung and Intel would gain immensely (they already churn out more chips than TSMC anyway, IIRC.) Fabless companies would suffer, but other pure-play fabs like GlobalFoundries would see a huge jump in business.
My bad. In my defense, I just design the chips that the fabs make, I am not directly involved in the fabrication process.
It would take years to get all the designs moved from TSMC/UMC to other fabs. Even if you are moving a chip to an equivalent process node there are going to be electrical performance and design rule differences to be accounted for, plus a new manufacturing flow means that all designs will need to be re-qualified. That’s for digital chips; for analog and mixed-signal chips the processes are even more unique, so porting a design will required substantial design work. At least a man-year or two per design, and there are thousands of designs.