Legal status of Taiwan
| Political status of Taiwan | |||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 臺灣問題 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 台湾问题 | ||||||||||
| Literal meaning | Taiwan Issue | ||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Táiwān Wèntí |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Tâi-oân Būn-tê |
The political and legal status of Taiwan (or the Taiwan Issue, Mainland Issue or Taiwan Strait Issue as referred to by the Republic of China) hinges on whether the island of Taiwan and Penghu should become unified with the territories of Mainland China under the rule of the Republic of China (ROC); become unified with the territories of Mainland China under the rule of the People's Republic of China (PRC); or declare independence to become the Republic of Taiwan.
In 1945, the ROC took control of Formosa (Taiwan), the Pescadores (Penghu) and other nearby islands, under the direction of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. In September 1952, Japan officially renounced its right to Taiwan in the Treaty of San Francisco without explicitly stating the sovereignty status of Taiwan, and hence some people regard that the sovereignty of Taiwan is still undetermined.
In addition, the situation can be confusing because of the different parties and the effort by many groups to deal with the controversy through a policy of deliberate ambiguity. The political solution that is accepted by many of the current groups is the perspective of the status quo: to unofficially treat Taiwan as a state and at a minimum, to officially declare no support for the government of this state making a formal declaration of independence. What a formal declaration of independence would consist of is not clear. The status quo is accepted in large part because it does not define the legal or future status of Taiwan, leaving each group to interpret the situation in a way that is politically acceptable to its members. At the same time, a policy of status quo has been criticized as being dangerous precisely because different sides have different interpretations of what the status quo is, leading to the possibility of war through brinkmanship or miscalculation.
Taiwan (excluding Penghu) was first populated by Austronesian people and was colonized by the Dutch, who had arrived in 1623. The Kingdom of Tungning, lasting from 1661 to 1683, was the first Han Chinese government to rule on Taiwan. From 1683, the Qing dynasty ruled Taiwan and the Pescadores as Taiwan Prefecture and in 1875 divided the island into two prefectures. In 1885 the island was made into a separate Chinese province to speed up development in this region. In the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War, Taiwan and Penghu were ceded by the Qing dynasty to Japan in 1895. At end of World War II, Japanese troops in Taiwan surrendered to the Republic of China, which was acting as the representative of the Allied Powers, putting Taiwan under a Chinese government again after 50 years of Japanese rule. The ROC then claim sovereignty on the basis of the Qing dynasty's administration, Cairo Declaration, Potsdam Declaration, and Japanese Instrument of Surrender, but this became contested by pro-independence groups in subsequent years due to different perceptions of the said documents' legality. Upon losing the Chinese civil war in 1949, the ROC government retreated to Taipei, and kept control over a few islands along the coast of mainland China and in the South China Sea. The People's Republic of China (PRC) was established in mainland China on 1 October 1949, claiming to be the successor to the ROC.
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