Taiwan's history: five governments in four centuries and a dispute over the last

Who lived on Taiwan before the Dutch arrived

The island was inhabited long before any outside state recorded it. Britannica puts the ancestors of the Indigenous peoples on Taiwan more than 10,000 years ago, and an agricultural culture that appeared around 3000 BC is taken by the Wikipedia survey of the island's history to mark the arrival of the ancestors of the peoples living there now. Their languages belong to the Austronesian family, and most historical linguists treat Taiwan as the homeland of that family: all of its primary branches except Malayo-Polynesian are found only on the island.

Chinese court records mention Taiwan from the 3rd century BC. Britannica dates the first recorded expedition to 239 AD, when an emperor sent a 10,000-man mission to explore it, and a second to 605. The Penghu Islands in the strait came under Chinese control during the Yuan dynasty, and there were Chinese settlements on Taiwan itself before the 12th century, alongside Chinese and Japanese pirates who used the coast as a base. No common government or body of law joined any of them.

The European name came from a ship that did not stop. In 1517 a Portuguese vessel passing through the strait logged the words "Ilha Formosa", beautiful island, and Formosa became the usual Western name for Taiwan.

How a company and a Ming loyalist ruled

The Dutch East India Company arrived by way of a refusal. Dutch forces landed on Penghu in 1622; a Chinese official offered them a trading post on Taiwan in exchange for leaving, and in 1624 the company set up a base in the south-west, at Zeelandia in present-day Anping, Tainan. Spanish forces took Keelung in the north in 1626. In 1642 the Dutch expelled the Spanish, put down a rebellion by Chinese settlers and, with help from Indigenous allies, brought the whole island under the company.

The company dug wells, surveyed land, brought in oxen and new farm tools, and employed Chinese labourers on rice and sugar plantations. Its representatives developed a written form for Indigenous languages and converted many speakers to Christianity. Chinese settlers came at the company's encouragement but remained fewer than the Indigenous population for the whole Dutch period.

The end came from the mainland's own civil war. When the Manchu took Beijing in 1644 and founded the Qing dynasty, Zheng Chenggong, the son of a pirate commander and a Japanese mother, kept fighting for the fallen Ming from the Fujian coast. By 1661 that campaign had failed and he turned to Taiwan. His forces besieged Zeelandia, the Dutch surrendered early in 1662 and were evacuated, and the Dutch called the man who expelled them Koxinga. He set up a Ming-style government, encouraged Chinese migration and trade, and died in June 1662. His son and grandsons held the island as the Kingdom of Tungning until court intrigue after his son's death opened the way for a Qing invasion, which took the island in 1683.

What two centuries of Qing rule changed

For most of the next two hundred years Taiwan was a prefecture of Fujian province, and Britannica describes the officials sent to it as men who did not value the posting. Britannica characterises the period by frequent rebellions followed by severe punishment; the Zhu Yigui uprising of 1721 and the Lin Shuangwen rebellion of 1786 were two of them.

The population changed more than the administration did. Over two centuries of Qing rule the number of people on the island grew by more than two million and became majority Han, largely through migration that the court had prohibited and through settlement on Indigenous land. Hoklo settlers from southern Fujian came in larger numbers than the Hakka from Guangdong and Fujian, and pushed the Hakka towards the interior. Qing territory spread until it covered the whole western plain and the north-east, and in the last decades of the dynasty settlement was actively encouraged.

Outside pressure turned a frontier into a province. After French forces blockaded the ports during the Sino-French War of 1883 to 1885 and occupied Keelung, the court sent Liu Mingchuan to strengthen the island. The sources disagree by two years on the date it became a province in its own right: the Republic of China's Foreign Ministry and the People's Republic's 2022 white paper both give 1885, Britannica gives two years after Liu's appointment. Liu built Taiwan's first railway and improved its roads and harbours before he was recalled.

How Japan ran its first colony

China lost the war with Japan of 1894 and 1895, and under the Treaty of Shimonoseki the Qing ceded Taiwan and Penghu to Japan on 17 April 1895. Local leaders declared a Republic of Taiwan, which lasted about ten days. Armed resistance went on for years: the Wikipedia account of the colonial period counts 6,000 to 14,000 killed in the fighting of 1895 and some 12,000 people classed as bandit rebels killed between 1898 and 1902.

What the colonial government built

Taiwan was Japan's first colony, and Tokyo ran it as a model. Rice production rose with new seeds and methods, and rice and sugar went to Japan. The island had about 50 kilometres of railway when Japan took it and some 500 within a decade, and electrification followed, bringing textile and chemical plants. By 1938 about 309,000 Japanese lived on the island.

What the colonial government suppressed

The law was enforced with harsh punishment. On 27 October 1930 Seediq warriors led by Mona Rudao attacked police stations and the public school at Musha, angered by their treatment as labourers in camphor extraction; it was the last large Indigenous rising of the colonial era. From 1937, as Japan went to full-scale war with China, the government pursued the Kōminka movement to make Taiwanese society fully Japanese, and Taiwanese were made to learn Japanese at the expense of their own languages. Many served in the Japanese military in the war that followed, and Britannica records more than 30,000 of them killed in combat.

What happened when the Republic of China arrived

The Republic of China had been founded on the mainland in 1912, while Taiwan was a Japanese colony. The Cairo Declaration of December 1943 said Taiwan and Penghu should be restored to it, and on 25 October 1945 the Japanese governor-general handed the administration to Chen Yi, the Nationalist government's chief executive for the island. The date is marked in Taiwan as Retrocession Day. The government declared the island a province the next day, a declaration the wartime Allies did not formally recognise.

Chen Yi's administration took over the Japanese state monopolies, staffed its senior posts mostly with mainlanders and pressed the Taiwanese to learn Mandarin. On 28 February 1947 a confrontation between government agents and a woman selling contraband cigarettes in Taipei, in which a bystander was shot dead, set off widespread unrest in which mainlanders were attacked. Troops sent from the mainland in March suppressed it. Britannica says thousands were killed, including much of the island's emerging local leadership; the Wikipedia account says tens of thousands were killed or arrested. The incident stayed a forbidden subject for decades. A foundation set up to compensate victims approved 2,264 cases between 1995 and 2006.

The government's defeat in the civil war then brought it to the island. Chiang Kai-shek moved the national government to Taipei in 1949, and the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in Beijing on 1 October 1949. The number of people who came with the government is itself recorded three ways: the Foreign Ministry's handbook gives about 1.2 million, Britannica some 1.5 million and the Wikipedia survey two million. On 25 October 1949 Nationalist forces defeated communist troops on the north-west coast of Kinmen at the Battle of Kuningtou.

How a provincial island became the whole republic

The Republic of China now governed Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu and claimed the rest of China. The constitution promulgated on 1 January 1947 had been overridden in 1948 by Temporary Provisions for the Period of Communist Rebellion, which widened the president's powers and lifted the two-term limit, and martial law was declared on Taiwan in May 1949. The Foreign Ministry's own timeline dates the start of the White Terror, the period of political persecution under those measures, to 1948 in one entry and 1949 in another, and its end to 1991.

The island's legal position was left open by the peace that ended the war. Under the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 Japan renounced its claims to Taiwan and Penghu without naming a recipient, and the Treaty of Taipei that the Republic of China signed with Japan on 28 April 1952 declared all earlier treaties between China and Japan void. The two governments across the strait read that record in opposite ways. The People's Republic's white paper of August 2022 holds that China recovered Taiwan in law and in fact in October 1945 and that the People's Republic succeeded to that sovereignty in 1949. The Foreign Ministry in Taipei holds that the San Francisco treaty superseded the wartime declarations, that it did not hand Taiwan to the People's Republic, and that the People's Republic has never ruled the island. This catalogue records both positions and takes neither.

The Korean War, which began in June 1950, brought the United States Seventh Fleet into the strait, and a mutual defence treaty followed in 1954. Artillery duels over Kinmen began on 23 August 1958 and lasted more than 40 days. Until 1971 the Republic of China held China's seat at the United Nations. On 25 October 1971 the General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, which recognised the representatives of the People's Republic as the only legitimate representatives of China there, and the Republic of China withdrew. In December 1978 the United States announced that it would end diplomatic relations with Taipei, and the Taiwan Relations Act that Congress passed in 1979 kept relations on an unofficial footing.

How martial law ended and elections began

Elections began at the local level and reached the top over twenty years. The arrest of democracy campaigners after a demonstration in Kaohsiung in 1979 led, in the Foreign Ministry's account, to the founding of the Democratic Progressive Party in 1986, when opposition parties were still illegal. Chiang Ching-kuo, president since 1978, did not dissolve it. On 15 July 1987 martial law on the main island ended after 38 years, together with the bans on new parties and newspapers, and residents were allowed to visit the mainland for the first time since 1949.

Lee Teng-hui, a Taiwanese whom Chiang had made his vice-president, succeeded him on his death in January 1988. The National Assembly abolished the Temporary Provisions on 22 April 1991 and the Period of Communist Rebellion ended on 1 May. Legislators elected on the mainland in 1947 and 1948, who had held their seats without re-election since, retired, and the whole legislature and National Assembly were elected on Taiwan in 1991 and 1992. The constitution was revised seven times between 1991 and 2005, and from 1991 the government accepted that its jurisdiction covered only the territory it controlled.

The first direct presidential election was held in 1996, and Lee won it with 54% of the vote. The People's Liberation Army had conducted missile tests in the strait in 1995 and conducted more during the campaign, and the United States sent warships. In 2000 the Kuomintang lost the presidency after more than fifty years, the first transfer of executive power between parties on Taiwan. Power changed hands again in 2008 and 2016. A Transitional Justice Commission was inaugurated on 31 May 2018 and the criminal records of victims of political persecution in the White Terror were expunged by its decision.