History

Early History

Evidence of human settlement in Taiwan dates back thirty thousand years, although the first inhabitants of Taiwan may have been genetically distinct from any groups currently on the island. About 4,000 years ago, ancestors of current Taiwanese aborigines settled in Taiwan. These aborigines are genetically related to Malay and Polynesians, and linguists classify their language as Austronesian. Han Chinese began settling in the Pescadores in the 1200s, but Taiwan's hostile tribes and its lack of the trade resources valued in that era rendered it unattractive to all but 'occasional adventurers or fishermen engaging in barter' until the sixteenth century.

Records from ancient China indicate that Han Chinese might have known of the existence of the main island of Taiwan since the Three Kingdoms period (3rd century), having assigned offshore islands in the vicinity names like Greater Liuqiu and Lesser Liuqiu, though none of these names have been definitively matched to the main island of Taiwan. It has been claimed but not verified that the Ming Dynasty admiral Cheng Ho (Zheng He) visited Taiwan between 1403 and 1424.

In 1544, a Portuguese ship sighted the main island of Taiwan and dubbed it 'Ilha Formosa', which means 'Beautiful Island.' The Portuguese made no attempt to colonise Taiwan and were content with their trading posts in Kyushu, Japan.

1624-1662: Dutch and Spanish Rule

In 1624, the Dutch East Indies Company, headquartered in Batavia, Java, established the first European-style government ever on the soil of Taiwan, and inaugurated the modern political history of Taiwan. They did not just collect taxes, but also tried to convert the native Formosans, who enjoyed a friendly relationship with the Dutch, and learned the Dutch language. Some aborigines still retain their Dutch Bibles even today.

Today, their legacy in Taiwan is visible in Anping District of Tainan City where the remains of their Castle Zeelandia are preserved, in Tainan City itself where their Fort Provintia is still the main structure of what is now called Red-topped Tower, and finally in Tamsui where Fort Anthonio (part of the Fort San Domingo museum complex) still stands as the best preserved Redoubt (minor fort) of the Dutch East India Company anywhere in the world. The building was later used by the British consulate until the United Kingdom severed ties with the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang) regime and its formal relationship with Taiwan.

It was the Dutch who began importing Chinese workers on a large scale from China's Fujian province as labourers, many of whom became naturalized. The Dutch had their colonial capital at Tayoan City (source of modern name 'Taiwan', and present day Anping). The Dutch military presence concentrated at a fort called Castle Zeelandia. The Dutch colonialists also used the aborigines to hunt the native Formosan Sika deer (Cervus nippon taioanus) that inhabited Taiwan, contributing to the eventual disappearance of a small subspecies in the wild.

The Spaniards occupied the northern part of Taiwan for 17 years before finally being driven away by the Dutch. Their forts in Tamsui and Keelung were destroyed and there are no visible remains of their presence left. A trace of Spanish influence remains in the name of the Cape of San Diego (the easternmost part of Taiwan), which derives from 'Santiago'.

The French occupied Keelung and the group of islands in the Formosa Strait known as the Pescadores from October 1884 to July 1885. Admiral Amédée Courbet was instated as military governor and died and was buried there having secured peace with China.

1662-1895: Imperial Chinese Rule

Naval and troop forces of Southern Fujian defeated the Dutch in 1662, subsequently expelling the Dutch government and military from the island. They were led by Lord Koxinga, son of a Southern Fujian pirate-merchant and a Japanese samurai's daughter. Following the fall of the Ming dynasty, Koxinga retreated to Taiwan as a self-styled Ming loyalist and established the Kingdom of Tungning (1662-1683). Koxinga established his capital at Tainan and he and his heirs, Zheng Jing (who ruled from 1662-82 and his son Zheng Keshuang, who served less than a year, continued to launch raids on the south-east coast of mainland China well into the Qing dynasty in an attempt to recover the mainland. Koxinga's attempt to solicit support from the Japanese Shogun was unsuccessful.

In 1683, following the defeat of Koxinga's grandson by an armada led by Admiral Shi Lang of Southern Fujian, the Qing Dynasty formally annexed Taiwan, placing it under the jurisdiction of Fujian province. Cheng's followers were expatriated to the farthest reaches of the Qing Empire. The Qing Dynasty government wrestled with its Taiwan policy to reduce piracy and vagrancy in the area, which led to a series of edicts to manage migration and respect for aboriginal land rights. Migrants mostly of Southern Fujian continued to enter Taiwan as renters of the large plots of aboriginal lands under contracts that usually involved marriage, while the border between taxpaying lands and 'savage' lands shifted eastward, with some aborigines 'Sinicizing' while others retreated into the mountains. The bulk of Taiwan's population today claim descent from these migrants. During this time, there were a number of conflicts involving Chinese from different regions of Southern Fujian, and between Southern Fujian Chinese and aborigines.

In 1887, the Qing government upgraded Taiwan's status from that of being a prefecture of Fujian to one of province itself, the twentieth in the country, with its capital at Taipei. The move was accompanied by a modernization drive that included the building of the first railroad and the beginning of a postal service in Taiwan.

1895-1945: Japanese Rule

Japan had sought to claim sovereignty over Taiwan (known as Takasago Koku, or 'country of High Sand,' a complimentary term in Japanese) since 1592, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi undertook a policy of expansion and extending Japanese influence overseas. Korea, to the west, was invaded, but attempts to invade Taiwan turned out to be unsuccessful due mainly to endemic and epidemic diseases that had no cure at that time such as cholera and malaria, and fierce resistance by aborigines on the island. In 1609, the Tokugawa Shogunate sent Haruno Arima on an exploratory mission of the island. In 1616, Murayama Toan led an unsuccessful invasion of the island.

In 1871, an Okinawan vessel shipwrecked on the southern tip of Taiwan and the crew of fifty-four were beheaded by the Paiwan aborigines. When Japan sought compensation from Qing China, the court rejected the demand on the ground that the wild and unsubjugated aboriginals of Taiwan were outside its jurisdiction. This open renunciation of sovereignty led to Japan's invasion of Taiwan. In 1874, an expeditionary force of three thousand troops was sent to the island. There were about thirty Taiwanese and 543 Japanese casualties (12 in battle and 531 by endemic diseases).

Following its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), Qing China ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores to Japan in perpetuity in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, on terms dictated by Japan. Inhabitants wishing to remain Chinese subjects were given a two-year grace period to sell their property and return to China.

On May 25, 1895, a group of pro-Qing high officials proclaimed the Republic of Formosa to resist impending Japanese rule. Japanese forces entered the capital at Tainan and quelled this resistance on October 21, 1895. This period of Japanese occupation was marked by suppression of local resistance movements by the Japanese, and the subjugation of the local populace into manual labour in various factories and plantations set up by the occupying force to produce exports to the Japanese mainland.

Japan spent the first 10 years to eradicate the endemic diseases from Taiwan, setting up a public hospital for each cho, an Japanese administrative unit between the town and village. It also poured money and first-class expert labour into the island. The first plantation scale sugar industry was established on Taiwan, as the Japanese also introduced the 'Horaimai' into Taiwan, which was Japanese rice seeds planted in Taiwan's soil. Taiwan quickly became the jewel of the Yamato crown, yielding profits for the Japanese. Taiwan supplied the empire with rice, sugar, bananas, pineapples, and high-class timber, hinoki, which was used by all the major Buddhist temples (otera) and Shinto shrines (jinja) in Japan.

Around 1935, the Japanese began an island-wide assimilation project to integrate the island into the Japanese Empire. Koo Hsien-jung, who guided the Japanese soldiers into the Taipei city in 1895, was appointed by the emperor as the first Taiwanese member of the Japanese House of Nobles, thus becoming a Japanese noble. Three other Taiwanese were subsequently appointed.

1945: Republic of China

With Japan's defeat in the war, Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender on August 15, 1945. On October 25, 1945, Republic of China troops representing the Allied Command accepted the formal surrender of Japanese military forces in Taihoku.

The ROC administration, led by Chiang Kai-shek, announced October 25, 1945, as 'Taiwan Restoration Day'. At first, they were greeted as liberators by the people of Taiwan. However, the ROC military administration on Taiwan under Chen Yi was generally unstable and corrupt; it seized property and set up government monopolies of many industries. These problems, compounded with hyperinflation, unrest due to the Chinese Civil War, and distrust due to political, cultural and linguistic differences between the Taiwanese and the Mainland Chinese, quickly led to the loss of popular support for the new administration. This culminated in a series of severe clashes between the ROC administration and Taiwanese.

In 1949, on losing the Chinese Civil War to the CPC (Communist Party of China), the Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang or KMT), led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated from Mainland China and moved the ROC government to Taipei, Taiwan's largest city, while continuing to claim sovereignty over all of China and Greater Mongolia. On the mainland, the Communists established the People's Republic of China (PRC), claiming to be the sole representative of China including Taiwan and portraying the ROC government on Taiwan as an illegitimate entity. Some 1.3 million refugees from Mainland China, consisting mainly of soldiers, KMT party members, and most importantly the intellectual and business elites from the mainland, arrived in Taiwan around that time. In addition, as part of its retreat to Taiwan, the KMT brought with them the entire gold reserve and foreign currency reserve of mainland China. This unprecedented influx of human and monetary capital laid the foundation for Taiwan's later dramatic economic development. From this period on, Taiwan was governed by a party-state dictatorship, with the KMT as the ruling party. Military rule continued and little to no distinction was made between the government and the party, with public property, government property, and party property being interchangeable. Government workers and party members were indistinguishable, with government workers, such as teachers, required to become KMT members, and party workers paid salaries and promised retirement benefits along the lines of government employees. In addition all other parties were outlawed, and political opponents were persecuted, incarcerated and executed.

Taiwan remained under martial law and one-party rule, under the name of the 'Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion', from 1948 to 1987, when Presidents Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui gradually liberalised and democratised the system. With the advent of democratisation, the issue of the political status of Taiwan has resurfaced as a controversial issue (previously, discussion of anything other than unification under the ROC was taboo).

During the 1960s and 1970s, the ROC began to develop into a prosperous, industrialised developed country with a strong and dynamic economy, becoming one of the East Asian Tigers while maintaining the authoritarian, single-party government. Because of the Cold War, most Western nations and the United Nations regarded the ROC as the sole legitimate government of China (while being merely the de-facto government of Taiwan) until the 1970s, when most nations began switching recognition to the PRC.

1980 to Present Day: Modern Taiwan

Chiang Kai-shek's eventual successor, his son Chiang Ching-kuo, began to liberalise Taiwan's political system. In 1984, the younger Chiang selected Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese technocrat, to be his vice president. In 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party was formed illegally and inaugurated as the first opposition party in Taiwan to counter the KMT. A year later, Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law.

After the 1988 death of Chiang Ching-Kuo, his successor President Lee Teng-hui continued to hand more government authority over to the native Taiwanese and democratise the government. Under Lee, Taiwan underwent a process of localisation in which local culture and history was promoted over a pan-China viewpoint. Lee's reforms included printing banknotes from the Central Bank rather than the Provincial Bank of Taiwan, and disbanding the Taiwan Provincial Government. Under Lee, the original members of the Legislative Yuan and National Assembly, elected in 1947 to represent mainland constituencies, were forced to resign in 1991. Restrictions on the use of Taiwanese languages in the broadcast media and in schools were lifted as well.

The Republic of China transitioned into a democracy over the 1990's. In 2000, Chen Shui-bian, a Hakka Taiwanese, was elected as President and is now serving his second and last term. A divide in Taiwanese politics has emerged between the Pan-Blue Coalition of parties led by the Kuomintang, favouring eventual Chinese unification, and the Pan-Green Coalition of parties led by the Democratic Progressive Party, favouring eventual Taiwanese independence.