HISTORY OF CHINA-TAIWAN RELATIONS

Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China (ROC), is an island off the southern coast of China that has been governed independently from mainland China since 1949. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) views the island as a province, while in Taiwan—a territory with its own democratically elected government that is home to twenty-three million people—political leaders have differing views on the island’s status and relations with the mainland.

Despite the sovereignty dispute, the economic ties between the island and the mainland have thrived in recent years. Yet political frictions still shadow the relationship, and China and Taiwan have experienced a renewal in tensions under new leadership.

The ROC is prohibited from using its official name internationally under pressure from the PRC and uses "Chinese Taipei" in other organizations. The ROC sees its use as a denial of the ROC's status as a separate sovereign state, diminishing it under "China", which implicitly is the PRC. Various instances of the use of the term by international organizations or news media have been met with protests from the Taiwanese government officials and citizens.

To clarify the present and the future, it is important to understand the trajectory of cross-Strait relations in the recent past. From the early 1990s until 2008, a corrosive political dynamic came to dominate political relations between Taiwan and China, dashing the faint hopes in the early 1990s of a political reconciliation after decades of hostility. All this happened despite their complementary economic relations.

China has largely prevented Taiwan from membership in international organizations. But Taiwan has led a decades-long campaign for inclusion in the WHO, arguing that its highly-regarded healthcare system earns it a place in the world’s public health agency.

With all this said, the China-Taiwan relationship continues to be a constant struggle. The rising tension across the Taiwan Strait might result in Chinese President Xi Jinping acting recklessly toward Taiwan in the next few years, drawing the United States into a conflict. In any case, if Taiwan promptly escalates to bring war China, no one knows quite what the U.S. would do, including the U.S. itself. A 1979 American law suggests that the United States is committed to Taiwan’s defense, but the law is ambiguous about just how committed.

References: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/opinion/china-taiwan-war.html