donn (08/21/82)
Re: cbosgd.2538 (Mark Horton) and ihuxq.153 (ihuxq!reza) The situation with regard to China and Taiwan is more complicated than you might think. The Kuomintang Party (KMT) under General Chiang Kai-shek con- trolled a fragmented and crumbling government on the mainland after WWII. The KMT had no popular following, and for very good reasons: its stability depended on the support of tyrannical warlords, and KMT soldiers tended to loot, rape and pillage rather than attack the enemy. The Communist Party was also weak following the war, but it had more military smarts than the KMT, it promoted land reform and its soldiers were soldiers rather than marauding hordes or venal gangsters. General Chiang was forced to withdraw to the island of Taiwan, a Japanese colony since the beginning of the cen- tury which was returned to Chinese hands after the war. The Communists of the People's Republic (PRC) were too weak to finish off the KMT of the Republic of China (ROC), so since that time we have been stuck with both of them. The KMT cleaned up its act once it realized that its situation had changed, and put through on Taiwan many of the same reforms that the Com- munists implemented on the mainland. The situation hasn't really changed much up to now. Taiwan is not being shelled from the mainland, I should note, as it is much too far away; rather there are two tiny islands called Quemoy and Matsu which are just off the mainland coast and are under the control of the ROC, and these receive occasional shellings of propaganda leaflets, which the ROC recipro- cates in kind. Both sides are run by authoritarian regimes; the political winds shift much faster and more violently in the PRC than in the ROC but neither regime suffers much dissent. The business about the name of the country has to do with a peculiar interpretation of the extravagant claims of sovereignty made by the PRC and the ROC. Both governments claim all of the territory of both the mainland and the island of Taiwan. In fact the ROC maintains shadow local govern- ments for all the mainland provinces. Neither government officially recog- nizes the existence of the other. Such recognition would establish a "two China" policy, which both sides vehemently inveigh against. Both countries treat the government of Taiwan as a provincial government; Taipei is con- sidered by both to be a provincial capital, not a national one. (I'm not sure but the ROC capital may still officially be the mainland city of Nank- ing.) "Taiwan" is not a name for and is not synonymous with the ROC. At any rate the differences in regard to names basically boil down to just the names of the governments... An ironic footnote: Taiwan was always rather marginally under Chinese administration, despite the claims of the KMT and the Communists; the ori- ginal inhabitants were of ethnic Indonesian origin and Chinese did not set- tle on the island until about 600 years ago, and even then the central government was frequently too weak to control the island until recently. The Japanese occupation is just one example of this. Ethnically the Chinese settlers were from southeast China (I believe Fukien province) and did not speak the Peking language (and still tend not to, although the KMT promotes it). Recently when the ROC authorities let up pressure and acted like they were going to allow free elections, a movement for Taiwanese independence sprang up. This movement was quickly crushed, but if it had by some miracle succeeded then it would have made a "one China, one Taiwan" system legitimate, since there is ample precedent in the world for rebelli- ous colonies becoming independent nations... Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn