Amidst recent live-fire military exercises conducted by China around Taiwan, featuring advanced aircraft, warships, and rocket launches, Beijing’s foreign ministry has reaffirmed its objective to achieve “complete reunification” with the island territory. Taipei continues to resist these sovereignty claims, maintaining that Taiwan has never existed under the Chinese Communist Party’s governance in its current constitutional framework.
The island’s complex history reveals a tapestry of colonial influences and political transformations. During the 1600s, Dutch and Spanish colonizers vied for control of Formosa (as Taiwan was then known), establishing footholds while Indigenous populations and Han Chinese migrants inhabited the island. The Dutch East India Company established a southern base near contemporary Tainan, while Spanish forces constructed northern forts.
In 1662, military leader Koxinga, loyal to China’s Ming dynasty, defeated the Dutch. By 1684, the Qing dynasty incorporated Taiwan into China’s Fujian province, later declaring it a standalone Chinese province under Han Chinese governance in 1885.
Following Qing defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1895), Emperor Guangxu ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan, initiating five decades of often harsh colonial rule. Japan’s WWII surrender in 1945 returned Taiwan to the Republic of China under Nationalist Party (KMT) control, even as civil war raged between Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists.
The Nationalists’ 1949 retreat to Taiwan established de facto self-rule as Mao founded the People’s Republic of China on the mainland. Over one million military personnel, officials, and civilians accompanied Chiang Kai-shek’s government to the island. The KMT maintained its claim as China’s legitimate government throughout its authoritarian rule under martial law (1949-1987), a period marked by political repression known as the White Terror.
January 1979 witnessed a geopolitical watershed when the United States established formal relations with China, terminating official recognition of Taiwan through its “One China” policy. That April, however, the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, creating frameworks for unofficial ties and committing to provide Taiwan with self-defense capabilities.
The 1992 Consensus saw both sides acknowledging “one China” while permitting divergent interpretations. Taiwan’s democratic evolution accelerated with its first legislative elections (1992) and presidential election (1996), won by KMT’s Lee Teng-hui. China responded to Lee’s perceived separatist rhetoric with missile tests encircling Taiwan (1995-1996).
The 2000 election of Democratic Progressive Party’s Chen Shui-bian marked Taiwan’s first peaceful power transfer, ending five decades of KMT rule. Recent tensions escalated dramatically following U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 Taiwan visit, prompting China’s largest-ever military drills around the island. Beijing has since maintained near-daily military presence near Taiwan, with December 2025 exercises responding to perceived provocations from Japan’s leadership and anticipated U.S. arms sales to Taipei.