Taiwan

The island now known as Taiwan was first settled by Austronesian-speaking peoples whose ancestors arrived several thousand years before the common era, and linguists generally identify Taiwan as the homeland from which Austronesian languages later spread across maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific. For most of recorded antiquity these indigenous communities lived in dispersed lowland and highland societies, and the island appears only intermittently in Chinese sources during the first millennium. Significant outside contact began in the early modern period, when Han Chinese traders and fishermen from Fujian Province established small settlements on the western plains, and Japanese pirates and traders used coastal harbours as waypoints.

European involvement followed in the seventeenth century. The Dutch East India Company built Fort Zeelandia at present-day Tainan in 1624 and administered much of the southwest, while a smaller Spanish presence held parts of the north between 1626 and 1642. Dutch rule ended in 1662 when Zheng Chenggong, a Ming loyalist commander known in the West as Koxinga, expelled the company and founded a short-lived kingdom on the island. In 1683 the Qing dynasty defeated the Zheng polity and incorporated Taiwan into Fujian Province, later raising it to a separate province in 1885. After the First Sino-Japanese War, the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 ceded Taiwan to the Empire of Japan, which governed the island as a colony for half a century, building extensive railways, ports, schools, and a sugar-based export economy while suppressing both indigenous and Han resistance.

Japanese rule ended with the Second World War. Following Japan's surrender in 1945, the Republic of China, then governed by the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek, took administrative control of Taiwan. Tensions between the incoming mainland authorities and the local population erupted in the February 28 Incident of 1947, which was followed by a long period of martial law. After the Chinese Communist Party's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Republic of China government, along with roughly one to two million soldiers, officials, and civilians, retreated to Taipei and continued to assert itself as the legitimate government of all China. The People's Republic of China, established in Beijing in October 1949, claimed Taiwan as part of its territory, and the resulting cross-strait dispute has remained unresolved.

For much of the Cold War the Republic of China on Taiwan held the Chinese seat at the United Nations and maintained close security ties with the United States, until the seat was transferred to the People's Republic in 1971 and Washington switched diplomatic recognition in 1979. Domestically, rapid industrialisation produced one of the four East Asian "tiger" economies. Martial law was lifted in 1987, opposition parties were legalised, and the first direct presidential election took place in 1996, completing a transition often described as one of Asia's most successful democratisations. Power has since alternated peacefully between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party.

Today the polity governed from Taipei is a multiparty constitutional republic with a semi-presidential system, a directly elected president, and a unicameral Legislative Yuan, operating under the 1947 Constitution as substantially amended since the 1990s. Its formal name remains the Republic of China, while internationally it is widely referred to as Taiwan.