Taiwan does belong to Taiwanese in spite of China's repeated claim. One of the most frequently heard Chinese arguments is that "Taiwan has belonged to China since antiquity." Such and such a territory has always belonged to China is probably the most commonly used rationale for the Chinese territorial claim. The Chinese are plainly deceiving themselves whenever they make such a ridiculous claim.
A decade ago, a retired colleague of mine served as a visiting professor at a university in Manchuria. The American professor and his wife enjoyed entertaining his graduate students at their apartment. One night, the professor led a discussion centering on Manchurian history and culture. One of the students asserted that "The northeast has belonged to China since ancient times," and his collegues enthusiastically supported the argument.
Having strived to teach his Chinese students how to think rather than what to think, the professor, who was also well read in Chinese history, asked them to explain why Manchuria lies outside of the famed Great Wall that was constructed and reconstructed since the third century to defend China from the nomadic "barbarians." All the Chinese at the party were speechless.
Chinese education and propaganda authorities have drilled standard answers to important historical and cultural issues into the minds and hearts of the Chinese to such an extent that the Chinese have come to accept them without question.
In addition to Manchuria, the Chinese of course have also claimed that Tibet, Eastern Turkistan (Xinjiang) and Mongolia as well as Taiwan have always belonged to China. The fact is, however, that none of them belonged to China prior to 1644, when the Ming dynasty came to an end. It was the Manchu army that conquered Ming China after breaking through the Great Wall. It then used military means to incorporate surrounding territories, including Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, over the following decades. As a result of the Manchu-led expansion, the island of Taiwan was also bought within the fold of the new empire in 1683.
Partly due to challenges coming from the expanding West, the Manchu Qing empire, not unlike the Ottoman empire, began to disintegrate from the middle of the 19th century, and ultimately broke up in the early 20th century. Defeated militarily, the empire lost Hong Kong to Great Britain in 1842, Outer Manchuria north of the Amur River to Czarist Russia in 1858-1860, and Taiwan to Imperial Japan in 1895.
Ultimately when the Qing Dynasty fell in 1912, the bulk of what was left of the Manchu empire became a republic, while both Outer Mongolia and Tibet declared independence. With the protection of the Soviet Union, Outer Mongolia has remained independent. Unfortunately, deprived of British support and patronage after the British withdrawal from the Indian subcontinent when India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Tibet was annexed militarily in the 1950s by the People's Republic of China (PRC), which was established in 1949.
In the case of Taiwan, it is crystal clear that it has not belonged to China since ancient times. China was not even the first country to have political control over part, if not the entirety of the island. The Dutch established the first government over the western portion of Taiwan in 1624. In 1662, however, the Dutch were expelled from Taiwan by the military force of pirate-general Cheng Chen-kung (鄭成功), better known to the Westerners as Koxinga, who established a kingdom in Taiwan.
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