When Beijing says “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China” and calls this “an indisputable legal and historical fact,” it promotes a claim that has absolutely no basis in international law or history.
But by aggressively stating that claim time and again over the years, it has made many in the world believe that fiction, especially when the dominant Western media outlets are reluctant to challenge the Chinese narrative.
Indeed, some international publications now use the phrase “reunify” without quotation marks while referring to Beijing’s Taiwan goal.
The truth is that Taiwan, for most of its history, had no relationship with China and has remained fully outside Chinese control for the last 129 years since 1895 when, following defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, China’s Manchu-run Qing government signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ceded Taiwan to Japan.
In international law, a territorial claim must be based on lasting and peaceful exercise of sovereignty over the entire territory concerned.
But Taiwan has never been an integral part of China in history. And the only outside power that secured control over all of Taiwan was Japan.
While Taiwan remained under Japanese colonial rule until 1945, Japan officially renounced its sovereignty over it only in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, but without the transferee being identified.
The communist-led People’s Republic of China, having exercised no territorial sovereignty over Taiwan, lacks the legal standing to lay claim to the island democracy.
In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921, long regarded Taiwan as a foreign territory and articulated for the first time its goal of “liberating” the island just months before it seized power in Beijing in 1949.
Beijing, likewise, dubiously claims that the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands have always been part of China. There is unquestionably no concrete evidence that China ever had effective control over those islands.
In fact, China began claiming the Senkakus only after a United Nations agency’s report in 1969 referred to the possible existence of oil reserves in the East China Sea.
It was not until the early 1970s that Chinese documents began applying the name “Diaoyu” (釣魚) to the Senkakus and claiming they were part of China.
Sinicizing the names of the territories it claims is a standard tactic of the CCP, which it is also applying to the Himalayan borderlands of India, Bhutan and Nepal.
This tactic is designed to lend credence to its assertion that the areas it covets have always been part of China.
For example, in three separate batches between 2017 and 2023, Beijing renamed a number of places in India’s sprawling Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is almost three times larger than Taiwan.
When India protested, Beijing doubled down, contending that Arunachal Pradesh is its own “territory” and Sinicizing names of places there is “China’s sovereign right.”
Such aggressive tactics, including claiming that a region controlled by another country has been part of China since ancient times, help over time to gain wide international recognition that the territory concerned is disputed.
This then encourages China to disturb the territorial status quo through stealthy maneuvers or encroachments.
China’s nearly four-year-long Himalayan military standoff with India has its origins in the April 2020 furtive Chinese encroachments on key borderlands in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh, which is located 2,000 kilometers from Arunachal Pradesh.
India, challenging Chinese power and capability, has more than matched China’s Himalayan military deployments and made clear that the standoff would continue until Beijing agrees to restore status quo ante.
More broadly, China, under President Xi Jinping (習近平), has been pushing expansive territorial claims in Asia on the basis of an ingenious principle — “what is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable.”
It is telling that these territorial claims, from the East and South China Seas to the Taiwan Strait and the Himalayas, are based not on international law but on revisionist history. China’s weak legal case was highlighted by the 2016 Hague ruling, when an international arbitral tribunal invalidated Chinese claims in the South China Sea.
Yet, such is Beijing’s unmitigated scorn for international law that, in defiance of the Hague ruling, it has accelerated its expansionism in the South China Sea, turning its seven human-made islands into forward military bases and gradually securing greater and greater control of this critical corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
China’s “nine-dash line” encompassing much of the South China Sea exemplifies how it uses alleged history to pursue aggressive expansionism.
But Beijing’s manipulation of history extends beyond advancing extravagant territorial claims.
It also uses history to instill among the Chinese an abiding sense of grievance over the 110 years of national humiliation that China suffered up to the communist takeover in Beijing.
While Beijing misses no opportunity to shame Japan with the history card, its selective historical memory is highlighted by Chinese school textbooks, which black out the Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet in the early 1950s and the wars it unleashed against India (1962) and Vietnam (1979).
In fact, as the mythical Middle Kingdom, China claims to be the mother of all civilizations, weaving legend with history to claim a dual historical entitlement — to recover “lost” lands and become a world power second to none. This helps to rationalize its muscular foreign policy, which seeks to make real the legend that drives the CCP’s revisionist history — China’s centrality in the world.
In the name of “reunification,” Xi seems determined to annex Taiwan, just as Mao Zedong (毛澤東) occupied the then-autonomous and resource-rich Tibet.
Chinese aggression against Taiwan would constitute the biggest threat to world peace in a generation.
It has thus become imperative to contest Beijing’s strange fairy tale that Taiwan was part of China since time immemorial.
Taiwan has all the attributes of a robust independent state, and most Taiwanese want it to stay that way.
After all, why would the Taiwanese be willing to give up their freedoms and be absorbed by the world’s largest autocracy, which is also a technology-driven Orwellian surveillance state?
People in Taiwan, in fact, have developed an identity that is distinct from that of Chinese citizens.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
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