Considering Taiwan: Past and Present

Most of you remember Formosa being the name often used for the island that lies between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. That name came from Portuguese sailors, who, upon sighting the island in 1542, reportedly exclaimed “Ilha Formosa!” – “Beautiful Island.” But ever since that island came under Chinese sovereignty, the official name has been Taiwan. 

Taiwan was incorporated into China’s Qing Empire in 1684 and remained under Chinese sovereignty until it was ceded to Japan in 1895. At the close of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the Treaty of Shimonoseki contained a provision that ceded Taiwan to Japan “in perpetuity.”*

On October 25, 1945, the Republic of China (ROC) accepted Japan’s surrender in Taipei, Taiwan, and took over the island’s administration and unilaterally declared Taiwan a province of China and termed it “Retrocession Day.” The Allied powers, though, did not formally recognize that unilateral annexation.

One of my faculty colleagues at Seinan Gakuin University from 1968 to the 1990s was born in Taiwan in the 1930s. He was one of the roughly half a million Japanese residents living in Taiwan at the end of WWII. Almost all these Japanese civilians were sent back to Japan, and this process was largely completed by the end of 1946.

Chiang Kai-shek relocated the Republic of China (ROC) government to Taiwan in December 1949, following the Nationalists' defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Mainland China under Mao Zedong (or Tse-tung until 1958) officially became the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, and remains so to this day.

Chiang became the sole head of the ROC in a de facto sense by 1928, but he was not formally inaugurated as the first president of China until May 1948, and then he resigned after eight months. After relocating to Taiwan, though, he was re-elected and served as the ROC president for 25 years, from March 1950 until his death (at age 87) in April 1975.

Chiang’s arrival in 1949 was opposed/resisted by many Taiwanese, who viewed Chiang and the leaders of the Nationalist Party as outsiders imposing mainland authority over the island. And indeed, most Taiwanese citizens were unable to vote directly for their president from the ROC’s relocation to Taiwan until the first direct presidential election in 1996.

Taiwan is now under direct political threat from PRC President Xi Jinping, who insists the island will eventually be “reunited” with the mainland and refuses to renounce the use of force.

At the same time, President Trump’s assertive foreign policy has demonstrated a willingness to use military power for strategic objectives, from operations in Venezuela to repeated statements that the United States “needs” Greenland, leaving open the possibility of force.

With Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi—who has led Japan since October—openly stating that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could justify Japanese military action alongside the United States, the growing normalization of force by major powers risks lowering the threshold for Xi Jinping to pursue reunification of Taiwan by military means.

This piece has been a brief summary of Taiwan’s past from 1684 until 1996, and a bit about the current situation there. But who knows what will happen in the near future! Let’s pray that the uncertain present doesn’t lead to a major conflagration.  

An excursus about Chiang Kai-shek’s Christian faith. In 1927, Chiang married Soong Mei-ling (1898~2003), whose parents were prominent Methodist Christians. Her parents initially opposed the marriage because Chiang was not a Christian. He promised, though, to study Christianity before their wedding, which he did, and then he was baptized as a Methodist Christian in 1930.

Rev. Chow Lien-hwa (1920~2016) was a leading Baptist pastor, theologian, and Bible scholar in Taiwan and a longtime spiritual adviser to the Chiang family. He served for decades as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Taipei and was sometimes known as the Chiang family’s “palace pastor.”

Chow was also deeply influential in theological education, serving as president of the Asia Baptist Graduate Theological Seminary (ABGTS) from 1993 to 2005. I had the privilege of serving for several years as a trustee of that institution, including being the board chair toward the end of his term, which ended when he was 85. I remember having interesting conversations with Rev. Chow during trustee dinners.

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 * Shimonoseki City is located at the westernmost point of Honshu, the main and largest island in the Japanese archipelago. Since 1973, it has been connected by a bridge to Kyushu, the southwesternmost of Japan’s four main islands. It is only a little over 50 miles from Fukuoka City, where I lived from 1968 to 2004.

** The Chinese character for Soong has long been written in English letters as Song, and it is the same character as the family name of C.S. Song, the much-respected Chinese/Taiwanese theologian, whom I wrote about in an October 2019 blog post.