The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party back in April became the latest in a long list of groups to conduct a wargame examining a potential U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan. Yet the most important question about such a conflict is the one none of these organizations ever ask: What is the vital national […]
right, there are a few small countries that consider the government on Taipei the legitimate government of all of China (IIRC it’s mainly due to trade deals that would be cut off if they switched recognition to Beijing), but I’ve yet to find a country that recognizes Taiwan as a country – not even the government on Taipei does
According to this article, they recognized PRC as legitimate in 1988, which makes me wonder what they consider themselves.
This is the classic conception: there is the single country that is China, with two regions (the mainland region and Taiwan region) and two governments on each region, each asserting their own rights as the sole and legitimate government of all China. The government on Taiwan lost this competition years ago, and now it has only 13 countries left in the world that recognize their legitimacy, one of which is the Vatican.
However, recent trends in Taiwan is to promote independence on the down-low, to change their mandatory history education to say Taiwan never had anything to do with China, not even historically, that it essentially sprang into existence some one hundred years ago, owes more thanks to Japan for its culture, and whatever cultural elements that are similar to the mainland are just because the mainland had been a large general influence all over Asia.
The DPP doesn’t dare to change the Constitution overtly to make Taiwan an independent country, though they keep treading the red line in their actions, because they know that the day they do so will be the day the CPC is forced into military action. The US also would not approve, as it wants Taiwan to be a manageable thorn in the CPC’s side, not an out-of-control element that will pull the US into a war it isn’t yet ready for.