The Republic of China Yearbook 2009

CHAPTER 3 History

Birth of the Republic of China

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Ching dynasty ruled territories stretching from the Pacific in the east to Central Asia in the west, from Siberia in the north to the Himalayas in the south. Yet, it was weakened after decades of internal strife and challenges by foreign powers. During this period, a number of societies dedicated to overthrowing the Ching leadership were formed, prominent among which was the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng Hui) set up in 1905 by Sun Yat-sen and others during his exile in Japan.

After 10 failed attempts, on October 10, 1911, allies of the Revolutionary Alliance achieved a revolt in Wuchang, Hubei Province. By January 1, 1912, the Revolutionary Alliance groups exercised control over 16 of the then existing 22 provinces, and on that date, they established a provisional government of the Republic of China in Nanjing, with Sun Yat-sen as its president. Eventually, the Republic incorporated all of the territories held by the Ching dynasty.

The Xuan Tong Emperor (whose personal name was Pu Yi) abdicated on February 12, 1912. And Sun, in return for an alliance with Yuan Shi-kai, commander of Ching forces in the northeast, relinquished the presidency in favor of Yuan.

Uncertain Beginnings

Under the Ching dynasty, Yuan had commanded the elite Beiyang Army with its Western-trained officers. Soon after his inauguration as president on October 10, 1913, he sought to disband the Revolutionary Alliance, dissolved the National Assembly and assumed dictatorial power. Unpersuaded by the advice of foreign governments and opposition by the Revolutionary Alliance, Yuan declared himself emperor on December 12, 1915.

Revolts in various locales fragmented the young nation. The newly formed National Protection Army opposed Yuan’s return to monarchy and demanded that he step down. During the spring and early summer of 1916, one after another, provinces and districts declared their independence. Amid such intense opposition, Yuan fell gravely ill and died on June 6, 1916. General Li Yuan-hong, vice president of the Republic that Yuan Shi-kai had sought to dismantle, succeeded him, while General Duan Qi-rui retained his post as premier.

In February 1917 when the American government severed diplomatic relations with Germany, it pressed the ROC to do the same. President Li strongly opposed the move, but Premier Duan and his supporters pushed through a declaration of war on Germany in August. Although the ROC sent over 100,000 men to France during World War I, it reaped little benefit from participation in the war. It was assured a seat at the Versailles Peace Conference, but the ROC delegation was stunned to discover that Germany’s holdings in China would not be returned to the Chinese people. Rather, the Western powers had acceded to a Japanese claim to the German concession in Shandong Province as a reward for Japan’s participation in the war.

On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing protested this decision. A riot ensued and many students were arrested. Protests spread to other major cities in China, merchants closed their shops, banks suspended business, and workers went on strike. Finally, the government was forced to release arrested students and discharge some of the Chinese officials who had collaborated with Japan. Ultimately, the government refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles.

An intellectual revolution sparked by the events of May 4, 1919, referred to as the May Fourth Movement, gained momentum. The movement was led by a new generation of intellectuals who critically scrutinized nearly all aspects of Chinese culture and traditional ethics. This new intelligentsia emerged in China after the traditional civil service examination system was suspended in 1905. New educational reforms enabled thousands of young people to study science, engineering, medicine, law, economics, education and military science in Japan, Europe and the United States. These “overseas students” returned with the goal of modernizing China and, through their writings and lectures, exercised a powerful influence on the next generation of students.

Guided by concepts of individual liberty and equality, a scientific spirit of inquiry, and a pragmatic approach to the nation’s problems, the new intellectuals sought a more profound reform of China’s institutions than what had been accomplished by the Self-strengthening Movement of the late Ching period or the republican revolution. China’s most prestigious institution of higher education, Peking University, became a center for scholarly research and inspired educators all over China through the efforts of its chancellor, Cai Yuan-pei. A proposal by Professor Hu Shi to write literature in the vernacular rather than classical language also won quick acceptance.

Important economic and social changes occurred during the first years of the Republic. With the outbreak of World War I, competition from foreign industries abated, and state-run light industries experienced rapid growth. By 1918, the industrial sector employed 1.8 million workers. A large portion of capital flowed from the agricultural sector to new industries in China’s coastal provinces, and modern Chinese banks with growing capital resources were able to meet expanding financial needs.

In the 1920s, the United States, Great Britain and Japan seemed to be moving toward a new postwar relationship with China. At the Washington Conference (1921-1922), the major powers agreed to respect China’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial and administrative integrity; to give it the opportunity to develop a stable government; to uphold the principle of equal opportunity in China for the commercial and industrial activities of all nations; and to refrain from taking advantage of conditions in China to seek exclusive privileges. The powers also agreed to China’s tariff autonomy and abolition of extraterritoriality treaties dating as far back as 1689.

The Warlord Era

Despite general noninterference in affairs of state by foreign powers, China was fractured by rival military regimes to the extent that no one authority was able to subordinate all rivals and create a unified and centralized political structure. Having witnessed the collapse of the fledgling central government he had worked so hard to create, Sun Yatsen turned south to his home province of Guangdong, where he established a military government in August 1917.

In 1919, Sun reorganized his party into the present-day Kuomintang (KMT), and in 1921, he assumed the presidency of the newly formed southern government in Guangdong. When war between the northern warlords erupted the following year, Sun issued a manifesto urging the unification of China by peaceful means. Finally, in 1924, Sun and his southern government moved to set up a military academy that would train an officer corps loyal to the KMT and dedicated to the unification of China. Sun appointed Chiang Kai-shek as commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy.

On November 10 of that year, Sun called for a National People’s Convention to bring China’s regional leaders to the conference table. Two weeks later, Duan Qi-rui became the provisional chief executive of the Beijing-based government. Sun, as head of the southern government, traveled north to hold talks with Duan. However, while in Beijing, Sun succumbed to liver cancer and died on March 12, 1925, at the age of 59.

Sun’s untimely demise left the southern government in the hands of a steering committee. This 16-member committee established a national government in July 1925, and 11 months later appointed Chiang Kai-shek commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army. In this capacity, Chiang launched a military expedition northward to subdue feuding warlords in central and northern China and unify their territories under a single government. This Northern Expedition, as it is known to history, lasted three years.

On March 22, 1927, troops of the National Revolutionary Army entered Shanghai and, two days later, captured Nanjing, where a new national government was formally declared on April 18, 1927. Soon thereafter, the ongoing Northern Expedition brought the remaining provinces into the fold.

Second Sino-Japanese War, Civil War, Relocation to Taiwan

The impending unification of the northeastern region of Manchuria with the rest of China threatened Japan’s hegemony and economic privileges there and in other regions of China. Japan therefore created a puppet state known as Manchukuo in 1932, installing Pu Yi as emperor.

Meanwhile, the ROC government’s legitimacy was also challenged by communist rebels. They fomented uprisings in a number of cities, and established a breakaway “liberated zone” ruled by a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “soviet” in Jiangxi Province in November 1931. While the KMT-led ROC government focused on “unity before resistance against foreign aggression,” the CCP opted for a “united front” strategy against Japan.

On July 7, 1937, a minor clash between Japanese and Chinese troops near Beijing finally led China into war against Japan—the War of Resistance Against Japan (or Second Sino-Japanese War), which became a front in World War II. During the early period of the war, Japan won successive victories. The ROC’s capital Nanjing fell in December 1937, and Japanese forces occupying the city killed some 300,000 people in seven weeks of unrelenting carnage known as the Rape of Nanjing. A month earlier, in response to fighting at Shanghai, the government had announced that it would immediately withdraw from Nanjing and move up the Yangtze River to Chongqing.

Once relocated, the government worked to rebuild its scattered armies and supply its forces with weapons purchased from abroad. When war broke out in Europe, shipments decreased dramatically. By then, however, the United States had sold the ROC 100 fighter planes, and on July 23, 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the shipment of large quantities of arms and equipment and dispatched a military advisory mission to China.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Shortly afterward, the United States and Britain declared war on Japan and developed close ties with the ROC as a member of the Allied Forces.

In late November of 1943, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek met with U.S. President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Cairo to discuss the postwar disposition of Japanese territories. On December 1, their governments released a joint communiqué, or position paper, popularly known as the Cairo Declaration. In part, the document reads, “The Three Great Allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan. They covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion. It is their purpose that … all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa [Taiwan], and the Pescadores [Penghu Islands], shall be restored to the Republic of China.”

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. forces dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, a second one was dropped on Nagasaki. The next day, Japan notified the Allies via neutral Switzerland of its decision to surrender.

On August 14, Japan announced its formal surrender in accordance with the terms of the Potsdam Proclamation of July 1945, which stated that “the terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out.” The Japanese government also accepted inclusion of this provision in the instrument of surrender concluded on September 3, 1945, between Japan and the Allies. The Japanese forces in mainland China surrendered to the ROC government on September 9, 1945 in Nanjing.

On the Chinese Mainland

Even before Japan’s surrender was announced, CCP rebel troops had moved into Japanese-held territory and seized Japanese arms. The KMT-led government held peace talks with the CCP, culminating in an agreement on October 10, 1945. The agreement called for the convening of a multiparty Political Consultative Council to plan a liberal, democratic postwar government and to draft a constitution for submission to a national assembly. Conciliation efforts ultimately came to naught, however, and fighting between government and communist troops resumed and became increasingly fierce, with communist Russia supplying the CCP via Manchuria.

Nevertheless, a new constitution was promulgated on January 1, 1947. Within a year, members of the National Assembly, the Legislature (Legislative Yuan) and the Control Yuan had been elected. And in April 1948, the National Assembly elected Chiang Kai-shek to the presidency of the Republic of China.

However, setbacks in the war against communist rebels, combined with economic problems stemming from war debts, runaway inflation and widespread social chaos undermined the viability of the ROC as a nation.

In early 1949, Chiang Kai-shek began deploying troops to Taiwan. After communist forces crossed the Yangtze River, ROC government personnel began relocating to Taiwan. In all, some 1.3 million civilians, soldiers and government personnel relocated to the island.

History of Taiwan

The Original Taiwanese

Taiwan’s first inhabitants left no written records of their origins. Anthropological evidence suggests that Taiwan’s indigenous people are descended from proto-Malayans. Their languages belong to the Austronesian linguistic family.

The majority of the prehistoric artifacts unearthed (flat axes, red unpolished pottery, decorated bronze implements, megalithic structures and glass beads) from over 500 sites indicate an Indonesian connection. Other items (painted red pottery, red polished pottery, chipped stone knives, black pottery, pottery tripods, stone halberds and bone arrowheads), however, would suggest that Taiwan’s earliest settlers might have come from the Chinese mainland.

European Trading Bases in Taiwan (1624-1662)

It is said that when Portuguese navigators on their way to Japan passed by Taiwan in 1542, they were struck by the beauty of its green mountains, therefore dubbing it “Ilha Formosa,” meaning “beautiful isle.” It was under this name that Taiwan was introduced to the Western world.

The next Europeans to come to Taiwan were from the Netherlands via bases in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), and from Spain via colonial holdings in the Philippines. In 1622, the Dutch East India Company established a base on the Penghu Islands (Pescadores), but was promptly driven away by Ming-dynasty Chinese forces. It then set up a base in Taiwan in the vicinity of today’s Tainan City in 1624, from which it extended its hegemony, but not absolute control, over the island’s southwestern coast.

Meanwhile, in 1626, a rival Spanish consortium occupied areas in northern Taiwan corresponding with today’s Keelung City and Danshui Township, only to be driven out by the Dutch in 1642. Under Dutch control, Taiwan’s seaports became important entrepots for maritime trade and the transshipment of goods between Japan, China, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Europe.

The Dutch East India Company employed Chinese immigrants to work its sugarcane and rice plantations in the southwest. This marked the beginning of large-scale, intensive cultivation in Taiwan. The sugarcane and rice cultivation initiated by the Dutch continued to be mainstays of the island’s economy and export business until as recently as half a century ago. The Dutch also used Taiwan as a base for trade within Asia and beyond.

While the Dutch were active in Taiwan, Ming-dynasty China was experiencing a series of rebellions, followed by the invasion of Manchu conquerors. The resultant toll in human suffering, exacerbated by famine and banditry, prompted thousands of Chinese in the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong to risk the dangers of crossing the Taiwan Strait, or hei shuigou (“Black Ditch”) as they called it, to reach the island. By 1662, an estimated 40,000 of them had successfully done so.

Reign of the Zheng Family (1661-1683)

As troops poured into northern China from Manchuria beginning in 1644, Ming loyalists fled southward, where they resisted Manchu incursions for over two decades. One of the best known resistance fighters was Zheng Cheng-gong (Koxinga). The offspring of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, he inherited his father’s position as the “godfather” of a syndicate of traders, pirates and private armies whose operations ranged from Japan to Southeast Asia.

In 1661, when forces of the deposed Ming dynasty were on their last legs in their fight against those of the Ching dynasty, a fleet and army commanded by Zheng laid siege to the Dutch East India Company headquarters in Taiwan, and the two sides negotiated a treaty under the terms of which the Dutch left in 1662.

Under the rule of Zheng Chenggong, his son Zheng Jing and grandson Zheng Ke-shuang, a mini-kingdom with a Chinese-style political system was created, which lasted for 22 years before being absorbed into the Ching Empire in 1683.

Ching-dynasty Rule (1683-1895)

During the two-plus centuries of Ching rule over Taiwan, hundreds of thousands of impoverished people in China’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces flouted the Ching court’s ban on travel to the island and migrated there to make a fresh start.

The bulk of these people were farmers who, like the people hired by the Dutch East India Company, mainly engaged in rice and sugarcane cultivation. Most of the steadily growing agricultural exports were shipped to China.

As a consequence of the Second Opium War (1856-1860), four ports in Taiwan—Keelung, Danshui (Tamsui), Anping and Kaohsiung (Takau)—were opened by the Ching dynasty to Western traders. Thereafter, tea and camphor, which enjoyed large global demand, became major cash crops. Being the production base of these products and of coal, northern Taiwan overtook the southwest as the island’s economic and political hub.

As in the preceding eras of rule by the Dutch and the Zheng family, during Ching-dynasty rule, the desire of refugees to stake out a piece of land for themselves in their new home came into conflict with the indigenous peoples’ determination to defend their ancestral homelands from invasion. This conflict was exacerbated by the international demand for tea and camphor, which could be produced only in highland areas inhabited by indigenous peoples.

The island was also buffeted by international military actions challenging the will of Ching-dynasty rulers. In 1841 and 1842, during the First Opium War (1839-1842), for example, British forces attempted to occupy the northern seaport of Keelung and western seaport of Da-an (near Taichung) but were repulsed. And just before the Second Opium War, U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry dispatched the USS Macedonia to reconnoiter the vicinity of Taiwan’s northern port city of Keelung, map its harbor and evaluate the potential of the nearby, newly developing coal mining operations to supply U.S. steamships.

Not to be outdone by Western imperialists, Japan dispatched a punitive expeditionary force to southern Taiwan in 1874, its first-ever projection of military force beyond its national territory. While Tokyo’s publicly stated objective was to punish southern Taiwan’s indigenous Paiwan people for killing shipwrecked Okinawans and Japanese sailors in 1871, Japanese government documents indicate that its real objective was to establish a permanent presence in eastern Taiwan.

In response, the Ching government in Beijing took action to reinforce its claim of sovereignty over Taiwan by buttressing the island’s defenses and expedited development of its economy and infrastructure. Ching administrators expanded the budding coal mining industry and lay telegraph lines between northern and southern Taiwan as well as an undersea telegraph cable between the island and Fujian Province.

Finally, in October 1885, soon after the Sino-French War (1884-1885), during which French forces invaded parts of northern Taiwan, the Ching government declared Taiwan a province of the empire, appointing Liu Ming-chuan as its first governor.

Japanese Colonial Rule (1895-1945)

In 1894, war broke out between the Ching Empire and the Japanese Empire after the latter invaded Korea, which the Ching court regarded as a satellite state. Under the terms of the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki that concluded the conflict, known as the First Sino-Japanese War, Taiwan was ceded to Japan. Rejecting this outcome, Taiwanese intelligentsia proclaimed the establishment of the “Democratic Republic of Taiwan.” This bid for self-rule failed, however, as Japanese troops crushed all resistance offered by local militias within half a year.

Pacification and “Special Governance” (1895-1919)

In addition to “hard” measures taken to suppress and deter rebellion, the Japanese colonial government in Taipei instituted a number of “soft” legal measures designed to ease the transition from existing conditions to those deemed more desirable. These included a phased ban on opium smoking and a land reform program whose main feature was “one person, one farm.” In addition to taking control of opium distribution, the colonial government nationalized the production and marketing of camphor, salt and a number of other commodities. It also strove to expand sugar and coal production.

Assimilation of Taiwan as an Extension of Japan (1919-1936)

Tokyo proclaimed that the Taiwanese enjoyed the same legal rights as Japanese citizens in the home islands. Compulsory Japanese-language education was enforced, while programs for cultural assimilation were promoted and the pace of economic development increased.

Imperial Subjectification (1936-1945)

Tokyo implemented a policy to encourage the Taiwanese to adopt Japanese names and customs, including Shinto religious practices. To meet wartime needs, the development of heavy industries accelerated, and Taiwanese men were recruited into the Japanese imperial army.

By the time the United States declared war against Japan in December 1941, Taiwan boasted what some scholars describe as the most modern industrial and transportation infrastructure in Asia outside of Japan, and its agricultural development was second to none. Public health programs had eradicated diseases common to many other countries in Asia, sophisticated banking and business practices were in place, and literacy levels had greatly improved.

Despite such admirable material progress, persistent discrimination, which denied Taiwanese positions of authority throughout all sectors of society, led to widespread protests against Japanese rule. A movement seeking autonomy for Taiwan and the establishment of a “Taiwan Assembly” was launched in the 1920s and continued into the 1930s, promoted mainly by Taiwanese university students in Japan. This, however, came to nothing.

The Wushe Uprising, a short but bloody conflict, began in October 1930 in the mountain village of Wushe in today’s Nantou County. In outrage at Japanese colonial administrators’ humiliating treatment of the Sediq people, their chief, Mona Rudao, led hundreds of warriors in an all-out war against the Japanese. Ultimately, the uprising was crushed not only by virtue of superior numbers, but by the use of poison gas bombs dropped from aircraft.

Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan came to an end as a result of the military conflict that began with a shooting incident at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing in July 1937. This marked the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), which became one of the fronts in the Asia-Pacific theater of World War II.

After Japan announced its surrender in August 1945, ROC troops and administrators took over Taiwan on behalf of the Allied Powers and received the surrender of Japanese troops in Taiwan on October 25, 1945.

The ROC on Taiwan (1945- )

After taking over Taiwan on behalf of the Allies, the Nanjing-based ROC government declared Taiwan a province of the ROC in line with the Cairo Declaration. October 25, the date upon which Japanese troops in Taiwan surrendered to ROC administrators, was officially proclaimed “Retrocession Day.”

Four years later, on the verge of defeat by communist forces, the ROC government vacated the continent and relocated to the island of Taiwan. Over the six decades since then, the Taipei-based ROC government has exercised jurisdiction over Taiwan and a number of other islands, while the Beijing-based CCP regime has exercised jurisdiction over the Chinese mainland, and the two societies have developed in radically different directions: Taiwan has joined the ranks of democracies while the mainland has remained under authoritarian rule.

As summarized in the remainder of this chapter, and discussed in other chapters,political and economic developments inside and outside Taiwan since 1945 have strongly influenced its people’s sense of identity and future prospects. The ROC government’s forced withdrawal from the United Nations in 1971, democratization, and flourishing economic and cultural ties with the Chinese mainland have highlighted both profound differences between and shared interests of people on either side of the Taiwan Strait.

While public debate concerning Taiwan’s future and its relationship with the mainland continues, what unites ROC citizens is their affirmation of the imperative to protect and nurture their hard-won freedom and democracy.

Political Developments and Reform

The ROC government’s relocation from the mainland to Taiwan marked the beginning of the period of martial law (1949-1987) in Taiwan. Under martial law, the KMT-controlled government imposed press censorship, banned new political parties, and restricted the freedoms of speech, publication, assembly and association. Direct elections for some local government heads and local legislative council seats were initiated in 1950, however.

Following the death of President Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, Yen Chia-kan served as president until 1978, when he was succeeded by Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the formation and development of an informal coalition of democratic opposition politicians and democracy activists known as the dangwai, or “party outsiders,” indicating that they were not members of or affiliated with the KMT.

In December 1979, a rally in Kaohsiung City organized by leading dangwai figures and Formosa magazine to observe international Human Rights Day turned into a violent confrontation when thousands of participants were hemmed in by military police. In connection with this event, known as the Kaohsiung Incident, prominent dissidents were detained, convicted of sedition by a military tribunal, and sentenced to long prison terms.

Ultimately, however, the incident and the repression that followed added steam to the democracy movement. In September 1986, dangwai leaders established the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in defiance of the ban on the formation of new political parties.

President Chiang Ching-kuo rescinded martial law in 1987 shortly before his death. His successor, Lee Teng-hui, took vigorous action to reform the political system and dismantled the party-state machinery that had been in place in Taiwan for the preceding four decades. Under his administration, the press was given greater freedom, opposition political parties developed, private visits to the Chinese mainland increased dramatically, and the Constitution was revised to require the direct election of all legislators and the president.

In 1996, incumbent President Lee Teng-hui became Taiwan’s first popularly elected president, as the ROC president and vice president in the past had been elected by the National Assembly. In 2000, DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian was elected president, marking the first-ever transfer of ROC government executive authority between parties. He was re-elected in March 2004.

Under the Chen administration, the Referendum Act was enacted in 2003, the first national referendums were conducted in 2004, and the National Assembly was abolished while its power to ratify constitutional amendments was transferred to the people through referendum in 2005. Meanwhile, a new “single-member-district, two-ballot” electoral system instituted through constitutional amendment in 2005 was used in the national legislative election held on January 12, 2008 (see Chapter 5, “Democracy and Elections”).

On March 22, 2008, KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou was elected to the presidency, and his inauguration on May 20 completed the second transfer of ROC government executive authority between political parties, and marked a new milestone for Taiwan’s multiparty democracy. Soon thereafter, President Ma unveiled a new policy of “flexible diplomacy,” proposing a “truce” with Beijing to halt cross-strait competition for diplomatic allies at the other side’s expense, while at the same time striving to raise Taiwan’s international profile and integrate it more fully into the Asia-Pacific regional economy on the premise of “putting Taiwan first for the benefit of the people.”

Cross-strait tensions eased during the first year of the Ma administration as consequence of the resumption of long-suspended institutionalized negotiations between Taiwan’s semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation and its mainland counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait. The talks could be resumed thanks to a consensus reached in 1992 between the KMT administration in Taipei and the CCP regime in Beijing that there is only one China, and the definition of that China would be determined separately by Taipei and Beijing.

Taiwan also became an observer at the World Health Assembly of the U.N.’s World Health Organization in May 2009 under the name “Chinese Taipei,” marking its first official participation in U.N. activity since 1971. This offers hope that Beijing will see the wisdom of no longer opposing Taiwan’s active engagement in other international bodies.

Nevertheless, over 1,300 ballistic missiles on the Chinese mainland remained targeted at Taiwan near the end of President Ma’s first year in office, prompting him to stress the imperative to maintain Taiwan’s military preparedness to ensure its security.