Paul Keating, Australia’s former prime minister, may believe that Taiwan is “Chinese real estate”, and that Taiwan’s fate is not important to Australia’s interests. But history tells otherwise.
This year Tainan, Taiwan’s oldest city, celebrates its 400th anniversary. In 1624 the Dutch East India Company established a trading post there which, in the words of Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, a former Tainan mayor, “marked Taiwan’s links to globalisation”.
But Taiwan’s history stretches back much further than this. Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, part of the Austronesian language family group of Malayo-Polynesian Indigenous peoples spanning maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific, have lived in Taiwan for more than 5,000 years. Australia’s Torres Strait Islanders belong to this group. Though Indigenous peoples officially constitute less than 3% of Taiwan’s 23.5 million people, a much larger part of Taiwan’s population is thought to have Indigenous ancestry.
More recently, nearly one million immigrants, predominantly from Southeast Asia, have also made Taiwan their home.
Taiwan’s modern history starts in the 1500s when passing Portuguese sailors named the island Ilha Formosa (beautiful island). A small number of Chinese merchants, fishermen and pirates then began settling in Taiwan. After the Dutch established their colony in Taiwan’s southwest, in 1626 Spanish merchants established their own trading post, this time in Taiwan’s north. The Dutch eventually drove out the Spanish in 1642, but were themselves ousted in 1662 by the Ming loyalist Koxinga, who fled to Taiwan after the Ming dynasty was conquered by the Manchurians.
In 1683, Qing forces took control of Taiwan’s western and northern coasts. A much larger wave of Chinese immigration followed, driven by demand for labour and commercial opportunities. Two centuries later, in 1885, Taiwan was declared a province of the Qing Empire, only to be ceded to Japan a decade later following the First Sino-Japanese War.
The Japanese ruled Taiwan as their first ever colony from 1895 until the end of the Second World War in 1945, bringing substantial development to Taiwan’s economy, industry, infrastructure and civil administration. But they also had to put down several Taiwanese resistance movements.
Like in Australia, the commitment to shared democratic values and freedoms is today a defining feature of Taiwan’s open, diverse society.
Following Japan’s surrender, in 1945 the Republic of China (ROC) government began exercising jurisdiction over Taiwan. In 1947, ROC troops were dispatched from China to suppress a large-scale Taiwanese uprising sparked by the February 28 incident. In 1949, as full-scale civil war raged in China between the ROC and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the ROC government fled to Taiwan, followed by 1.2 million people from China.
Martial law was declared signalling the beginning of the “White Terror” period of authoritarian rule, during which up to 30,000 Taiwanese were killed and many others persecuted. It was eventually lifted four decades later in 1986 marking the start of Taiwan’s democratisation, including establishment of political parties and direct presidential elections, first held in 1996.
In the 1970s many countries including Australia, switched diplomatic recognition from the ROC in Taipei to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing. In 1971 the United Nations General Assembly passed UN Resolution 2758 recognising the PRC as the only legitimate representative of China to the body.
In its 1972 Joint Communique, Australia recognised the government of the PRC as China’s sole legal government and ended official relations with the ROC. Under its “one China policy”, Australia did not take a position on Taiwan’s future status, to be determined peacefully between the parties, and developed strong unofficial economic and cultural relations with Taiwan.
Half a century on, Taiwan is a leading Indo-Pacific economy and democracy, and a critical partner for Australia. In the recent AUSMIN Joint Statement, Australia and the United States reiterated support for the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, opposition to unilateral changes to the status quo, and backing for peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues through dialogue, without the threat or use of force and coercion. The statement also committed to continuing support for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organisations and further strengthening economic, trade and people-to-people ties with Taiwan, as well as enhancing development coordination in the Pacific.
Like in Australia, the commitment to shared democratic values and freedoms is today a defining feature of Taiwan’s open, diverse society. These freedoms have been hard-won.
As a deeply democratic country with a record of protecting and promoting human rights at home and globally, and as a country with long-standing economic, cultural and people-to-people links with Taiwan, Australia has a stake in democratic Taiwan’s success. Australia should continue to play its key role in maintaining the status quo of regional stability and peace, encouraging differences to be resolved peacefully through dialogue.
