quarrel over island
Mao didn’t want Taiwan at first: how China twisted history
Originally viewed Taiwanese as a distinct people: Mao Tsetung, here in 1967 as China’s head of state.
©UPI/DPA
China’s Communist Party has threatened Taiwan, claiming it is “Chinese sacred soil”. But founding father Mao Tsetung himself advocated the island’s independence.
China’s Communist Party presents the Taiwan conflict as a national issue of destiny: “Unification” is a historic task for the party, according to the latest Taiwan White Paper. “Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times.” In fact, today’s Beijing claim dates from after 1943. Before that, Mao Tsetung and other top CCP officials advocated independence for the island, as recorded in party documents and documented by scholars in Taiwan, Japan, the US and Germany. However, no evidence can be found for the claim that Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times.
Mao promised Taiwan “enthusiastic help” in independence struggle
Originally, the Taiwanese of the Chinese Communist Party were considered to be just as independent a people as the Koreans, both of whom were under Japanese colonial rule at the time. “It is China’s immediate task to win back all our lost territories,” Mao Tsetung told US journalist Edgar Snow in 1936. “We’re not including Korea, though.” If the Koreans want to break the chains of Japanese imperialism, “we will give them enthusiastic support in their struggle for independence,” Mao said. “Same goes for Formosa” – Snow used the then-western name of Taiwan in the translation.
The US journalist was close to the party, the authorized quotes can be found in the 1937 book “Red Star over China”. In the same year, Japanese troops invaded China on a broad front. Mao put it even more clearly in a 1938 report to his party: “The Japanese imperialist war of aggression threatens and injures not only the Chinese people, but also Japan’s soldiers and people, as well as Korea, Taiwan and other oppressed peoples.” The Chinese Communist Party must “propose to the peoples of Korea and Taiwan the principle of a united front against invasion”.
When asked, the Chinese embassy in Berlin denied that Mao or the CP had ever considered Taiwan a separate nation or advocated independence for the island. “The Chinese Communist Party has always regarded solving the Taiwan question and achieving the full reunification of the motherland as its unswerving historical task,” the statement said.
However, the historical sources leave no doubt. The original position of the Communist Party and Mao was scientifically documented and proven in the 1960s and 1970s by the Taiwanese historian Shi Ming, the US sinologists Frank Hsiao and Lawrence R. Sullivan, and the German China scholar Jörg-Meinhard Rudolph in his 1986 dissertation: “The Chinese Communist Party and Taiwan 1921 – 1981”. Up until around 1947, the CP leadership believed that Taiwan should be an independent state, Rudolph said when asked.
Faithful translations of Mao’s Chinese original texts, including the passages now denied by Beijing, can also be found in the huge eight-volume work “Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912 – 1949” by the US nuclear physicist and sinologist Stuart Schram.
Taiwan was uninteresting from China’s perspective
The claim that Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times also contradicts the historical sources. Part of Taiwan was first incorporated into the Empire in 1683 — not by a Chinese dynasty, but by the Manchu people of North Asia, who conquered all of China, Mongolia, and parts of North and Central Asia, and founded the Qing dynasty. The Manchu ruled their vast empire from Beijing until 1911.
The first comprehensive Chinese treatise on the island was written by the imperial official Jiang Minying around 1687: “In ancient times, Taiwan was a place of uncivilized savages,” it says at the beginning. Jiang then explained that in the 15th century the famous Chinese admiral Zheng He ignored Taiwan on his voyages through the seven seas – “because the barbarians were incorrigible”.
Zheng He made it as far as India and Arabia, Taiwan, inhabited by headhunters, was of no interest from a Chinese perspective. Later imperial chroniclers in the 18th century noted that the name Taiwan dates back to a short-lived Dutch colony in the first half of the 17th century and had previously had no trade relations with China.
For 200 years after 1683, parts of Taiwan were a restless Qing colony, a playground for headhunters, pirates, robbers and adventurers. According to reports by western diplomats, only a third of the island was under the control of the imperial administration. In 1895, after a brief war, Japan extorted Taiwan from the Empire.
Almost half a century later, the Chinese national government under “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-Shek pushed through at the Cairo Conference in 1943 that Taiwan should go to China after Japan’s defeat.
It was only from this point in time that Mao and the CP became interested in the island. After the end of World War II, the civil war against Chiang’s Kuomintang National Party (KMT) flared up again, ending in 1949 with the flight of the military regime to Taiwan. At this point at the latest, Mao and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party had changed their view, says Rudolph.
Sponsored by the United States, Chiang dreamed of “reconquering the mainland” in Taipei. The CP, in turn, planned the “liberation of Taiwan” as the last missing step to victory in the civil war. Taiwan, which has been democratic since the mid-1990s, has long since abandoned the claims of the former KMT regime, while the CP is increasing its threats against the island.
Before the founding of the People’s Republic, China’s Communist Party was quite capable of renunciation: The party accepted without complaint the loss of Mongolia, which had been part of the Qing Empire, and the final cession of other large areas in the north and west to the Soviet Union. Beijing no longer claims these territories.