Guardian Columnist Tags China's Claims To Taiwan As 'Historical Tales'

Brian Hioe, editor of the New Bloom magazine and columnist of the Guardian, has savaged China’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, saying it is riddled with “convenient historical tales. Taiwan belongs to the Taiwanese. In his Aug. 18 column for Guardian, Hioe said the US Sinologist Lucian Pye was wrong in saying that China is a “civilization pretending to be a nation-state”. But it is precisely the opposite: China is a modern nation-state that pretends to be an ancient civilization – when it suits its expansionist ambitions.”

Photo Insert: "Taiwan belongs to the Taiwanese."

Hioe said nowhere is this clearer than it the way it talks about Taiwan, which it claims has been part of China since time immemorial.

The government recently published a white paper – released in the context of unprecedented live-fire drills aimed at intimidating Taiwan after Nancy Pelosi’s visit – which begins by referencing the dispatching of troops to Taiwan by the Sui Dynasty (581–618).

Chinese territorial claims over Taiwan often cite the history of the Ming dynasty warlord Koxinga, who made Taiwan his base of operations during his short-lived Kingdom of Tungning (1661-1683), or Taiwan’s formal incorporation into the Qing dynasty as a province in 1887.

“Yet references to dynastic Chinese history to justify contemporary territorial claims are spurious. After all, the Chinese Communist party, which rules over the People’s Republic, is precisely one of the historical forces that overthrew imperial China. And the CCP has never controlled Taiwan in its 75-year history. It is not as though a pre-modern polity simply sending troops to Taiwan means that an entirely different polity, 1,500 years later, has the right to control it. Where Koxinga is concerned, while Chinese nationalists revere him as a historical figure seen as subjugating Taiwan for China, he was also half-Japanese,” Hioe explained.

As a result, during Taiwan’s 50-year period under Japanese colonial rule, from 1895 to 1945 – another event that splits Taiwan’s history from that of the Chinese mainland – Koxinga was used to emphasize Japanese claims over Taiwan.

Lastly, Koxinga is remembered as a genocidal Columbus-esque figure by Taiwan’s indigenous people, who had settled the land and were its original inhabitants long before Han settlers arrived.

Even during its incorporation under the Qing, China did not control all of the island of Taiwan, and it seemed uninterested in it as a territory. Hence it was ceded to the Japanese in 1895 after the Sino-Japanese war, only a short eight years after its incorporation, Hioe argued.

The territory of modern China as declared by Dr. Sun Yat-sen in 1910, did not include Taiwan.

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