Taiwan independence movement
Based on Wikipedia: Taiwan independence movement
In 1989, a Taiwanese publisher named Cheng Nan-jung set himself on fire rather than be arrested. His crime? Publishing a draft constitution for an independent Taiwan. The magazine he ran was called "Liberty Era Weekly," and he died defending the liberty to imagine a different future for his island home.
This single act of defiance captures something essential about the Taiwan independence movement: it has always been about more than just flags and borders. It's a story of identity, resistance, and the question of what it means for a people to determine their own fate.
The Ambiguity at the Heart of Everything
Here's the puzzle that confounds diplomats and legal scholars alike: Is Taiwan already independent?
The answer depends entirely on whom you ask and what you mean by "independent." Taiwan—officially called the Republic of China, or ROC—has its own government, military, currency, passport, and democratically elected leaders. It conducts diplomacy with a handful of countries and the Vatican. Its citizens live under laws made in Taipei, not Beijing. By any practical measure, Taiwan governs itself.
Yet officially, things get strange. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which controls mainland China, insists Taiwan is a renegade province that must eventually be "reunified" with the motherland. Most countries in the world, including the United States, maintain a deliberate ambiguity about Taiwan's status—a diplomatic fog that has persisted for decades.
So when people talk about "Taiwan independence," they might mean two very different things. Some advocate for formally declaring a new country called the Republic of Taiwan—a clean break with the old Chinese civil war baggage. Others argue that Taiwan is already independent in everything but name; it's called the Republic of China, sure, but everyone knows it means Taiwan. Why rock the boat with a formal declaration that might trigger a war?
Since 2016, Taiwan's government has essentially taken the second position. The Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which leans toward independence, maintains there's no need for a formal declaration because Taiwan is already independent—it's just called the ROC instead of the ROT.
Before There Was a Movement
Taiwan's story begins long before Chinese politics complicated everything. The indigenous peoples of Taiwan have lived on the island for over six thousand years—longer than the pyramids have stood in Egypt. They spoke Austronesian languages, related to the tongues of Polynesia and Southeast Asia, and for most of human history, they had the island to themselves.
Then came the colonizers, in waves.
The Spanish arrived first, followed by the Dutch, who established trading posts in the 1620s. Ming dynasty loyalists fleeing the Qing conquest of China took refuge on the island in the 1660s. The Qing eventually absorbed Taiwan in 1683, ruling it as a frontier territory for two centuries. Then Japan seized the island in 1895 after defeating China in war, and held it until 1945.
Each occupation left its mark. But it was the Japanese period that most deeply shaped modern Taiwanese identity—for better and worse. Japan modernized the island's infrastructure, built railways and schools, and promoted Japanese language and culture. Some Taiwanese elites were co-opted into the colonial system. Others resisted. Both indigenous peoples and Han Chinese inhabitants mounted rebellions against Japanese rule, rebellions that were eventually crushed.
Here's a detail that surprises many people: in the 1930s, Mao Zedong supported Taiwanese independence. The future founder of the People's Republic of China told the American journalist Edgar Snow that the Chinese Communist Party would lend "enthusiastic help" to Taiwan's struggle for freedom from Japan. The CCP maintained from 1928 to 1942 that Taiwan was a separate nation.
Mao only changed his tune when the rival Nationalists—the Kuomintang, or KMT—started claiming Taiwan for China. Politics, as always, determined principle.
The Trauma That Shaped Everything
World War II ended in 1945, and with it, Japanese rule. The Allied powers authorized the Republic of China—then governing mainland China under the KMT—to temporarily occupy Taiwan on their behalf. What was meant to be temporary became permanent.
At first, many Taiwanese welcomed their "fellow Chinese" liberators. That welcome didn't last long.
The KMT administrators who arrived from the mainland often treated Taiwan as a conquered territory to be exploited. Corruption was rampant. The economy deteriorated. Tensions between native Taiwanese and the newly arrived mainlanders grew toxic.
Then came February 28, 1947.
An incident involving a cigarette vendor and government agents sparked island-wide protests. The KMT responded with brutal force. Troops massacred civilians. Intellectuals, local leaders, and suspected dissidents were rounded up and killed. Estimates of the dead range from ten thousand to thirty thousand people. The date—2/28—became seared into Taiwanese memory.
What followed was even worse in some ways: forty years of martial law.
From 1949 to 1987, Taiwan lived under authoritarian KMT rule. This period, known as the White Terror, saw not only leftists but liberals and democracy advocates persecuted. Discussion of Taiwan independence was forbidden. The government insisted it was the legitimate ruler of all China, temporarily exiled to Taiwan, and that recovering the mainland was the national mission. Seats in the legislature were held by delegates elected on the mainland in 1947—men who grew old in their chairs because new elections might acknowledge that the mainland was lost.
Independence activists compared this era to South Africa under apartheid. There's a traditional saying about Qing-era Taiwan: "Every three years an uprising, every five years a rebellion." Under the KMT, rebellion took different forms.
Exile and Return
With open advocacy impossible inside Taiwan, the independence movement went underground—and overseas.
Dissidents fled to Japan and the United States, establishing think tanks, political organizations, and lobbying networks. In the 1950s, a group even set up a "Republic of Taiwan Provisional Government" in Tokyo, complete with a nominal president named Thomas Liao. At one point, this government-in-exile held quasi-official relations with newly independent Indonesia, thanks to personal connections between its liaison and President Sukarno.
The KMT leadership grew paranoid. Chiang Kai-shek, the ROC president, suspected Americans were plotting a coup with independence activists. His son, Chiang Ching-kuo, ran the secret police and purged anyone suspected of disloyalty. One target was General Sun Li-jen, an American-educated military leader arrested in 1955 for allegedly plotting with the CIA to seize Taiwan and declare independence.
Back in Taiwan, the independence cause became intertwined with the broader democracy movement. The 1970s saw intensifying protests against authoritarian rule, culminating in the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident, when police violently suppressed a human rights rally. Many of those arrested would later become founding members of the Democratic Progressive Party.
The DPP formed in 1986, one year before martial law finally ended. When the political system opened up, exiled independence advocates flooded back to Taiwan. Many had spent decades on a KMT blacklist that prevented them from returning home. They came back as heroes to some, troublemakers to others, and began openly building political support for a cause that had been unspeakable for forty years.
The Politics of Identity
By the 1990s, Taiwan independence had transformed from a forbidden idea into a mainstream political position.
The DPP added independence to its party platform in 1991. As the party's electoral success grew, the movement shifted tactics. Instead of just demanding formal statehood, activists focused on identity politics—changing what it meant to be Taiwanese.
This meant reinterpreting history. The February 28 Incident, long suppressed, became a national day of remembrance. It meant changing language policy: promoting Taiwanese (a variant of Southern Min Chinese) and indigenous languages instead of just Mandarin. It meant redesigning maps, rewriting textbooks, proposing new flags and anthems. One prominent campaign aimed simply to use the word "Taiwan" wherever the Republic of China officially appeared—the Taiwan Name Rectification Movement.
Some independence purists criticized these symbolic battles as superficial. But the cultural shift was real. A generation came of age learning a different story about who they were.
The movement peaked in intensity during the 1970s through 1990s, but then something interesting happened: it moderated. Not because supporters abandoned independence, but because the identity transformation succeeded. Friction between "mainlanders" (those who fled China with the KMT in the 1940s and their descendants) and "native" Taiwanese decreased as the communities intermarried and developed shared interests.
By the late 1990s, many independence supporters had adopted a new formulation: Taiwan, as the ROC, is already independent from mainland China. Why provoke a crisis with a formal declaration? In 1999, the DPP codified this position in its "Resolution on Taiwan's Future."
The View from Beijing
The People's Republic of China has never wavered in its opposition to Taiwan independence. From Beijing's perspective, Taiwan and the mainland are two portions of a single country's territory, temporarily divided by civil war. Any move toward formal independence is separatism—a crime against national unity.
The PRC points to several documents to support its claim that Taiwan legally belongs to China: the Cairo Declaration of 1943, the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, and United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 from 1971 (which transferred China's UN seat from the ROC to the PRC). Legal scholars debate whether these documents actually say what Beijing claims they say, but the PRC's position is unambiguous.
In 2005, Beijing passed the Anti-Secession Law, formally authorizing military force if Taiwan declares independence. The law's name is revealing: it frames potential conflict not as conquest but as preventing secession from a country Taiwan already belongs to.
China's official position remains "peaceful unification" under a formula called "one country, two systems"—the same arrangement governing Hong Kong. But the PRC explicitly reserves the right to use force if necessary. And in 2024, Beijing went further: new legal guidelines made advocating for Taiwan independence a criminal offense punishable by death, regardless of where in the world the advocacy occurs.
This is not an idle threat. China has dramatically expanded its military capabilities over the past two decades, building the world's largest navy and developing missiles specifically designed to strike Taiwan or deter American intervention. Military exercises near Taiwan have become routine.
The World Watches
Taiwan exists in a peculiar international limbo. Only eleven UN member states and the Vatican officially recognize it. Most countries, following Beijing's demands, maintain informal relations through institutes and trade offices rather than embassies.
The United States occupies a deliberately ambiguous position. American policy acknowledges the PRC's claim but doesn't endorse it. The Taiwan Relations Act commits the US to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons and to regard any non-peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question as a grave concern. But whether America would actually fight to defend Taiwan remains—by design—uncertain.
In 1995, Taiwan's president Lee Teng-hui became the first Taiwanese leader to visit the United States, speaking at Cornell University about his hope for Taiwan's future. China responded with fury, conducting missile tests near Taiwan in what became known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis.
When Chen Shui-bian became Taiwan's first DPP president in 2000, he initially pledged moderation with his "Four Noes and One Without" policy—no declaration of independence, no change to the national title, no inclusion of independence in the constitution, no referendum on independence, and no abolition of the bodies governing relations with mainland China. But by the end of his presidency, he had grown bolder, articulating the concept of "One Country on Each Side"—that the PRC and ROC are simply two different countries.
Chen also pushed symbolic changes: renaming Chunghwa Post to Taiwan Post, changing Chinese Petroleum Corporation to CPC Corporation Taiwan, adding "Taiwan" to embassy signage. These moves drew condemnation from Beijing, criticism from Washington, and fury from the opposition KMT.
The Fault Lines Today
Taiwan's politics remain divided along this fundamental question.
The DPP and its allies in the Pan-Green Coalition generally support Taiwanese identity and resist closer ties with China. They range from those who would declare formal independence if they could do so safely to pragmatists who prefer the current ambiguous status quo. What unites them is skepticism of Beijing and commitment to Taiwan's democratic system and distinct identity.
The KMT and the Pan-Blue Coalition take a different view. They favor maintaining the Republic of China framework and the so-called "1992 Consensus"—an agreement, disputed by the DPP, in which both sides of the Taiwan Strait acknowledged there was "one China" while agreeing to disagree about what that meant. Some in the blue camp hope for eventual reunification with a democratic mainland China; others simply want stable relations and economic ties with the PRC.
Changing Taiwan's constitutional status would require an extraordinarily high bar: a quarter of legislators to propose an amendment, three-quarters attendance and three-quarters supermajority to pass it, then approval by popular referendum. This deliberately difficult process means dramatic changes are unlikely—which may be exactly the point.
What Independence Means Now
The Taiwan independence movement has succeeded in ways its founders might not have imagined, even as formal independence remains elusive.
Taiwanese identity is now the majority identity on the island. Surveys consistently show that most people in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese—a dramatic shift from a few decades ago. The February 28 Incident is commemorated, not suppressed. Indigenous languages are protected. The idea that Taiwan has its own destiny, separate from mainland China, is no longer criminal; it's common sense for most of the population.
Yet the ultimate goal—a Taiwan recognized by the world as a normal country—remains blocked by Beijing's threats and international reluctance to challenge China. Taiwan competes in the Olympics as "Chinese Taipei." Its passport gets you into most countries, but its government can't join the United Nations. It's independent in every practical way and unrecognized in every formal way.
Perhaps the most striking transformation is in the movement itself. What began as a radical demand has become the establishment position. Today's DPP doesn't push for a formal declaration of independence; it argues that Taiwan is already independent and needs no declaration. The revolutionaries became the status quo.
Cheng Nan-jung, the publisher who burned himself alive rather than be arrested for imagining an independent Taiwan, has become a national hero. His death is commemorated annually. Schools are named after him. The constitution he died for was never adopted, but the identity he died for flourishes.
In a sense, Taiwan independence has already happened—everywhere except on paper.
The question that haunts the Taiwan Strait is whether paper is what matters most.