Matt Bevan

Mao won and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan.

They proceeded to impose their rule on Taiwan, which had just been freed after 50 years as a Japanese colony.

That was in 1949, and it's at this point that the civil war froze in place.

Both sides, the communists and the nationalists, claimed all of China, including Taiwan, as their territory.

Neither will agree to surrender the territory they control to the other side.

And this is where it gets complicated.

Mainland Chinese people say that they live in the People's Republic of China and that Taiwan is one of their provinces.

The Taiwanese government officially calls their country the Republic of China.

It helps to think about it this way.

Taiwan, aka the Republic of China, is kind of David facing the authoritarian communist Goliath of Xi Jinping's People's Republic of China.

This is the version of the story that we have told before when we were talking about Xi Jinping's hopes of reunification or Taiwan's world-leading semiconductor industry.

The thing that we and most rapid-fire summarisers of a century-long civil war miss is that the story is actually far more bizarre and complicated than it seems.

The inexplicable, improbable, unique geopolitical entity of modern Taiwan exists thanks in part to an American magazine magnate, a truly unusual and unique woman, an incredible propaganda campaign, high housing prices and a horrific massacre.

Over the next couple of weeks, as Taiwan continues to find itself as an international pressure point, I'm going to tell you this story with as much nuance and complexity as we can jam into two episodes.

I hope you'll stick around because it's a wild, wild ride.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

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