Shelley Rigger

because they were not being returned to the China that they had left, which was the Qing Empire, which was gone.

They were being returned to this new Chinese state, the Republic of China, established in 1912 by the Chinese nationalists, whose leader by the end of World War II was Chiang Kai-shek.

During World War II, the US, Canada, Australia, and some of the other allies are fighting in Asia.

And a critical part of that action is happening in China

And it's mainly the Chinese that are keeping that going.

So from the perspective of the allied leaders, it's extremely important to keep Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist army in the war.

They're thinking about, you know, what can we offer him to make sure that he stays motivated?

And one of the things they decided to offer him at the Cairo conference was anything that's a Japanese-held territory that used to be Chinese will go back to the Republic of China.

We won't have some kind of decision-making process to see who should get it.

We're just going to send it back to China.

So 1945 rolls around, the Japanese decamp back to Japan, and the Nationalist government, the Nationalist army comes to occupy Taiwan because they've been promised that Taiwan will be Chinese territory after the war.

So for a lot of Taiwanese, the feeling was, okay, we don't exactly know these people, but they have the same heritage that we do.

So we're sort of cautiously optimistic that this is going to be fine.

And they were really shocked by what happened.

Because the Nationalists, they had just finished a war with Japan, and they were preparing actively for a civil war against the Communists.

So the Communists and the Nationalists had made a temporary alliance to fight Japan, but as soon as the Japanese were defeated, boom, the civil war is just inevitable.

So the Nationalists did not send the best of their forces over to Taiwan because they were getting ready for the next step.

Who they sent to Taiwan were a lot of kind of conscripted soldiers, many of them not even equipped for battle.

Taiwanese wrote about watching people come down off of the ships with like umbrellas and poking butts.

Well, I guess because that was their personal property that they had managed to hang on to.