Taiwan’s 100 year fight for freedom
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At a rural picnic spot in the dark, a young man suddenly disappears.
You could nearly say an alien took him away because he's just vanished.
When more clues from that night surface, something doesn't sit right. It's nonsensical where the stuff is. It's been scattered. I'm Rob Bergen. Join me as I investigate what became of Jack in the new season of Unravel. Is it a murder? Is it someone just gone missing? You know where my son is. Search for the Unravel podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. So, we have a bit of a problem. Nobody can agree on what Taiwan actually is. Taiwan is a cork in a bottle.
A country that isn't a country. Well, then again, maybe it is. It's an international pressure point. Taiwan is Taiwan and China is China. There is only one China, Taiwan being part of China.
Obviously, it's complicated. The short, simplified version we usually tell goes like this. More than 100 years ago, the ancient Chinese empire was overthrown in a revolution. What followed was a decades-long civil war where the communists under Mao Zedong and the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek fought over who would control the new Republic of China.
On both sides, the war is fought savagely. Without quarter, millions have been displaced or died.
That civil war was put on hold when the Japanese Empire invaded China in the 1930s. Mao and Chiang joined forces to fight the Japanese in World War II. When World War Two ended, the civil war resumed. Mao won and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan.
Chiang arrived in Taiwan with about two million troops, politicians and assorted refugees.
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.
And Taiwanese people say... Taiwan is Taiwan and China is 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.
What historical events led to Taiwan's complex political status?
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. If You're Listening What do you know about Time magazine? More than 29 million people all over the world turn to Time's lively pages each week to catch up on what's new.
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Well, it was founded by a guy named Henry Luce, who, according to his biographer, Alan Brinkley, was in most ways exactly the kind of guy that you would expect him to be.
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