Introduction

The Taiwan issue, as the Chinese often say, is a problem left over from the Chinese Civil War (1946–49), a conflict between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang (KMT), or Chinese Nationalist Party. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing, amid the total collapse of Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China (ROC) on the Chinese mainland. Fleeing offshore to Taiwan, which the ROC recovered from Japan in August 1945, Chiang and his KMT regime were widely considered doomed, but the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 prompted the United States to neutralize the Taiwan Strait, preempting a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takeover. From then on, the Taiwan issue has been a thorn in the side of Beijing, which considers the ROC on Taiwan as a potential threat to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity…