2025-05-10
48 分钟The Economist
The island of Taiwan is one of those places in the world
that's changed hands for centuries.
Back in the 17th, it was populated by a mosaic of Malay Polynesian tribes,
till the Spanish and the Dutch showed up.
Soon, dynastic ructions in China drove members of the old Ming dynasty in.
Then, in the 19th, came the Japanese,
who got Taiwan as spoils of the Sino-Japanese War.
You keeping up here?
Okay.
Then in the 20th century, revolution in China.
No more dynasties.
The new central government was under the loose rule of a nationalist party called the Kuomintang.
Marxism took root,
and the Kuomintang got help from the new Chinese Communist Party
to make its loose rule a lot tighter.
Taiwan, meanwhile, was handed to the Kuomintang by the Japanese,
again as spoils of war in 1945.
Long story still long, the nationalists and the communists, they fell out in a big way.
In the ensuing civil war,