China’s Taiwan Narrative Debunked

History and law both call bunk

Jul 02, 2025

Your living room, a shrine to globalisation, probably hosts a Taiwanese chip in every device. That microprocessor, humming away in your phone or laptop, embodies a truth Beijing would prefer you ignore: Taiwan is a country, not a province. The Chinese Communist Party’s historical claims, as sturdy as papier-mâché in a monsoon, collapse under scrutiny. Let’s dissect the mythology, expose the philosophical sleight of hand, and ask why so many otherwise rational people accept a narrative that would make even George Orwell wince.

The Myth of Ancient Ownership: History as Political Theatre

Chinese officials thunder about “sacred territory” and “historical inevitability,” as if reciting a spell will make it so. Yet, the facts tell a different story. Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, Austronesian cousins to Hawaiians, have lived on the island for millennia — long before a single Ming or Qing bureaucrat ever gazed eastward. The Dutch, Spanish, and Ming loyalists all took a turn at colonial musical chairs in the 17th century. The Qing dynasty, that lumbering relic of Manchu ambition, only managed to declare Taiwan a province in 1885 — after two centuries of mostly ignoring it.

The Qing’s grip? Eight years of official provincial status before ceding Taiwan to Japan in 1895, after a military humiliation so thorough it made the Treaty of Shimonoseki required reading for every aspiring imperialist. Japan ruled Taiwan for half a century, transforming it into a modern colony. The Republic of China (ROC) only began administering Taiwan in 1945, after Japan’s defeat. A fact that cannot be disputed by anyone is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC), founded in 1949, has never governed Taiwan for a single day.

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So, where is this unbroken chain of Chinese sovereignty? I know the current regime doesn’t like Mao anymore, but Mao Zedong himself, in 1937, told American journalist Edgar Snow that Taiwan’s independence was a legitimate aspiration, equating it with Korea’s struggle against Japanese rule. The CCP’s own archives, if they haven’t been purged, show a party once sympathetic to Taiwanese nationhood. Only when the Nationalists fled to Taiwan did the CCP’s tune change, as if sovereignty were a matter of convenience rather than principle.

Legal Fictions and Diplomatic Gymnastics: The UN and the “One China” Mirage

Beijing’s legal arsenal consists mostly of smoke and mirrors. The favourite weapon: United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758, passed in 1971. Chinese diplomats wave this document like a talisman, insisting it proves Taiwan is part of the PRC. But any analysis of the historical record, the resolution’s drafting, its antecedents, and intent, Resolution 2758 never mentions Taiwan. It simply recognises the PRC as the only entity that can bear the name China to the United Nations and expels the ROC delegation. Not a syllable about sovereignty, borders, or Taiwan’s international status. Every action taken in the name of 2758 barring Taiwan, besides having the word “China” on the name card at the UN, is both contrived and wilfully misrepresented.

This is legal prestidigitation — a shyster’s sleight of hand masquerading as international law. The resolution settled a question of representation, not ownership. If you evict a tenant, you don’t acquire their neighbour’s house by default. Yet, Beijing has built an entire diplomatic campaign on this misreading, browbeating other countries and international organisations into silence.

If sovereignty is, as Jean Bodin argued, “supreme authority within a territory,” then Taiwan’s reality is unambiguous: it possesses a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. That’s the Montevideo Convention’s checklist for statehood, and Taiwan ticks every box — except the one labelled “recognised by a bully with veto power.”

Sovereignty and the Consent of the Governed: Philosophy’s Verdict

Let’s ascend the hierarchy of imperatives: Sovereignty, properly understood, is not a matter of who shouts the loudest but who governs with the consent of the governed. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all agreed — though they’d have bickered over dinner — that the legitimacy of a state arises from social contract, not historical accident or brute force.

Taiwan’s 23 million people elect their leaders, pay their taxes, and serve in their own military. They possess passports, a currency, and a legal system no more beholden to Beijing than to Brussels. The ROC’s constitution, for all its quirks, is not a PRC appendix. The people of Taiwan have repeatedly affirmed, through democratic means, their desire for self-determination — a principle enshrined in international law and basic moral reasoning.

If sovereignty is the marriage of authority and legitimacy, then Taiwan is wed to its own people, not to a distant suitor in Beijing. To claim otherwise is to reduce the social contract to a shotgun wedding, officiated by the United Nations Security Council.

National Identity: The Psychological Firewall

National identity is not a bureaucratic formality; it’s a psychological fortress. Social identity theory tells us that people derive meaning, self-esteem, and purpose from group membership. Taiwanese identity, forged through centuries of resistance — against Qing neglect, Japanese colonialism, and KMT authoritarianism — has become a living testament to the power of collective memory.

The Taiwanese flag, anthem, and even the island’s cuisine are not mere symbols; they are the cognitive scaffolding of a nation. When Beijing insists that Taiwan is “Chinese,” it’s not just rewriting history. It is also attempting to rewire minds. It is pure PsyOps. Yet, the psychological evidence is clear: the more Beijing pushes, the more Taiwanese identify as distinct, not Chinese. This is the logic of human identity formation.

The Existential Stakes: Freedom, Fear, and the Shadow of Coercion

Here’s the existential question: Who decides the fate of a nation? Is it the people who live, love, and die there, or the distant regime that claims them as property? Beijing’s answer is unambiguous — force, not consent, is the final arbiter. The threat of invasion, the daily military exercises, the cyberattacks — these are weakness. These are the tools of a regime that knows its historical argument is fake.

I am not one to want to perpetually draw parallels with Ukraine and Russia, but Russia’s claims over Ukraine are just as spurious. Putin’s rhetoric leans heavily on language and ethnic history — he brandishes the Russian language as a birthright and a cudgel. Xi, meanwhile, wraps himself in the banner of destiny. His claim is not merely about words or shared bloodlines, but about the grand sweep of fate and the inevitability of “historical reunification”.

Putin’s irredentism is Xi’s inevitabilism.

If the world accepts that might makes right, then every nation is a hostage to its most powerful neighbour. Today Taiwan, tomorrow Ukraine, the day after—who knows? The hierarchical imperative is clear: the sovereignty of nations, and the dignity of peoples, must not be sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical expediency.

Who Benefits from the Lie?

Let’s pose the Socratic question: Who benefits from pretending Taiwan is not a country? Not the Taiwanese, who risk war and economic strangulation. Not the international community, which loses a vibrant democracy and a technological powerhouse. Solely Beijing, which seeks to extend its reach by erasing inconvenient truths and which, like Moscow beat the story up so much and filled people’s head with mis-truths so much, that there was no stepping back from the lie. The goal being that the lie oft retold becomes the truth.

Why do so many governments, otherwise champions of democracy, parrot the “One China” policy? Is it fear, greed, or simply the inertia of diplomatic habit? And what does it say about the moral courage of the international order when it allows a lie to become orthodoxy?

Truth, Power, and the Future

If history is a ledger, then the Chinese claim to Taiwan is written in red ink — debts unpaid, logic unbalanced. The world’s willingness to indulge this fiction is a testament to nothing but fear. It attests to a broad lack of commitment to truth over power, self-determination over subjugation.

Taiwan’s existence is an affront to authoritarian logic: a free society flourishing in the shadow of a dictatorship. Its democracy, imperfect but resilient, is a rebuke to those who believe history is destiny and power is its own justification.

As President Lai Ching-te declared this week, “Of course Taiwan is a country”. The evidence — historical, legal, philosophical, and psychological — is overwhelming. The only thing missing is the collective moral courage to say so, loudly and without apology.

The Hierarchical Imperative of Our Age

The world faces a choice: defend the sovereignty of nations or surrender to the logic of the strong devouring the weak. Taiwan’s fate is not a regional squabble; it is the crucible in which the future of self-determination will be forged or forsaken.

The chips in your gadgets, the headlines you scroll, the values you claim to cherish — all are bound up in this struggle. To deny Taiwan’s nationhood is to participate in a lie that diminishes us all. The hierarchical imperative is simple: truth matters, sovereignty matters, and the consent of the governed is not negotiable. The world ignores this at its peril.