Taiwan's Identity Challenge

Abstract

Taiwan's geo-strategic position and its domestic political development have been in conflict throughout its modern, post-Chinese civil war history. Taiwan's geo-strategic position, defined by its oppositional relationship to China, has ensured that Taiwan and the cross-strait relations have remained a global flash point for close to 60 years. For the first 40 years, Taiwan's goal to reclaim China has underpinned the authoritarian Kuomintang party-state and its domestic program of enforced Sinification. Since the end of the Cold War, Taiwan's democratization has fundamentally changed Taiwan's political identity and unleashed an irreversible nation-building process. Taiwan's nation-building is moving the country away from reunification with a rising China. Unfortunately, this decision compromises its already vulnerable geo-strategic position and external support.