Orphan state

IT HAS no membership of the UN. In the Olympics, it competes as “Chinese Taipei”. Most nations don’t recognise it as a country.

The economically dynamic, self-governing island of Taiwan has struggled with diplomatic isolation and a conflicted identity that makes it not quite a sovereign nation – although many Taiwanese insist it is.

It has de facto independence from mainland China, but has never formalised that, so it technically still vies with the mainland to be the “real China”.

Taiwan retains its official name, “Republic of China”, along with a constitution that defines its territory as encompassing all of mainland China. But as far as Communist China is concerned, Taiwan is part of its territory, and it insists that the two sides eventually reunite.

Among Taiwan’s 23.5 million people, sentiment for unification with China is declining. Surveys show significant majorities favour maintaining the status quo of de facto independence.

Such contradictions underpin the island’s politics, rising again to the fore with the announcement of talks between the Chinese and Taiwanese presidents in Singapore this weekend – the first since the two sides split in 1949 after China’s civil war.

Taiwan’s complicated identity comes from a tumultuous recent history and, of course, politics.

A former Japanese colony, Taiwan – historically called Formosa, a name given by Portuguese sailors – was handed to the Republic of China under the terms of Japan’s World War II surrender in 1945.

But when Mao Zedong’s Communists won China’s civil war in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Nationalists moved their government wholesale to the island.