I've been enjoying Bill Hayton's The Invention of China. It's a little heavy-going at times - all those names and dates and intricate detail! - but it gives a good glimpse into Chinese history, in all its chaotic and unsalubrious glory.
It also does a pretty good job of explaining one aspect of Chinese history I've never really understood, namely why China insists on claiming ownership of Taiwan and the islands of the South China Sea. Various bits of what China calls China - from Tibet to Xinjiang to Mongolia, even Manchuria - are more or less tenuously claimed, depending on how you read history. Much if it is based on myth or wishful thinking that managed to become reality, to some degree at least.
China's Qing Dynasty invaded the island of Formosa (Taiwan) in 1683, and held it by force until 1895, when a much weakened Qing Dynasty officially ceded it by treaty to the expanding Japanese empire. Before that, it had been colonized by the Dutch and, briefly, the Spanish, in the 17th century, and before THAT, it was just populated by aboriginal inhabitants, occasionally visited by traders from the Chinese mainland. At no point in ancient history was it ever a part of "China proper".
After 1895, China made no claims on Taiwan for some time. It was considered a Japanese possession, acquired fair and square in war, and even the early Chinese Nationalists and Communists in the first part of the 20th century did not seem to think of it as a part of China. Indeed, the first time such a claim was made in more-or-less modern times was by Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Kuomintang (Guomindang) in 1942, when the Americans joined WW2 against Japan, and China saw an opportunity to stake a claim for the island. It was only after that that Chinese maps first started showing Taiwan as a part of China.
With Japan's defeat in 1945, however, Taiwan was ceded back to China by international agreement (basically, by default) The next few years in China, though, were years of all-out civil war between the Communists and Nationalists. After Mao Zedong's Communist victory in 1949, Chiang and his Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, where they ruled effectively by martial law. By this point, though, it was once again a completely separate entity to the mainland People's Republic of China, just as it had been before the 17th century invasion. In 1971, the United Nations officially recognized the Communist People's Republic of China in place of the Republic of China (Taiwan) as the official representative of "China", and Taiwan began its time in the political wilderness.
Taiwan, cast adrift politically, gradually democratized ("Taiwanized") throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and the country developed as a largely independent nation. Martial law was ended in 1987, and the Kuomintang itself completely disbanded with the 2000 democratic elections. Any connections with mainland China were long forgotten by this time.
Given this history, it seems a bit rich for China to claim that Taiwan is, and has always been, just a wayward province of China proper. But nowadays, particularly since Xi Jinping's presidency began in 2013, that is very much the official story. The Chinese government likes to appear mortally offended by any suggestion that Taiwan is an independent state, and makes all kinds of threats to anyone who has the audacity to suggest as much. How things have changed!
If China's case for Taiwan is thin, it's case for all those shoals and islets in the South China Sea is downright non-existent. But when did that ever worry China?
A "U-shaped line" through the South China Sea first appeared on official Chinese maps in 1948, marking China's new-found zeal for this stormy, inhospitable and apparently barren area, presumably marking the time that the region's rich fish resources became better known. As its potential for oil and gas became clear later, China's nationalistic rhetoric increased, to the extent that it now seems willing to consider all-out war in support of its claims.
It's still not clear just what those claims are, though. China lays claim to some specks of sand, tiny rocky islets or even completely submerged reefs, that are 1,500 kilometres from the nearest uncontested Chinese land (Hainan Island). These specks may be just 100 kilometres from Vietnamese, Philippino or Malaysian territory, putting them well within the jurisdiction of those countries according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). But what does China care for such trivialities?
In recent years, China has been muddying the waters still further by constructing artificial islands on some reefs to act as unsinkable aircraft carriers and military bases, as well as building oil platforms in contested waters.
The book explains how many of China's territorial claims in the region are based entirely on cartographic fictions or errors. Up until the 1930s, records shown that China was completely unaware of most of the islands and reefs it now lays claim to as having been Chinese possessions "since ancient times". It was only in the 1930s that Chinese geographers started renaming islets and archipelagos they found on European (mainly British) maps, including some of the errors THOSE maps contained. The errors compounded as China claimed as islands features that were in reality only underwater shoals, revealing that no-one had even bothered to check.
Anyway, you get the idea. It seems like Chinese governments have always been unreliable and rapacious. Xi Jinping is just the latest, and one of the most brazen, of a long tradition of Chinese fabulists.
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