On Taiwan

(Letter)

25 October 2017

Hi,

I’ve been a reader of a number of articles from the Spartacist League/ICL. While I’ve enjoyed their insights, I’ve noticed that there’ve been a few articles on the historical situation in Taiwan which make questionable claims.

For instance, there is the claim that “Taiwan has been a part of China since Ancient times,” when it only became a part of China during the Qing Dynasty. In fact, Taiwan has had a history of multiple colonial regimes. The Qing Dynasty even considered Taiwan to be “a ball of mud beyond the pale” for much of its time in control of the island.

Taiwan also has a rather interesting history with communism (albeit quite brief due to its suppression during the Japanese and KMT [Guomindang] eras). The Taiwan Communist Party was established 1928 during the Japanese Colonial period. I think this would be an interesting history worth delving into.

Best regards,
A reader

WV replies:

In a 2005 joint statement of the Spartacist Group Japan and the Spartacist League/U.S., we denounced the imperialists’ ominous move of declaring Taiwan a “mutual security concern” and wrote: “Taiwan has been since ancient times a part of China, and we Trotskyists will stand with China in the event of any military conflict with imperialism over Taiwan” (“Down With U.S./Japan Counterrevolutionary Alliance! Defend the Chinese and North Korean Deformed Workers States!” WV No. 844, 18 March 2005). Since then, this formulation has been repeated several times in WV.

As our reader correctly points out, Taiwan was seized by Chinese invaders of the Qing dynasty in 1683—hardly ancient times. At that time, the number of Chinese in Taiwan was roughly equal to the number of indigenous Austronesian people. Over the years, Chinese immigration continued and by 1895, when Japan took Taiwan after a war against China, the island had long been overwhelmingly ethnically and linguistically Chinese. On their way to becoming a major imperialist power, the Japanese capitalist rulers murdered well over 30,000 Chinese on Taiwan and carried out genocidal drives against the Austronesians. Today, the deeply oppressed indigenous peoples make up just 2 percent of Taiwan’s population.

In the years following Japan’s 1945 defeat in the Second World War, Taiwan was ruled by the blood-drenched Chinese Guomindang regime. Led by U.S. puppet Chiang Kai-shek, the Guomindang treated Taiwan like a conquered province. In order to crush an island-wide revolt in February 1947—the “2-28 Incident”—Chiang dispatched troops from the mainland, who slaughtered as many as 28,000 people. With the advances of the Communist Party-led People’s Liberation Army in the Chinese civil war, Chiang’s forces fled en masse to Taiwan and imposed martial law for the next four decades. Ever since the 1949 Chinese Revolution, capitalist Taiwan has been an outpost for imperialist military threats and counterrevolutionary schemes against the People’s Republic of China.

As a key part of our unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state, we call for the revolutionary reunification of China, creating a China-wide collectivized economy under a government based on workers democracy and proletarian internationalism. This requires proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats on the mainland and socialist revolution in Taiwan to shatter the capitalist state and expropriate the bourgeoisie.