With China’s economy set to soar, will the independence of the internationally unrecognized region of Taiwan be under threat? Recent news that the island’s current administration will slash a proposed special arms budget aimed at fending off rival Beijing to US$11 billion from US$15 billion has raised concerns that the standoff for Taiwan between the mainland Chinese and the United States could be nearing an unpleasant showdown.

So how did this seeming paradise of lush foliage jungle and stunning mountain landscapes find itself at the heart of one of the most bitterly disputed international contests of the past few decades, and why doesn’t the world’s media talk about it?

The answer is all in the island’s troubled history.

The Troubled Isle

In the 15th Century, Portuguese colonists settled on the idyllic island of Taiwan, just off the eastern coast of mainland China, and named it “Formosa”; the beautiful island.

Since then, the tropical land mass has been host to some of the most turbulent and largely unreported conflicts and tragedies of the region’s history. The years have been particularly hard on the inhabitants, who for the past four hundreds years or more have been more or less powerless in deciding the fate of their homeland while greater powers fought for dominance over the ill-fated isle.

Today, Taiwan again faces an uphill struggle to regain its footing as a nation state to give justice to the unique culture and passions of its inhabitants.

Despite now being a tourist hotspot, pioneering some of the most unique pop music through its resilient youth, gradually becoming a major world economy and claiming the largest video games market on Earth, it lies in the warpaths of both China and the United States; two superpowers, one of which analysts expect to emerge as the coordinate economic and military force of the world in the coming decades.

Its past is complex; with many major political players all over the world staking claim to the territory at some point during its last five stormy centuries.

But no nation’s history ever was simple, and it’s important that the Taiwanese story gets out and understood by the world’s public, because the survival of the liberty and lifestyle of its inhabitants are set to once again enter the line of fire.

Today, the world’s attention is firmly rooted in Europe and the Middle East and the media often fails to pick up on the less newsworthy plight in other regions, such as Africa and Asia. Even now, when Africa is supposedly so high on the G8 governments’ agendas following the campaigning of the Live 8 and Make Poverty History groups, the Niger famine has taken a back seat to coverage of the so-called “War on Terrorism” and turmoil in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the political evolution of Asia is progressing at such dizzying speeds that the rest of the world risks overlooking the serious implications that the historical development of the region may pose on the future.

Beijing’s watchful eye

After years of the Chinese government maintaining a low value on the Yuan, meaning Chinese industries made huge profits on exports to the world market, PR China recently re-valued its currency. The US dollar now buys you more Renminbi than ever before.

However, despite how good this might sound for the Americans, the People’s Republic’s economy is still set to climb far faster and higher than that of the US in the next few decades, and it’s all down to their adoption of its hybrid capitalist economic system.

Following the Tiananmen Square massacre, when the revolutionary aspirations of the Marxist community and the appeals against civil liberty infringements from the country’s middle class youth sparked a brutal crackdown on political dissension from the increasingly paranoid and totalitarian state authorities, the government effectively offered the nation a compromise.

The deal was this; that the government pursue economic success in markets around the world and at home in order to rapidly modernize what was essentially a third world country into what we see today; a booming land of malls, pavements and roads. The condition was this; that the Chinese people remain obedient; supportive of the Party no matter what, ever refraining from scrutinizing or challenging the means by which the state was willing to pursue its economic ends, and willing to turn a blind eye to the ruthless destruction of labour rights up and down the country at the hands of the police and transnational corporations. The result was cheap labour for the world to buy, with little worker protection and a huge internal population of consumers quickly becoming history’s largest middle class.

But what does China’s inevitable ascent to superpowerdom mean for Taiwan and its neighbors?

The last time the United States of America had a competing superpower of comparative resources was Russia at the height of the Cold War, but since then “defense” technology has far developed, international tensions between various regions have shifted and the stakes of large scale military conflict have never been quite so high.

China is by no means a sleeping giant; its international influence is set to rise to a level equivalent to, if not greater, than the United States within the next five decades, and before long Beijing should be expected to begin flexing its new muscles in the surrounding territories; not least, in Taiwan.

Taiwan is not officially recognized as a country of its own as it doesn’t technically hold its own sovereignty, and this is largely due to PR China’s stubborn refusal to leave the island in peace since it found independence from the Republic of China and Japan during the tense 18 and 1900’s. Look it up on a map and it’s most often referred to as the Autonomous Region of Taiwan, much like Tibet and parts of Mongolia.

AR Taiwan is an island located just off the coast of mainland China, south of Japan, and north of the Philippines. After being colonized by the Dutch and Portuguese, later ousted from the island in 1661 by the famed Koxinga, a former pirate turned military leader, it was annexed by the Chinese Ching Dynasty in 1683. During this time the majority of the original native inhabitants of the island had been almost exterminated and replaced by Chinese and European settlers.

Yet those who remained, second or third generation settlers or some of the few natives, found common cause with one another is establishing the island as nation of its own. But the storms of Chinese and Japanese expansionism in the coming years gradually threw the island into political and economic chaos.

After briefly passing into the hands of the Emperors of Japan following the First Sino-Japanese War, a notoriously bloody conflict in which many lives were lost and much cruelty was perpetrated by both sides, inhabitants of the island fought back and established Asia’s first republic, the Taiwan Republic.

According to taiwandc.com, a qualified source on Taiwanese history, “a few days later, on 29 May 1895, a Japanese military force of over 12,000 soldiers landed in Northern Taiwan, and started to crush the movement. On 21 October 1895, Japanese imperial troops entered Taiwan, the southern capital of the Taiwan Republic, ending its short life.”

White terror

The tension between the Chinese occupation that set in during the second world war finally triggered massive clashes between natives and settlers in the February 28th Incident of 1947, when a small incident in Taipei led to large-scale demonstrations. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was initially stunned by the uprising, but quickly began secretly sending troops from the mainland to abduct and execute a generation of leading figures, students, lawyers, and doctors on the island.

Almost 30,000 people were killed during this “white terror” and for years proceeding, thousands of people were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by the KMT’s highly efficient KGB-machine, the Taiwan Garrison Command.

Yet another uprising took place during the RoC era and the native population effectively carved out its own independent nation, much to the fury of the Mandarin bureaucrats in Beijing, and the down trodden island slowly began to develop its own economy and culture.

Throughout the 1960s many island natives began assembling what became the independence movement, fed up by the rule of a mainland minority, began to call for a separate state of Taiwan.

It was now that the United States entered into the scene. Once United Nations expelled Taipei’s nationalist rules in the early 1970’s, Beijing took their place as governors of the isle. Almost a decade later the USA finally formally recognized the People’s Republic of China, severing official segregate diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

This meant that America accepted the Chinese “one China” project for reclaiming and expanding into nearby territories and abandoned its defense pact with the island, but within weeks the United States Congress reinstated a set of unofficial, unregulated economic agreements with AR Taiwan, including, critically, the sale of arms, highlighting the military interests of Washington in the region.

However, of course, since the rise to power of neoconservativism and aggressive foreign policy in mainstream US politics, prominent political and military figures in the United States government and army have stated that they feel obligated to violently defend Taiwan from re-assimilation into mainland China.

The deadlock between China and the US could, however, soon sway. With China more powerful than ever before and its economy set to propel it into the realms of world megapower in only a few short decades, many Taiwanese are afraid that Beijing will eventually muster the courage to reach out and grab Taiwan with its huge military arms.

What the future holds

Despite the steadfast mentality of the Taiwanese natives, especially the new generations who have now been born and raised on the island having had little or no contact with their hostile neighbors, China seems determined.

MSNBC’s Kari Huus writes, “Kiu Yan Chun grew up in Taiwan firmly believing that her family would someday go back to mainland China. It took most of her life to realize that there would be no triumphant return, as envisioned by the Nationalists when they retreated to Taiwan after defeat by the Chinese Communists in 1949. It took her longer still to realize that she had no desire to return.”

It is true the inhabitants of Taiwan have successfully mentally detached themselves from the mainland and found pride in themselves as a nation in its own right, despite not being recognized as such by international diplomacy.

Yet the free-market hybrid of PR China is following in the American expansionists footsteps, when they know what they want they will soon have the courage to go out and get it.

The future of Taiwan could end up concerning far more than just the island’s populace. Concerns continue to grow over the increasingly aggressive policies adopted by both China and the United States regarding the island.

The White House has continually assured China and the world that it will resort to violent force to prevent Chinese domination of the. On the 25th of April, 2001, CNN White House Correspondent Kelly Wallace wrote:

“U.S. President George W. Bush on Tuesday said that the United States would do “whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself” in the event of attack by China.

Asked in the ABC interview if Washington had an obligation to defend the Taiwanese in the event of attack by China, which considers the island a renegade province, Bush said: “Yes, we do … and the Chinese must understand that. Yes, I would.”

More recently Beijing announced that it would resort to even nuclear weaponry to defend its interests in Taiwan. Combine this with the recent changes in American policy regarding nuclear weapons at the behest of the Bush Administration, in which nuclear payloads will no longer be considered simply as deterrents but may be used by the United States in tactical combat use, and a picture of a very damaging conflict between China and the US seems likely.

“If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons,” said General Zhu Chenghu in mid-July, speaking at a function for foreign journalists organized, in part, by the Chinese government.

But despite its lack of recognition through the world’s media, Taiwan and its inhabitants aren’t just pawns on the chessboard of international politics. Taiwanese culture has taken off since it established one of the world’s most healthy economies;

Drawing on Han Chinese traditions it has built itself a world-renowned cuisine. Tourists come from all over the world to view the beautifully kept landscapes and palaces. The energetic island youth have made karaoke something of a national phenomenon and turned gadgetry and video games into nothing short of high art.

Taiwanese culture also influences the West’s, with Bubble tea and milk tea both popular drinks in urban Europe and the United States. The acclaimed director Ang Lee, whose martial arts epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon became one of the most popular foreign films in US Box Office history.

Could Taiwan be at the center of what may have the potential to escalate into world war? Nobody can be certain, but given the situation at present, one thing is for sure; it is unlikely the islanders will see much peace for some time.

However, with a youthful and passionate generation of activists, campaigners, journalists and artists growing up on the island that doesn’t exist, maybe this, one of Asia’s few functioning democracies, will be able to flourish and survive, teaching a lesson to China and the US about how defiance and patriotism really can make a nation great, rather than just plain greedy.

Amongst all the diplomacy, we see a chilling truth, echoed in the history of many other regions and continents around the globe; when communities are split so violently by those who seek to divide and conquer for private gain, the deep wounds caused to native culture and social structures can continue to bleed down through generations.