T aiwan I ndependent Movement

Abstract The Taiwan Independent Movement (TIM) refers to collective, organized efforts to establish a sovereign Taiwan independent of China. Since the seventeenth century, Taiwan has been closely related to China. The western part of Taiwan became part of Chinese territory in 1684 after Qing troops defeated Koxinga, a Ming dynasty loyalist who drove away the Dutch colonialists in 1662 and used Taiwan as a base for his military campaign against Qing dynasty rulers. Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 by the Qing dynasty in the Treaty of Shimonoseki that followed the 1894 Sino‐Japanese War and was returned to Chinese rule again in 1945 after World War II. Since the seventeenth century, many Chinese Han migrants have settled in Taiwan, constituting more than 95 percent of the island's population by 1905, according to the Japanese census. Advocates of TIM, however, claimed that after 51 years of Japanese rule the Taiwanese had evolved into a nation different from China. The TIM claim was contested by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime and the Kuomintang (KMT, literally “Nationalist Party”) regime, which relocated to Taiwan after the former took over the Chinese mainland in 1949. Both the CCP and the KMT claimed that Taiwan had been a part of China since ancient times.