PDF(2.7mb) - 國家政策研究基金會

158 Taiwan Development Perspectives 2009
China has been an empire since the First Emperor
founded his Jin Dynasty in 221 B.C. An empire is a
state that has a great extent of territory and a great variety
of peoples under one rule. The Chinese empire,
which still exists in the twenty-first century as the People’s
Republic of China, has since expanded or shrunk,
remaining divided and in turmoil for most of the time.
In fact, China was unified usually at the beginning of
each new dynasty, but a unified China did not last long,
a century at most.
History has seen the rise and fall of empires.
However, the days of the empire are over. The British
Empire, where the sun never set, has been taken over
by the Commonwealth. The Soviet empire came to an
end with the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. It is a historical inevitability.
The demise of the British Empire, on the other
hand, sets an example for Chinese reunification. It
yields a strategic lesson for Taiwan, the thriving island
state since 1950 which will be annexed by or merged
with the People’s Republic as a small part of a large,
unified China in the end. It is a historical inevitability.
Taiwan’s history began in the seventeenth century
with the Dutch colonization of the island. Koxinga,
defeated in the Chinese civil war, led his army to invade
Taiwan and drove out the Dutch in 1662. Chinese
immigrants came to Taiwan in droves and the island
was fully Sinicized by the time it was annexed by Qing
China in 1683. Taiwan, better known as Formosa, was
ceded together with the Pesacdores by China to Japan
under the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. They were
restored, along with Manchuria, to the Republic of
China at the end of World War II in 1945. When Generalissimo
Chinag Kai-shek, defeated by Mao Zedong in
the Chinese civil war like Koxinga in 1662, came to
Taipei at the head of his Kuomintang government at the
end of 1949, Taiwan assumed a new status, that of sovereign
state. Taiwan was returned by Japan to China as
a province. With the national government moved to
Taipei, Taiwan became an independent sovereign state
with the official title of the Republic of China, albeit it
is so recognized by a mere 23 countries of the world
and the number may continue to decrease. The celebrated
New Encyclopedia Britannica, however, dates
Taiwan becoming a new independent nation on October
25, 1945. The Republic of China formally took over
Taiwan from Japan on that day, when General Rikichi
Ando handed over an instrument of surrender as governor-general
of Taiwan to General Chen Yi, administrator-general
of Taiwan.
The British Commonwealth of Nations, created in
1931, was an evolutionary outgrowth of the British
Empire, of which Queen Victoria was the first empress.
The traditional British policy of allowing considerable
self-government in its colonies led to the existence by
the nineteenth century of several dependent states,
which were populated to a significant degree by Europeans
accustomed to the form of parliamentary rule and
which possessed large degrees of sovereignty. In 1837 a
period of increasing tension in Upper and Lower Canada
culminated in rebellions. Lord Durham, sent from
England to investigate, declared in his famous report
that the only cure was to give the colonists the same
kind of self-government in all their internal affairs as
that enjoyed by Englishmen at home. The result was
that responsible government was established in the
North American colonies in 1846-49 and in Australia
and New Zealand a few years later. The next step these
self-governing colonies took was to change themselves
into dominions; i.e., their unification into national entities.
By this means colonies, which in their separate
existence had been small and weak, attained a size and
strength which made them at least potentially comparable
with the mother country. Unification also made
possible the steady growth of a distinctive national spirit.
In 1867 the four chief North American provinces,
on their own initiative but with full consent in Great
Britain, constituted a federation under the title of the
Dominion of Canada. It was the first dominion. After
Canada, dominion status was granted Australia in 1901,
New Zealand in 1907, the Union of South Africa in
1910, and 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland, which joined
the Commonwealth as the Irish Free State in 1921.