Development
The concept of One China has been part of the Chinese political orthodoxy since ancient times. Often, if one claimed to be the Emperor of China with the Mandate of Heaven, then all other regimes within the country were either considered rebel or tributary. Accordingly, from the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 until the mid-1970s the concept of reunification was not the main subject of discourse between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China; each formally envisioned a military takeover of one by the other. The Kuomintang (KMT) believed that they would, probably with American help, one day retake mainland China while Mao Zedong's communist regime would collapse in a popular uprising and the Nationalist forces would be welcomed back. The Communist Party of China considered the Republic of China to have been made defunct by the newly-established People's Republic of China and thus regarded the ROC a renegade entity to be eliminated for the sake of reunification. The concept of reunification replaced the concept of liberation by the PRC in 1979 as it embarked, after the death of Mao, on economic reforms and pursued a more pragmatic and less ideological foreign policy. In Taiwan, the possibility of retaking mainland China became increasingly remote in the late 1970s, particularly after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the PRC and United States in 1979 and the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975.
With the end of authoritarian rule in the 1980s and the shift in power within the KMT away from the Mainlanders who accompanied Chiang to Taiwan, the KMT began to move away from the ideology of Chinese reunification. In 1991, President Lee Teng-hui announced that his government no longer disputed the rule of the Communists in mainland China, leading to semi-official peace talks (under what would be termed as the "1992 consensus") between the two sides. The PRC broke off these talks in 1999 when President Lee described relations with the PRC as "special state-to-state".
Until the mid-1990s, supporters of Chinese reunification on Taiwan were also bitterly opposed to the Communist Party of China. Since the mid-1990s there has been a considerable warming of relations between the Communist Party and supporters of Chinese reunification as both oppose the pro-Taiwan independence bloc that was elected to executive power in Taiwan following President Lee's retirement. This has brought about the accusation that reunification supporters are attempting to sell out Taiwan. The response of reunification supporters is that closer ties with mainland China, especially economic ones, are in the interest of Taiwan.
After the presidential elections of 2000, which brought the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party's candidate Chen Shui-bian to power, the Kuomintang, faced with defections to the People First Party, expelled Lee Teng-hui and his supporters and reoriented the party back towards reunification. At the same time, the People's Republic of China shifted its efforts at reunification away from military threats (which it has not renounced but which it has de-emphasized) towards economic incentives designed to encourage Taiwanese businesses to invest in mainland China and aiming to create a pro-Beijing bloc within the Taiwanese electorate.
Within Taiwan, supporters of reunification tend to see "China" as a larger cultural entity divided by the Chinese Civil War into separate states or governments within the country. In addition, supporters of reunification also do not oppose localization of culture or a Taiwanese identity but rather see the Taiwanese identity as one piece of a broader Chinese identity rather than as a separate cultural identity. What supporters of Chinese reunification do oppose is desinicization inherent in the foreign Communist ideology built into the system as seen during the Cultural Revolution, along with the effort to emphasize a Taiwanese identity as separate from a Chinese one. As of the 2008 election of Ma Ying-Jeou, the KMT agrees to the principle of One China, one led by the Republic of China rather than the People's Republic of China as the official government since 1911.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Reunification
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