An overview of how today’s cross-strait tensions took shape over the past century

The tension between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan is not a recent development, nor is it reducible to a simple dispute over geography. At its core, it is a sovereignty conflict, a question of which government holds legitimate authority over which territory, and it has remained unresolved for more than seven decades.

The conditions that produced the current standoff were set in motion across the span of a century, through imperial transition, civil war, Cold War alignment, and the gradual emergence of a distinct Taiwanese political identity. What exists today is not a new crisis. It is the continuation of a fracture that was never resolved.

Taiwan’s separation from the Chinese mainland began not in 1949 but in 1895, when the Qing dynasty ceded the island, known by Western powers as Formosa, to Japan following its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese colonial period lasted fifty years, until 1945. During that time, Taiwan developed along a trajectory distinct from the mainland.

Japanese colonial administration transformed the island’s infrastructure, educational institutions, and economic organization. By the time the colonial period ended, Taiwan had spent half a century outside the political and administrative structures of any Chinese government. That separation left a mark on the island’s development that subsequent events would deepen rather than erase.

The end of World War II brought Taiwan under Chinese administration, led by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party. The transfer was short-lived as a moment of stability. The Chinese Civil War, which had been suspended during the war with Japan, resumed immediately.

By 1949, Communist forces under Mao Zedong had prevailed on the mainland, where the People’s Republic of China was established in Beijing. The Nationalist government, with its military forces, approximately two million civilians, and the gold reserves of the Chinese national treasury, relocated to Taiwan.

Two governments then existed, the PRC, controlling the mainland, and the ROC, controlling Taiwan. Each claimed to be the legitimate government of China. Neither recognized the other’s authority. That dual claim, established in 1949, remains the structural core of the cross-strait conflict today.

The early Cold War period hardened the divide. The United States, engaged in a broader confrontation with Communist expansion, backed the Republic of China on Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese government and secured its seat at the United Nations. Military tensions punctuated the 1950s.

The First Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954 to 1955 and the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958 both involved PRC military action against ROC-held islands and drew direct U.S. military engagement in defense of Taiwan. Meanwhile, Taiwan remained under martial law, a state of emergency declared in 1949 that would not be lifted for nearly four decades. During those early Cold War years, the PRC remained largely isolated from Western politics and economic networks.

The diplomatic architecture of the Cold War began to shift in the 1970s in ways that permanently altered Taiwan’s international standing. In 1971, the United Nations transferred China’s seat from the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China, effectively recognizing the PRC as the sole legitimate Chinese government in the eyes of the international body.

In 1979, the United States formally switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Taiwan lost its formal diplomatic relationships with most countries in rapid succession. However, the shift did not eliminate U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s security. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979, establishing a framework for unofficial relations and defense support. But it also fundamentally changed Taiwan’s position in the international order. From that point forward, Taiwan would conduct its affairs as a de facto state without formal recognition from most of the world’s governments.

Taiwan’s internal transformation over the following decades moved in a direction that diverged sharply from the mainland. Martial law ended in 1987 after 38 years, one of the longest periods of martial law in modern history. A democratic transition followed, producing multiparty elections, a free press, and civilian control of government.

In 1996, Taiwan held its first direct presidential election. It was a milestone that coincided with renewed military pressure from the PRC, which conducted missile tests in waters near Taiwan. The tests prompted the United States to deploy two aircraft carrier groups to the region, but the election proceeded, and the democratic system held.

The emergence of a distinct Taiwanese identity accompanied the democratic transition and accelerated after it. Successive generations of Taiwan-born residents, including descendants of families that had arrived from the mainland in 1949, increasingly identified as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.

Public opinion surveys conducted over the following decades documented a consistent and widening shift in self-identification away from a Chinese identity and toward a Taiwanese one. That shift had political consequences. It produced governments in Taipei that were less inclined to accept the PRC’s framework for eventual unification and more inclined to assert Taiwan’s separate political existence, even without formally declaring independence.

The PRC’s position has remained consistent across governments and decades. Taiwan is, in Beijing’s formulation, a province of China, and unification is not a matter of if but when and how. The PRC has not renounced the use of military force to achieve that outcome.

As Taiwan’s democratic identity strengthened and its political distance from the mainland grew, the PRC responded with increasing military activity in the waters and airspace surrounding the island. Fighter aircraft incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone became routine. Naval exercises simulating blockade and invasion scenarios grew in scale and frequency.

Diplomatic pressure succeeded in reducing the number of countries maintaining formal relations with Taiwan to a small handful. Economic leverage was also applied against governments and corporations perceived as too accommodating toward Taipei. The tools the PRC deploys in the current period fall short of open war but constitute a sustained pressure campaign across multiple domains.

Military signaling through air and naval activity establishes presence and tests response times. Economic pressure shapes the behavior of trading partners and multinational corporations with interests on both sides of the Strait. Information operations target Taiwanese public opinion and political institutions. The effect is a condition of managed tension, neither the stability of a settled diplomatic relationship nor the rupture of open conflict, that has become the baseline of cross-strait relations in the 21st century.

Taiwan’s strategic importance extends well beyond the island itself. Its geographic position places it at the center of the first island chain, a series of archipelagos running from Japan through the Philippines that forms a key boundary in East Asian security planning. Control of Taiwan, or denial of its use to adversaries, carries significant implications for naval and air operations across the western Pacific.

Japan, which administers islands within close proximity to Taiwan, has made clear that a cross-strait conflict would directly threaten its own security. The United States maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity regarding the specific circumstances under which it would intervene militarily, a posture designed to deter both a PRC attack and a unilateral Taiwanese declaration of independence.

Taiwan’s semiconductor industry adds a dimension to the strategic calculation that has no precedent in earlier periods of the conflict. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, known as TSMC, produces a significant share of the world’s most advanced chips. These are precision components on which virtually every modern electronics sector depends, from consumer devices to defense systems.

A disruption to Taiwan’s semiconductor output, whether through conflict, blockade, or coercion, would reverberate through global supply chains in ways that no government or industry has a plan to fully absorb. That vulnerability is understood in Washington, Tokyo, Seoul, and Brussels, and it shapes the strategic calculus around Taiwan in ways that purely military or diplomatic frameworks do not capture.

Milwaukee is not adjacent to the Taiwan Strait. But the assembly lines at Harley-Davidson, the imaging labs at GE HealthCare in Wauwatosa, and the defense contractors supplying the Great Lakes region run on advanced chips that come from an island 7,000 miles away. That supply chain has no redundancy. It has no backup. If Taiwan stops producing, Milwaukee industry stops too.