Apart from the incorrect ‘breakaway province’ cliché, another favourite of the press when writing on Taiwan is to mention that the island was separated from China in 1949, at the end of the Chinese Civil War. In this piece I argue that this is wrong. Taiwan was separated from China in 1895, when the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan to the Japanese Empire. There has been a distinct Taiwanese society ever since. The chaotic 1945–9 period during which it was part of a Nanjing-based Republic of China (ROC) was too short and tenuous to undo this. The post-1949 period was indeed initially dominated by refugees from the Mainland, but they were migrants making a new home in an existing society. The fact that they brought their Chinese cultural background with them and sought to remould Taiwanese society in that light does not change the fact that the end-product was something new and different. The real point of divergence for Taiwan was 1895.
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