Foreign Relations of Taiwan - Historical Background

Historical Background

Established in 1912, the early years of the Republic of China were characterised by the domination of warlords and foreign incursions. When World War I broke out in 1914, Japan fought on the Allied side and seized the German possessions in Shandong. The Japanese set before the Beiyang government in Beijing (then romanised as 'Peking') the Twenty-One Demands. The Beijing government rejected some of these demands but yielded to the Japanese insistence on keeping the Shandong territory already in its possession. Beijing also recognised Tokyo's authority over southern Manchuria and the eastern part of modern-day Inner Mongolia. In 1917, in secret communiques, Britain, France, and Italy assented to the Japanese claim in exchange for Japanese naval action against Germany.

In 1917, the Chinese Acting President Feng Kuo-Chang declared war on Germany in the hope of recovering its lost province Shandong, then under Japanese control. But in 1918, the Beiyang government signed a secret deal with Japan accepting the latter's claim to Shandong. When the Treaty of Versailles confirmed the Japanese claim to Shandong and Beijing's sellout became public, internal reaction was shattering. Thousands of students gathered in the streets of Beijing in a protest known as the May Fourth Movement. In Paris, the Chinese prevented their delegates from participating to the debates.

Between 1901 and 1937, the United States military maintained a strong presence in China to maintain Far East trade interests and to pursue a permanent alliance with the Republic of China, after long diplomatic difficulties with the Chinese Empire. The relationship between the U.S. and China was mostly on-again off-again, with periods of both cordial diplomatic relations accompanied by times of severed relations and violent anti-U.S. protests. The United States military in China was slowly withdrawn to protect other U.S. interests in the Pacific with the approach of World War II.

After years of Japanese control of Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, war broke out between Japan and China in 1937 in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident.