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Taiwan's Identity Challenge
- SAIS Review of International Affairs
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 25, Number 2, Summer-Fall 2005
- pp. 83-92
- 10.1353/sais.2005.0032
- Article
- Additional Information
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Taiwan's geo-strategic position and its domestic political development have been in conflict throughout its modern, post-Chinese civil war history. Taiwan's geo-strategic position, defined by its oppositional relationship to China, has ensured that Taiwan and the cross-strait relations have remained a global flash point for close to 60 years. For the first 40 years, Taiwan's goal to reclaim China has underpinned the authoritarian Kuomintang party-state and its domestic program of enforced Sinification. Since the end of the Cold War, Taiwan's democratization has fundamentally changed Taiwan's political identity and unleashed an irreversible nation-building process. Taiwan's nation-building is moving the country away from reunification with a rising China. Unfortunately, this decision compromises its already vulnerable geo-strategic position and external support.