Name: Why Didn't China Conquer Taiwan?
Uploaded: 2025-08-07T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 10 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Ah, Taiwan, that small island off the coast of China that's been giving its communist neighbors a very big headache.

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You'd be forgiven for thinking that the Taiwan problem is relatively new, a leftover from the Chinese Civil War and the Cold War that followed.

But truth be told, China's troubles with Taiwan began much earlier, albeit in a surprisingly similar form.

To be clear, for most of its history, China didn't even want Taiwan.

In the eyes of the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties, Taiwan was a barbarian backwater inhabited by various Austronesian peoples and the occasional Chinese pirate or fisherman.

It is in this sorry state of affairs that the Portuguese first found Taiwan around the year 1542.

Unlike the Chinese, the Portuguese liked the island so much that they called it Formosa or Beautiful Island, though they weren't able to establish any settlements.

It was the Dutch who first laid claim to Taiwan by building an outpost on its southwestern edge, quickly followed by the Spanish who occupied a strip of coast up north.

This cozy arrangement didn't last very long.

After all, sharing was never a European strong suit.

And so the Dutch kicked the Spanish out in 1642, just in time for the rapid collapse of the Ming Dynasty against invading Manchus from the north.

In a very blunt foreshadowing of things to come, the loyalists of the now-deposed Ming Dynasty fled from the victorious Manchus on the mainland to Taiwan from 1661 onwards, kicking out our Dutch friends in the process.

But the Manchus weren't able to invade Taiwan immediately in pursuit.

They were, after all, steppe nomads with no naval experience to speak of.

Instead, they ordered the entire southern coast of China to be evacuated at least 15 kilometers inland.

Close to a million people were forcibly displaced to prevent any trade with Taiwan and to starve out the Ming holdouts, with questionable results.

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The new Qing dynasty ended up having to invade Taiwan anyway, which they only managed to do 20 years later after building up their navy.

And so, in 1683, China invaded Taiwan with over 200 ships and won one of the largest naval battles of the 17th century.

Taiwan's rebel regime was definitively ended and the island was, for the first time, in formal Chinese possession.

But now that they had it, the Qing weren't quite sure what to do with Taiwan.

Many in the imperial court pushed for it to be abandoned, as it was, by all accounts, a poor backwater with minimal economic and cultural value.

The military argued fiercely to keep Taiwan after bleeding so much to occupy it.

And this was indeed what the emperor decided to do, but under strict conditions.

Taiwan was to be integrated into China as a prefecture, but with heavy restrictions on settler migration.

In this way, foreigners couldn't use it as an outpost and it would be too depopulated to serve as a rebel base.

Taiwan would remain as this frontier military-occupied territory for the next two centuries, producing over a hundred separate rebellions, so much so that the Qing had a proverb about it.

But while the Qing were busy putting down rebellions, the Japanese were getting down and dirty with industrialization.

They beat up the Qing so badly with their new modernized army that China handed over Taiwan, the Liaodong Peninsula and their supposed suzerainty over Korea, which we discussed in another recent sidequest, to Japan.

This time around, it was Qing loyalists that tried to resist a hostile takeover of Taiwan and to their credit, they did proclaim Asia's first republic in the process, but they were violently put down in just under six months.

Taiwan was Japan's first colony and, as an eager imperial power, Japan invested heavily in railways, schools and a public health system to show off their colonial prowess in front of the western great powers.

In the meantime, the Manchu-Qing dynasty collapsed and China became a republic, only for it to face regional warlordism and a communist insurgency that Japan was all too eager to exploit in the lead-up to World War II.

By the time Japan surrendered and was forced to return Taiwan to China, the island was already starkly more developed and wealthy than its mainland compatriots.

But now that Taiwan was with China once more, they all lived happily ever after.

The republican Chinese government was notoriously corrupt and exploited Taiwan's resources to fight their war in the mainland against the warlords and the communists.

When the mainland war turned against them in 1949, they fled en masse to Taiwan, just like the Ming loyalists three centuries earlier.

Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China in October of that year, but just as before, the new mainland Chinese regime had no navy with which to pursue the holdouts on Taiwan.

The communists weren't even able to take a small island off their own coast, which is miraculously still ruled by Taiwan today.

So it was clear that taking Taiwan itself would require a lot more preparation.

Mao ordered the training of a half a million strong invasion force and the construction of thousands of ships, with MiG-15 aircraft being generously provided by the Soviet Union.

This new and improved amphibious army would be put to the test the very next spring in the invasion of Hainan, the other big Chinese island that was still under control by the republican holdouts.

This time around, the invasion was a resounding success.

Over a hundred thousand men crossed the Chongzhou Strait and secured Hainan in two weeks with relatively few casualties.

What was even more emboldening for Mao was the total lack of any reaction by the United States, who had up until then provided the republicans with massive loans and military equipment.

America had made it clear in January 1950 that Japan and the Philippines were within its protective umbrella, but Taiwan and Korea were conspicuously left unmentioned.

This convinced Mao that the Americans had written off republican China, and so he ordered the invasion of Taiwan to commence in the summer of 1950.

But just as final preparations were underway, Kim Il-sung of North Korea decided to initiate his own invasion plans, of South Korea, with Stalin's blessing and with the same expectation that the US would not intervene.

Unfortunately for Kim and for Mao, the US did intervene.

The fear of a communist Korea being used as a springboard against Japan was simply too great.

And so President Truman backtracked on America's non-intervention policy by sending the Eighth Army to protect South Korea, and by ordering the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent any further expansion by communist China.

With Taiwan now under the American defense umbrella, all hopes of invasion were off.

The long standoff had begun, and although America's reasons for protecting Taiwan have changed over the years, its guarantee hasn't wavered so far.

And as odd as it may sound, the man we have to thank for all this is Kim Il-sung, as without the Korean War, the US would have probably let Taiwan fall just like it had done with Hainan.

In any case, I want to thank you my friends for watching.

If you enjoyed our brief but exciting tour of Taiwan's survival, consider supporting us on Patreon so that we too can survive any overwhelming invasions by the YouTube algorithm.

Also be sure to check out the free online PvP strategy game of our friends over at Supremacy World War 3.

Follow the link in the description within the next 30 days to get a delicious starter pack with an elite bomber seasonal unit and wage your war of global domination.

In the meantime, let us know what other topics you'd like us to explore next and stay tuned for the next improbably prosperous episode of SideQuest.

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