STATE ORGANS | THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA | MULTI-PARTY COOPERATION AND THE POLITICAL CONSULTATIVE SYSTEM | JURISDICTION | HONG KONG | MACAO | TAIWAN | RELIGION | RELATIONS WITH FOREIGN COUNTRIES

Taiwan

Consumer Price Indices        Output of Major Crops

Gross National Product        Total Imports and Exports

Main Indicators of Area and Population

Output of Major Industrial Products

Railway and Highway Passenger and Freight Traffic

Reunification is one of the three major tasks (continuing to push forward the modernization drive, accomplishing the motherland's reunification, and safeguarding world peace and promoting common development) for the Chinese people in the 21st century.

Taiwan has been part of the sacred Chinese territory since ancient times. But at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, a poor and weak China sank into semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism under the invasion of imperialist powers. In the wake of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 launched by Japanese imperialism to annex Korea and invade China, Japan forcibly occupied Taiwan. When the Chinese won the War of Resistance Against Japan in 1945, compatriots across the Taiwan Straits shared the joy of Taiwan's return to the embrace of the motherland. When New China was founded in 1949, the world saw a China with complete sovereignty towering in the East again. Regretfully, however, Taiwan was unable to be reunified with the mainland because of the civil war, which was not yet over, and the armed intervention by foreign countries. The Chinese had to continue the struggle for the reunification of the two sides across the Taiwan Straits. From the late 1970s, relations across the Straits, pushed by the principle of “peaceful reunification and one country, two systems”, made new progress. The long-term absolute separation between the two sides across the Straits was brought to an end and personnel exchange and exchanges in other areas reached an unprecedented scale. At the end of the 20th century, China made great achievements in its reform and opening-up drive. Hong Kong and Macao's return to the motherland, which ended the history of Western powers occupying Chinese territory, marked a great progress in the process of reunification. Exhilarated by this, Chinese compatriots at home and abroad became even more concerned about the early settlement of the Taiwan issue and the complete reunification of the motherland.

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