{"id":47619,"date":"2022-08-19T02:03:50","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T17:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2022\/aug\/18\/power-not-history-is-driving-chinas-stance-on-taiwan"},"modified":"2022-08-19T02:03:50","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T17:03:50","slug":"power-not-history-is-driving-chinas-stance-on-taiwan-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=47619","title":{"rendered":"Power, not history, is driving China\u2019s stance on Taiwan | Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Richard Sproat<\/strong>,<strong> Joseph R Allen <\/strong>and <strong>Adam Burden <\/strong>put the Chinese ambassador\u2019s pronouncements in an opinion article into historical context<\/p>\n<p>Zheng Zeguang, the Chinese ambassador to the UK, parrots the standard People\u2019s Republic of China talking point that \u201cTaiwan has been an inalienable part of China\u2019s territory since ancient times\u201d (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2022\/aug\/16\/taiwan-uk-us-china-nancy-pelosi\" title=\"\">Taiwan is now a touchstone issue for the UK, the US and for us in China. This is how we see it, 16 August<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>The island of Taiwan has indeed been inhabited by humans for thousands of years, but the Han Chinese only started settling there in the late 13th century. This hardly counts as \u201cancient times\u201d in terms of the 3,200-year recorded history of China (dating from the earliest Chinese written documents, the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.unesco.org\/memoryoftheworld\/registry\/511\" title=\"\">oracle bone inscriptions<\/a>), not to mention the much, much earlier history of continuous settlement in mainland China, for which there is ample evidence in archaeological records.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2022\/aug\/18\/power-not-history-is-driving-chinas-stance-on-taiwan\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Richard Sproat, Joseph R Allen and Adam Burden put the Chinese ambassador\u2019s pronouncements in an opinion article into historical contextZheng Zeguang, the Chinese ambassador to the UK, parrots the standard People\u2019s Republic of China talking point that &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":269,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,50,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-china","category-taiwan"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/269"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47620,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47619\/revisions\/47620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}