“Strategic ambiguity” – the policy that has underpinned the West’s defence of Taiwan for half a century or more – rests on another ambiguity: Taiwan’s status in international law. And that status matters because it could help us answer three questions:
does China have a legal right to restore control over its own territory by force?
do Taiwan and its allies have a legal right to resist such an attack?
might Taiwan even have the right to declare independence?
The islands we know as Taiwan have been inhabited for 30,000 years, including by successive waves of peoples from mainland China. Taiwan was subject to partial Dutch and Spanish colonisation from the early 17th century, was partly controlled by the remnants of the mainland Ming dynasty from 1661, then colonised by the mainland Qing dynasty from 1683. The main island was incorporated as a Chinese province in 1887.
