A history of China-Taiwan relations

By The Associated Press Sat Aug 12, 1:31 PM ET

Taiwan was claimed by China’s Manchu dynasty in 1683 after large-scale immigration from the Chinese mainland to the island.

Japan gained control of Taiwan in 1895 after defeating China in the first Sino-Japanese war. The Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek took Taiwan back at the end of World War II, and retreated to the island following its overthrow by Mao Zedong and his communists in 1949. The two sides then waged their own Cold War — two dictatorships each claiming to be the sole government of all of China.

The United States staunchly backed anti-communist Taiwan. But after the Nixon administration achieved detente with Mao, Taiwan’s U.N. seat was awarded to Beijing. In 1979 Washington recognized Beijing as the government of China and severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan, but continued to maintain close quasi-official ties.

China launched far reaching economic reforms in the 1980s that would transform it into a global economic powerhouse. However, it has remained a one-party communist state.

Taiwan began to shed the mantle of Chiang’s Nationalist Party dictatorship in the mid-1980s. It held its first direct presidential election in 1996, and four years later elected Chen Shui-bian as president, ending the Nationalists’ half-century monopoly on power.

Over 400 dead and missing in China from Typhoon Saomai

by Peter Harmsen

BEIJING (AFP) – Chinese rescuers have recovered the bodies of more than 100 drowned fishermen, bringing the number of dead and missing from Typhoon Saomai in the country to over 400, officials and state media said.

The total confirmed death toll in the three provinces of Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangxi reached 255, while more than 160 were still unaccounted for, state-run Xinhua news agency said.

In Fujian, whose long coastline forms the southeastern corner of the mainland, the grim task of hauling bodies from the sea brought the number of dead to 166, four times the figure reported the day before.

Saomai has caused severe economic losses and fatalities in our province,” the Fujian provincial government’s water resources department said in a statement posted on its website on Monday.

The dead and missing were mainly caused when ships and boats that had sought harbor to evade the typhoon were torn from their moorings by the strong wind, and then were shattered and sank.

Saomai, the eighth typhoon to hit China so far this summer, struck on Thursday last week. With winds of over 215 kilometers (135 miles) an hour, it was the most powerful to hit the mainland in half a century.

The rise in the death toll on Monday was due mainly to the discovery that the typhoon had claimed a heavy toll in fishing communities near the city of Fuding in Fujian’s extreme north.

Xinhua said a total of 138 were confirmed dead and 86 others still missing in the Fuding area, almost all of them believed to be fishermen.

Out of the bodies that had been retrieved from the sea, 27 were of people who came from elsewhere and could not be identified, said the statement by the provincial government.

It urged locals to report immediately if they discovered bodies that had drifted ashore, suggesting the toll would again rise.

Women were walking along the coastline near Fuding city looking for what they feared might be the body of a husband, a father or a brother, a local resident said Monday.

Adding to their agony, the bodies that had drifted ashore had become almost impossible to identify, the man told AFP by telephone, asking not to be named.

“They all look the same because they’ve been in the water for so long,” he said.

A resident of Shacheng, a village in the area, described how fishing families rented boats to search for relatives among the bodies bobbing in the water.

“They sail up to each body and turn it around in the water and see if they recognize the face,” she told AFP by telephone. “If that’s not possible, they look for scars or other marks on the body.”

Also devastated in Typhoon Saomai was Zhejiang province, one of China’s most developed and prosperous provinces immediately to the north of Fujian, with 87 dead and 52 missing.

Photos from the Zhejiang town of Cangnan, right in Saomai’s path, showed buildings utterly devastated as if they had just been targeted in an air raid.

In the province of Jiangxi, further to the west, two people were reported killed and one missing.

Zhou Yongkang, the minister of public security, issued a warning against looting and other crimes in the wake of the typhoon.

Police should step up their patrols and strike hard against any attempts to take advantage of the emergency to break the law,” Zhou said, according to Xinhua.

Saomai was downgraded early Friday to a tropical storm and by early Sunday it was classified as a tropical depression.

China’s typhoon season, which began in May about a month earlier than usual, has seen hundreds if not thousands of people killed or left missing.

Typhoon Prapiroon, which made landfall on August 3, killed at least 80 people and Tropical Storm Bilis, which hit on July 14, hovered over eastern and central China for 10 days, killing more than 600 people.

The government said in late July that more than 1,300 people had been killed and 306 were missing from weather-related incidents from the start of May to July 21.