自古以来

indy

https://youtube.com/playlist?lis ... 4DrbH6m5j7XP6tWdjIJ

Many have been arguing about the legitimacy of China claiming Taiwan is part of China. Please spend some time watching this 6 episodes documentary series on Taiwan, if you understand Chinese language (it’s narrated in Chinese w/o English subtitles). It clearly explains Japan’s surrendering and renouncing Taiwan, restoring all the stolen territories to China in compliance to the Potsdam Declaration 1945 and Cairo Declaration 1943.

In these videos, you can clearly see the enormous effort China put into rebuilding Taiwan after the ravaging war between the WW2 Allies and Japan, from the ground up, namely the basic livelihood, education, infrastructure, finance, commercial and trade. Elites and expertise were brought into Taiwan from China to facilitate the rebuilding work.

My understanding is that these effort were made at the expense of the people in Mainland China. And that established the foundation for Taiwan to become one of the Four Asian Tigers during the rapid industrialisation between 1960-1990. China could have brought in the then devalued Swiss Franc (The Great Depression) to Taiwan for the rebuilding fund but doing that would duplicate the bad inflation already happening in Shanghai. Hence the Old Taiwan Dollar was created in 1946 and New Taiwan Dollar in 1949. Please also note that Chinese Yuan was introduced in 1948; China could have replaced Old Taiwan Dollar with Chinese Yuan but it didn’t. What was the reason? The damaged mines and factories, the destroyed communication, transportation and power systems, disrupted agriculture and food supplies had brought the country’s financial to its knees. China wanted a new beginning for Taiwan province. Another incident that is not commonly mentioned, Jiang Kai-shek transported gold(8 million oz t.) and silver(1.2 million oz t.) from Shanghai to Taiwan between Dec 1948 and May 1949. That’s more than USD3.3b in today’s money.

Attached is the photo excerpts from Cairo Declaration 1943, courtesy of University of British Columbia archives.

https://rbscarchives.library.ubc ... _1135_30_15_001.pdf

indy