Crisis of Taiwan

Crisis of Taiwan

At the time of the Tang dynasty, and later during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, the Indonesian empires of Sriwijaya and Majapahit covered a larger part of the archipelago, including Malaysia's peninsular.

Many of the actual political boundaries are, in fact, the inheritance of recent and more or less artificial colonial divisions. The Portuguese settled in Macao and the eastern part of Timor; the Netherlands occupied a large part of the Malay archipelago; the British grabbed the Malay peninsula, Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei and simultaneously created Singapore and Hong Kong; and the Japanese occupied Taiwan, while most of mainland China was divided by the colonialist powers of the time.

To a certain extent, Hong Kong is quite comparable to Singapore, Macao to Timor, and Taiwan to Malaysia and Brunei. Apparently, the legitimacy of the Chinese claims over many temporarily separated territories from its mainland are now widely accepted by the international community. Where else could such similar principles apply?

BERNARD DORLEANS

Jakarta