This research paper summarizes the history, economic development, resources, political evolution, society and culture of Taiwan (the Republic of China or ROC) from the standpoint of a private foreign investor. Taiwan is an excellent country in which to conduct an international business. Only one grave uncertainty clouds the horizon for private foreign investors, the current impasse in cross-strait relations between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC), which constitutes a large imponderable hazard for the foreseeable future.
Taiwan is comprised of a large (13,895 square miles) mountainous and subtropical main island lying about 100 miles off the southeast coast of China and many smaller surrounding islands. Originally inhabited by Malayo-Polynesian aborigines, Taiwan's present day population of approximately 22 million people is almost entirely of Han Chinese descent. Over many centuries, Chinese farmers and settlers from Fukien (Fujian) and other coastal provinces settled along Taiwan's coasts. First the Portuguese and then the Dutch established outposts there in the 17th century. Ming Empire loyalists drove out the Dutch. From 1683 to 1895, Taiwan was part of the Manchu Empire which paid little heed to it. It was ceded to Japan after China lost the Sino-Japanese War and remained a Japanese colony until 1945 when, pursuant to the Cairo and Potsdam conferences of World War II, sovereignty over it reverted to Nationalist China.
As the Nationalist regime on the mainland collapsed during the Chinese civil war of 1945-1949, Goldstein (1997) said "Nationalist officials swarmed onto the island, seizing property and imposing the same kind of corrupt, repressive rule that existed on the mainland" (p. 12). Today, the approximately 85 percent of the people whose forbears arrived before 1949 call themselves Taiwanese. The Nationalist regime ruled Taiwan as a mixed military and one party (Kuomintang or KMT) police state during the...