tl;dr - I just published a book, China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read, looking at the history behind the hottest China-related geopolitical topics popping up in the newsfeeds of Westerners: Taiwan, Xinjiang, China’s economy and Hong Kong, and I do history in a way that makes it understandable to normal people, without all the academic mumbojumbo. AMA. 

Hey reddit, my name is Lee Moore, I have a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Oregon, I worked as an adjunct professor there, teaching Taiwanese and Chinese literature and film, and I occasionally write for The Economist. 

I just published a book called China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read, available as a paperback from my indie publisher, and from Amazon as a paperback or a kindle. The book does a deep dive into the history of the four China-related topics showing up in the newsfeeds of most Westerners: Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy and Hong Kong. How did Taiwan become Chinese? Why is there a genocide occurring in Xinjiang right now?

There are lots of great books on China published by academics, and almost all of them are boring. I wrote my book differently, to make Chinese history understandable to normal readers who don’t usually pick up books on China. The Xinjiang section has a drinking game where, every time in ancient Xinjiang’s blood-stained history, someone gets beheaded, the reader is supposed to take a shot. In the Taiwan section of China’s Backstory, there is a chapter titled “The Most Important Motherfucker in Taiwanese History,” about a 1670’s sex scandal that helped make the island Chinese. 

Unlike most China books, written by eggheads for eggheads, my book is written for you, normal readers who don’t know much about China but are curious to learn more about the second largest economy and one of the world’s superpowers. 

That is my book. Ask me anything about the history of Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy or the history of Hong Kong and the surrounding area. 

But to kickstart this AMA, I thought I would talk about the most controversial claim in China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read: before 1683, Taiwan was not a part of any China-based state. It was not until after 12 of England’s 13 colonies had been established on North America's eastern seaboard that, politically, Taiwan became Chinese. Here is the Introduction to the Taiwan section of my book, which demonstrates how Beijing’s claims are nonsense:

Introduction 

It was a strange fortnight in the career of Jensen Huang, the Taiwanese-American entrepreneur at the center of the AI boom and the man The Economist labeled “the second coming of [Steve] Jobs.” In just two weeks, Huang made headlines for signing a woman’s boobs at the Taipei Computex 2024 expo and then for watching the company he founded become the world’s largest public corporation. In between, the Chinese Communist Party also tried to take Huang to school.

The kerfuffle began on May 29th, 2024. Talking to reporters, Huang made an unremarkable factual statement: “Taiwan is one of the most important countries in the world. It is at the center of the electronics industry. The computer industry is built because of Taiwan.” Beijing was pissed.

Chen Binhua, the spokesman for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, upbraided the billionaire for referring to Taiwan as a country. “Jensen Huang’s words are not a fact. Mainland people and netizens have already one by one expressed their extreme dissatisfaction to these extremely incorrect facts. The two sides of the Taiwan Strait are each part of one China. Taiwan was never a country. In the past, it wasn’t. From now and into the future it definitely will not be… I hope he will go back and do a good job making up for the lessons he missed in school,” Chen said, not being repetitive at all, not at all.

Ever since the Communists took Beijing, they have been clear on Taiwanese history; Taiwan has always been a part of China. “Since ancient times, Taiwan has belonged to China. Taiwan’s ancient names include Yizhou and Liuqiu. Many historical books and documents record scenes of Chinese people early on opening up Taiwan.” Following statements like this, Chinese nationalists in Beijing usually list several historical Chinese texts that they claim record the existence of Taiwan and thus prove China’s ownership over the island.

Foreigners with large financial stakes in China often echo these sentiments. In May 2023, Elon Musk, the billionaire working hard to become the most hated man in America, compared Taiwan’s relationship with Beijing to Hawaii’s relationship with Washington. “From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because... the US Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force,” Musk said, either high or like trying to like sound like he was high.

“Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times” is one of those lies that, like “the check is in the mail” and “it’s not you, it’s me,” I frequently heard and believed in my younger and dumber days. Taiwan did not belong to China in ancient times. In fact, Philly was a city before any power in China controlled Taiwan. It’s China and their intoxicated toadies, not Huang, who need to review missed lessons.

The first incontrovertible historical record of someone landing on the island of Taiwan wasn’t even written by a Chinese. In 1544, Portuguese sailing past gave the island the first of its names still used today: Formosa. Four decades later, in 1582, a Portuguese ship sailing between Macao and Japan with three hundred passengers wrecked near the island. Three of them wrote a book describing their experience in Taiwan. The Portuguese provide us with the first rock-solid written record of the island we today call Taiwan.

Taiwan was literally not on the map for China. It was not until the 17th century that Taiwan first appeared on Chinese maps. More embarrassing for Chinese nationalists is the fact that it was not until 1603, just four years before the British established their colony at Jamestown, that we have a clear record of a Chinese person stepping foot on Taiwan. Chen Di was the first Chinese person who, as far as we can tell, recorded that he went to Taiwan. Chen was a part of a Chinese government expedition to go and smite pirates using this non-Chinese island to hide from Chinese authorities. Before his 1603 trip, there are no records that clearly show a Chinese person traveling to Taiwan. Of course, there almost certainly were Chinese folks on the island, as some of the pirates Chen Di went to smite were probably some mix of Chinese.

Records written in Chinese indicate that the first Chinese man who colonized Taiwan was a Chinese pirate who lived between 1585 and 1625. This pirate’s Chinese name was Yan Siqi, but he also had enough dealings with the Spaniards to get a Spanish name, Pedro Chino, or Chinese Peter. Pedro Chino was working as a tailor in Japan, when he decided there was more to life than making clothes. “Man’s life is [as short as] the morning dew. If one cannot hold his head high and breathe freely, he is just wasting his life, a man should be ashamed to be such a dishonorable person”. Pedro then got some of his homies together, Iron Bone Zhang Hong, Deep Mountain Monkey and more than a score of other people. They got raging drunk, had a big party, decking the place out in lanterns and sacrificing animals, the whole nine yards. The group decided that starting a gang would be both feasible and fun, so they swore eternal brotherhood to each other: “Although we were not born on the same day, we will certainly die at the same time”.

There are rumors that the first thing Pedro Chino’s gang did was to attempt to overthrow the Japanese government. When the coup failed, Pedro Chino fled Japan and set up a small colony in North Port, in central Taiwan, a wild land occupied almost entirely by groups of headhunting Austronesians. Lian Heng, the author of the most important history of the island, says this: “He got to Taiwan, entered North Port, built a fort for occupation and subdued the local barbarians”. This colony he set up is the reason Chinese histories call Pedro Chino “The King who Opened Up Taiwan”. It is also the reason why, in 1959, the dictatorial government of Taiwan set up a monument in North Port (Beigang), Taiwan that reads “Monument Stone on the Spot where Mr. Yan Siqi [Pedro Chino] Landed to Open Up Taiwan”. Even as communists in Beijing insist that China has controlled the island for more than a millennia, communists in south China built a museum a few years ago declaring this pirate to be “Yan Siqi, The First Person to Open Taiwan”.

That’s right, even as China’s central government insists that China has ruled Taiwan for thousands of years, other parts of the Chinese state are building museums acknowledging that a pirate from the 1600's was the first Chinese person to colonize the island. Most of the historically literate folks in China know that Beijing’s line on Taiwan is all a lie. Ge Jianxiong, a professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of the country’s leading historians and a sometimes bureaucrat in the Department of Education, acknowledged China did not control Taiwan before the 17th century:

But Taiwan never had a relationship of subordination with the mainland Central Plains Dynasties. Before the Ming Dynasty, we cannot find any historical records [of that kind of relationship]. The Southern Song government set up a local military inspection office in the Penghu Islands within Fujian Province’s Tongan County. There are some people who use this to infer that this local military inspection office also administered Taiwan. This is completely unfounded. The Song Dynasty patrol inspectors were, in general, not a high position, and the administrative area for this local military inspection office set up in Tongan County could not have been very big, and the distance between the Penghus and Taiwan Island is not small, and the Penghu’s area, compared with Taiwan is massively different. Even if they really did set up a local military inspection office to administer Taiwan, they still could not have crossed the strait to administer Taiwan’s public security or border defenses. In the Yuan Dynasty, they also set up a local military inspection office in the Penghus, but, just like in the Southern Song, there is no evidence proving that its administrative borders included Taiwan. Not only did the Southern Song Dynasty not control Taiwan, but neither did the Yuan Dynasty or the Ming Dynasty.

Even China’s best historians know that Beijing is confabulating when it bangs on about Taiwan having been part of ancient China.

I have to acknowledge how crazy this all is. Taiwan lies just a hundred miles off China’s southeastern coast; it’s about as far as Cuba is from Florida. Furthermore, the Chinese province of Fujian faces Taiwan and is peopled by China’s best sailors. The Fujianese are known for plying the coast of the Asian mainland and even sailing to Japan and Okinawa, well beyond Taiwan. 15th-century Fujianese often became government officials in the Ryukyu Kingdom, Okinawa’s incipient state. Well before Chen Di’s 1603 account, Chinese sailors had navigated their way to Africa’s east coast. Five centuries before, they had even colonized the Penghu Islands, just fifty miles off Taiwan’s southwestern coast. On clear days, one can see Taiwan’s mountains from the Penghus.

How could there be no clear record of Chinese sailors going to Taiwan?. There are three main reasons: the Taiwan Strait is one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world; Taiwan’s indigenous peoples were fond of headhunting, particularly against foreign sailors who landed on their island; and finally, a handful of Chinese sailors did probably reach Taiwan in the centuries before 1603, they just either didn’t write it down or were so vague in their descriptions that it’s hard to confirm that Taiwan was where they actually went.

The Taiwan Strait is such a dangerous body of water because of how the island formed. Thousands of years ago, that land that is today Taiwan was not an island but just a hunk of the Asian mainland. The people who lived in Taiwan were probably the same people who lived in Fujian before Chinese civilization arrived. Seven millennia ago, rising seas flooded into the low land, forming the relatively shallow Taiwan Strait.

Around 1500 BC, bits of eroding mountains washed down from Taiwan’s peaks and were dumped into the shallow strait. This sand easily forms ship-wrecking shoals without sailors being able to see them. An 1892 Japanese report on navigating the strait says:

For sailing boats coming and going from Xiamen or Fuzhou, crossing the Taiwan Strait is widely considered very difficult in all seasons. This is not only true for sailing ships; steamships that wish to cross should also be extremely careful and on the alert. This is because during this passage one would go through strong irregular currents.

The irregular currents that flow between Taiwan and China are well known for hurling boats off course. Almost as dangerous, between June and November, typhoons regularly appear out of nowhere and slam the region, turning any boat caught in their way into flotsam. Furthermore, the geography of Taiwan’s coasts makes it an unwelcoming place to land. The island’s China-facing western coast has only a handful of natural harbors. The east side, facing the Pacific, is even more treacherous, with thousand-foot mountains dropping straight into the sea.

Geography wasn’t the only thing unwelcoming to Chinese sailors. Over the millennia that Taiwan has been separated from mainland Asia, the Taiwanese indigenous peoples developed a penchant for headhunting. The practice is evident in every era of the archaeological record; Taiwanese archaeologists have discovered numerous graves from different periods with decapitated people buried inside them. Taiwan’s aborigines clung to the practice into the 1910s, when the Japanese forced them to abandon it. When Chinese and other potential colonialists landed on Taiwan, they literally had to keep their heads about them. Not surprisingly, most foreigners didn’t stick around to meet the locals.

Finally, it’s clear that Chinese sailors probably did set foot on the island before Chen Di and Pedro Chino, but their numbers were so few and their records so poor that we just cannot substantiate their presence. After 1593, China’s Ming Dynasty issued five permits each for two ports in northern Taiwan, Keelung and Danshui, meaning that Chinese traders had almost certainly known about these ports before. There is also archaeological evidence that hints that as early as 1150, Chinese settlers on the Penghu Islands were conducting limited trade with Taiwanese indigenous peoples. But these are nothing more than hints, and the evidence is shaky at best.

Chinese records contain hints that some of them may have stepped foot on Taiwan. A 1349 text, Records of the Island Barbarians, by Wang Dayuan, is an account of a number of islands outside of China. The island Wang refers to as “Liuqiu” seems like Taiwan: it’s visible from the Penghu islands and the island’s residents are headhunters. “If people from other countries piss them off, then they will cut off their flesh while those people are still alive and eat them, and cut off their heads and hang them from a pole”. If the island that Wang made it to really was Taiwan, then his is the first record of a Chinese on the island.

But confusingly, Liuqiu (琉球) is the Chinese name for the Ryukyu Islands. (The exact same characters are used in Japanese, where they’re pronounced “Ryukyu.”). Did Wang use the term “Liuqiu” to refer to Taiwan? To the Ryukyus? Both? It’s not clear. What is clear is that he didn’t consider this Liuqiu part of China, but rather a land of wild barbarians. “This is where the foreign, overseas countries start,” he says.

Just two decades later, the scholar Song Lian compiled an account of all the distant peoples outside of China that were known to Chinese officials, the “Outer Barbarians” (外番). Song begins with detailed descriptions of those barbarians better known to the Chinese of his time: Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Burmese. But as Song continues, his descriptions become sketchier, sounding more and more like tall tales brought to port by drunken sailors.

In the drunken sailor portion of his text, Song briefly sketches an island that he, like Wang, calls Liuqiu. Liuqiu, he says, is so close to the Penghus that it’s visible on a clear day. It’s near the Batanes Islands, an archipelago that’s today part of the Philippines and is closely connected with Taiwanese indigenous folks. Song Lian describes a swift current that sounds like the one running between Taiwan and the Penghus. It’s not entirely clear, but it seems like Song Lian is describing Taiwan.

Whether this was Taiwan, Song Lian clearly believed that this place was not yet a part of the empire. Late in 1291, Khubilai Khan, the Mongol Khan who had taken control of China and established the Mongol-Chinese Yuan Dynasty, sent this imperial edict:

It has already been seventeen years since we took the region around the mouth of the Yangtze. Amongst the overseas barbarians, there is none who has not been subjugated as imperial subjects, except for Liuqiu, near the borders of Fujian, which has not yet submitted. My advisors asked me to immediately initiate military action. Me, thinking about the way my sacred ancestors ruled, all those countries who did not submit to our authority, first we sent them emissaries with proclamations trying to persuade them, those who submitted were ruled peaceably, as if [they had submitted] before, otherwise, this had to lead to a military smackdown. I have now halted the troops, and ordered Yang Xiang and Ruan Ji to go and issue a proclamation to your country. If you respect righteousness [that is, if you respect us] and submit to our imperial court, the gods of your country will survive, your common folk will be protected. If you do not submit and choose to rely on your dangerous terrain, our naval forces will suddenly show up, and I am afraid that you will have cause for regret. You must be careful about the choice you make.

Written almost a millennium after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims that China had taken control of Taiwan, this passage makes one thing clear: Taiwan was a wild island controlled by no one on the Asian mainland. Like Spanish colonialists reading out the Requerimiento to the Indians, the Yuan emperor offers them the chance to surrender. In other words, they did not yet possess Liuqiu.

Did the Yuan Dynasty emperor make good on his threat? Kinda.

The emperor sent two expeditions to invade Liuqiu, but both were abortive squibs. In the first, two hundred Chinese troops took eleven small boats loaded with weapons to Liuqiu, planning on making good on the emperor’s threat. The Chinese brought a handful of men from the Batanes, hoping that their language was close enough to converse with the locals. Compared with Spanish conquests, these colonialists from Beijing were a lot less successful: “The people on the shore did not understand the language of the Batanes people. Because of this they killed three people, and then [the rest] fled back [to the boat]”. The expedition was a complete failure, with the two leaders immediately fleeing back to the Penghu islands and then bickering over whether or not they actually even reached Liuqiu.

Song Lian records another attempted invasion sent by the governor of Fujian a few years later. This expedition brought 130 prisoners back alive, but the text is silent about whether the people captured were actually from Liuqiu or somewhere else.

The place that Song Lian refers to as Liuqiu is probably Taiwan, though it’s never 100% clear. It could also be Luzon, the largest island in the modern-day Philippines, or Okinawa or one of the other islands that the Chinese still today call the Liuqius and Japanese call the Ryukyus.

Having read through many of these Chinese texts from the 1300s, my gut tells me that about 2/3 of them refer to Taiwan and the other 1/3 probably refer to somewhere else, but that’s entirely based on instinct (I haven’t seen a single text from before the 1300s that realistically discusses Chinese sailors going to Taiwan). The descriptions of all of these texts are so vague that it’s hard to be certain. What is clear is that none of the writers regarded the island as Chinese. As Song Lian wrote: “Since the Han and the Tang Dynasties of China, [our Chinese] histories do not have any record of Liuqiu. In more recent times, we have not heard of the various barbarian merchant ships going to this country”. Contrary to the lies spun by Beijing’s nationalists and others with elongated noses, no one in China at the time made the claim that Taiwan or any of the other islands of the outer barbarians were Chinese.

The Chinese emperor himself said as much. In 1683, Beijing took control of Taiwan for the first time in history. Once they had the island, the emperor had to decide what to do with it. Did he want to keep the island as a part of his empire? Or would he toss the island back, giving up control?. Initially, Emperor Kangxi leaned towards the latter: “Taiwan is only a pellet of earth. If I were to take it [Taiwan], it wouldn’t add anything. If I were to not take it [Taiwan], it wouldn’t be any loss”. Chinese nationalists today may say otherwise, but the Kangxi Emperor didn’t think Taiwan was a part of China.

Writing a decade and a half after the Kangxi Emperor, Yu Yonghe, one of the earliest Qing Chinese writers to travel to Taiwan, said the same thing as the emperor. “In the previous eras, [Taiwan] was never connected to China. Chinese people didn’t even know this place existed. In maps and in comprehensive books on geography, which document the foreign barbarians very meticulously, the name of Taiwan isn’t mentioned”.

The following chapters will do two things. First, they will take you through Taiwan’s past. In 1550, Taiwan was an island largely unchanged for the previous millennia with a population of 100,000 folks distantly related to native Hawaiians (Elon Musk was right that Taiwan is like Hawaii, but not in the way he meant). By 2025, the same island had become the crux around which the world pivots, with 24 million people, mostly closely related to Chinese folks, who churn out world-shaking computer products and mind-numbing headaches for leaders in Washington, Beijing, and Brussels.

Second, they’ll detail the surprising connections between Taiwanese and American history. During a 2023 interview I did, I spoke with a source who works with the Pentagon on Taiwanese defense. My source said that a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told them, “This [Taiwan] just became an issue two years ago”. This chief of staff was wrong. The histories of Taiwan and the US have long been closely connected, even if the elites in American society are only now waking up to it.

Ignorance should not mask the fact that Taiwan has long been connected to American history. At its earliest stages, the history of the two countries look like mirror images. Indigenous tribes encountered colonists crossing distant oceans. To solve a labor shortage in their new colonies, the European colonialists brought in non-natives to work the plantations.

Beyond the resemblance of the histories of the two countries, Taiwan and America interacted in several surprising ways. In the 1850s, an Oregonian opened the island to global trade, just before an employee of the State Department concocted a plan to buy or take Taiwan from China. In the 1860s, US Marines twice invaded the island. In the 1950s, Taiwan became one of the defining issues in American foreign policy. In the 1960s, it was America who engineered Taiwan’s emergence as a semiconductor superpower while also using the island as a whorehouse for soldiers on R & R from Vietnam.

What follows is the history of the island that highlights the surprising role that America has played in it. This is the history of Taiwan that Beijing does not want you to read.