I'm by no means any sort of expert on... any of this. But I did some reading around and have formulated a bigger opinion, and I feel like sharing both. Sorry for the length!
QuickTidal, on 13 December 2016 - 05:56 PM, said:
Even the government of Taiwan doesn't consider themselves NOT part of China...the difference is in the details.
Taipei and Beijing are basically two competing governments of the same country, China, both claiming to be the legitimate government of all of China.
Yes, after the Republic of China government first fled to Taiwan they declared that they were still the legitimate government of ALL of China, and their goal was to re-unify China under their rule. They kept that stance for decades, even after the UN gave their seat to the PRC in the early '70s.
But keep in mind that the ROC government at that time was a one-party (Kuomintang, or KMT) system in a constant state of martial law! (Not that I'm saying that's automatically a bad thing... in fact the KMT did a great job of building Taiwan's economy and beginning to develop diplomatic relations with mainland China.) The only political party allowed had previously been the ruling party of all of China, and their official stance was that they wanted to once again rule a unified China, and that was that.
But in the 1980s and 90s the KMT gradually removed martial law and converted to a democratic system. Now there are numerous parties running for office, with a variety of stances on independence vs reunification under the PRC vs reunification under the ROC vs doing nothing, etc. The KMT themselves don't even necessarily claim to want to re-unify China under the ROC anymore: in 2003 their chairman and presidential candidate Lien Chan said that the party didn't want to be considered "pro-reunificationist" anymore (and at that time they simply advocated for maintaining the status quo).
From 1992 (the first democratic election for president) onwards, the KMT (now favouring a sort of "status quo: we're special and independent but not a country, and we have no wish to re-unify" stance) and the Democratic Progress Party (which in general favours a gradual approach towards independence) have traded administrations:
1992-2000 = KMT
2000-2008 = DPP
2008-2016 = KMT
2016-present = DPP
There's been some flip-flopping on government steps taken towards "Taiwanization", where the DPP will rename something currently called "______ of China" to "_____ of Taiwan" or even just "_____ of China (Taiwan)" but then the KMT reversed it back in their 2008-2016 administration. And yet, even the 1992-2000 KMT-party president of the country was a big supporter of Taiwanization.
(Taiwanization is not quite the same as Taiwanese independence - Taiwanization is more like making the Taiwanese language the official government language, or taking the school history books that focus only on the history of China (and therefore rarely discuss Taiwan since it was usually a backwater throughout Chinese history) and writing their own history books that go into greater detail on the history of Taiwan themselves.)
So now the DPP has recently been put back in charge, by a landslide, after the KMT spent the last 8 years largely maintaining the status quo (worth noting that the DPP is the most moderate of the pro-independence parties, though - in practice they seem to largely advocate for very gradually working towards independence so as to get there eventually without pissing off the PRC.
Time will tell, maybe the elections will keep flip-flopping back, or maybe not, but as of right now it seems to me like the people of Taiwan themselves want to eventually reach independence.
In any case, the old notion that the ROC doesn't want independence, only to re-unify all of China under their rule, is now outdated. There's only one party - the New Party - which still advocates for that, and they haven't won a seat since 2008. So no, recognizing the ROC as a sovereign government is *not* recognizing the ROC as the government of mainland China instead of the PRC. The current ruling party of the ROC (the DPP) does not agree with or recognize the PRC's "One China Policy" (via the "1992 Consensus").
The PRC has so far refused to have any official diplomatic relations with a country that does recognize the ROC as an sovereign government (of Taiwan, or of any other lands for that matter), but that doesn't mean the country in question is supporting the idea of reunification under the ROC. Most, if not all, of the countries that have official diplomatic ties with Taiwan would also have them with China if China were willing.
I think we're currently seeing Taiwan themselves figure out what they want, and going by the current trends they seem to be favouring a gradual move towards independence. But it doesn't help that the US has sometimes actively stated that they don't want to see even the smallest steps towards independence or greater self-identity taken by the Taiwanese government. I hope that if and when the time comes for Taiwan to become officially independent (no declaration necessarily needed - the DPP, for example, argues that the 1992 Consensus was neither official nor binding and legally speaking they are in fact already two sovereign nations) that nations like the US, Canada, India, Russia, Australia, etc, will remember our own transitions from being part of a larger nation to our own recognized independence and support it.
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