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This declaration put the United States in an awkward position. For one thing, it was so obviously untrue. And no one really believed that the ROC, with its corrupt leaders and inept military, would ever pose a legitimate threat to the ruthlessly effective communists of Mao and the PRC. On the other hand, the ROC were fierce-anticommunists, and some of the US’s only allies in Asia at a time when the US badly needed allies in that part of the world. So the US began a long, awkward advocacy of the status quo. The unstable arrangement resulted in periodic, predictable crises, many of which metastasized into military action, sometimes on a massive scale. In 1958, China fired so much artillery at the ROC controlled island of Quemoy that the high-quality steel shells became an un-natural resource for more than a generation of island blacksmiths, who became renowned for the meat cleavers they could fashion from the shells that had been intended to kill them. A skillful blacksmith could to this day, Angi learned, make sixty cleavers from a single shell.

After spending an hour on Taiwan’s history, Angi began to get into Taiwan’s recent past and its unique relationship to the US…from Wikipedia she linked to the Taiwan section of globalsecurity.org. She learned that the US policy had evolved into this: if the Republic of China was not actually China, neither was it a “rebel province” as declared by the real Chinese government, one that could be crushed by a PRC police action. The US, under Richard Nixon, finally acknowledged the obvious when it recognized the PRC as the legitimate government of China in 1979. The US embassy in Taipei, Taiwan was closed, renamed the American Institute in Taiwan. (The Taiwanese equivalent in Washington is the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.) The US, through a series of presidents, maintained the deliberately ambiguous “One China” policy, without ever specifying what that one China consisted of, or who was in charge of it. The US tacitly agreed to never hint that Taiwan was entitled to the independence that it actually had — by 1990 it was a thriving, prosperous democracy. In return, China tacitly agreed not to invade Taiwan and enforce the sovereignty that it insisted it had over the island.

The current crisis began less than six months before, when Qian Chen, the President of Taiwan, was granted a visa to speak at the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater. This visa represented a reversal of US policy, which had for forty years not allowed top Taiwanese officials to visit the United States — in 1994, Lee Teng-Hui, then president of Taiwan, was not even allowed off his plane in Hawaii while it refueled, lest his presence on American soil antagonize the Chinese. At Notre Dame, President Chen barely deviated from the carefully evolved phrases that characterized Taiwan’s odd status, but his mere presence there was enough to aggravate Beijing. In response, they immediately announced a series of surface-to-surface missile tests in waters less than twenty miles from Taiwan’s northern port city of Keelung — a distance that an M-9 Dongfeng missile travels in 9.5 seconds. Commercial air traffic was diverted and the Taiwanese stock market crashed as the latest crisis unfolded.

Angi learned what happened next on sinodefence.org, a British website operated by volunteers that called itself, “the most comprehensive and trusted online source of information on the Chinese military.” On a beautiful Fall morning, a specially trained brigade of the Peoples Liberation Army drove an 8 x 8 launching vehicle from the province of Jiangxi to a position about sixty miles away in the Fujian Province. Two missiles were fired and landed in the ocean, a vivid but harmless assertion of China’s anger and their national sovereignty.