Col Sanjay Kannoth, VSM

This Occasional Paper traces the roots of the contemporary Taiwan question to the bitter personal and ideological rivalry between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Moving beyond conventional state-centric narratives, it examines how their feud, shaped by civil war, foreign intervention, and great-power manoeuvring, has cast a century-long shadow over cross-Strait dynamics. The paper recounts the evolution from the First United Front and the White Terror through the Long March, the Xi’an Incident, the Chinese Civil War, and the Korean War, highlighting key turning points that preserved Taiwan as a separate political entity. It then connects these historical trajectories to later developments—US security guarantees, Taiwan Strait crises, domestic political shifts in Taiwan, and Beijing’s changing strategy—showing how unresolved legacies of Mao and Chiang continue to animate policy, identity, and strategic competition in the Taiwan Strait.