According to the Taiwan-based China Times, Taiwan authorities recently published a drafted outline of history courses for high school students on the island. This draft has completely altered the traditional teaching of history in Taiwan.

The draft withdraws the island province out of Chinese history, while moving the part of Chinese history after the mid-Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) into the course of world history.

The Taiwan authorities' moves are politically calculated, trying again to sever the connection between the island and the mainland.

Since Chen Shui-bian took office in 2000, promoting the "desinofication" and "name rectification" movements, the separatist forces in Taiwan have been engaged in a feverish attempt to remove everything from Taiwan that shows a connection to the Chinese mainland.

As many historical experts on the island have pointed out, this new draft is the typical making of the concept of "one country on each side" or "two states."

However, the Taiwan separatists are just wasting their time by undertaking this impossible mission, as history bears out the fact that Taiwan has never been an independent state but rather a part of China.

Taiwan's past is an integral part of China's history.

Taiwan was placed under the jurisdiction of China's Fujian Province as early as the 12th century. After a dozen years of rivalry between Dutch and Spanish colonialists, this island became a Dutch colony in 1642. It returned to Chinese rule when Zheng Chenggong, a loyal Ming Dynasty official rebelling against the Qing-Dynasty rulers in a hope to restore authority of the Ming court, defeated and drove out the Dutch colonialists in 1662. The island was subsequently put under the jurisdiction of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in 1683 until 1895, when it was ceded to Japan by the Qing government as the result of the latter's defeat in the Sino-Japanese war (1894-95).

Taiwan was again handed over to China after Japan was defeated in World War II, under the Cairo Declaration in 1943 and the later the Potsdam Proclamation.

All these historic documents, even including treaties like the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ceded Taiwan to Japan, revealed a very basic consensus that Taiwan was under the sovereignty of China.

The founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 only changed the regime of China instead of the scope of Chinese sovereignty. This has already been recognized by most of the international community.

To cut Taiwan's history away from the whole of Chinese history in school teaching is a vicious attempt by the Taiwan separatists to confuse the recognition of one nation among the people, in particular the young generation, on the island.

(China Daily September 24, 2003)