POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY IN TAIWAN Essay Example

be asserted to be due to the imagined competing communities in Taiwan including, the Taiwanese and Chinese. Taiwan was united with the Chines mainland few years ago creating a feeling of non- membership to the Chinese society unlike the Chinese nationals living along the mainland (Copper 2013). A disparity is hence experienced and aggregated with the different opinions concerning unification or independence in the course of striving for consistency in social and political boundaries. This has been viewed to result in a north- south divide where a higher number of the Taiwanese people voting for a certain party, that is the DPP, while the Chine mainlanders vote for a different party, that is the KMT, indicating ethnic groups distribution. With the population proportion in eastern Taiwan being only 2% due to the mountains, the north- south divide is a bit more remarkable than the east- west divide (Warf 2011).

For instance, in the presidential elections of 2004 the DPP party won with a landslide victory in the south in addition to some votes from the north. The ethnic groups’ distribution could be an explanation for the winning of the 2004 elections by DPP since unlike in the northern parts, there is a higher number of the Hohlo people who create a stronghold for the DPP party in southern Taiwan (Anoulak 2011). Exposure to different ethnic surroundings may result to different imagined communities being fostered by similar people. This would increase the likelihood of southern Taiwanese residents, regardless of their ethnic groups, to vote for DPP through accepting the Taiwanese nationalistic discourse. Issues such as Taiwan’s political status and the difficult relations of cross- strait create debates

among the candidates and political parties in Taiwan.in recent years, the PRC supported a policy of One- China policy stating that both mainland China and Taiwan are parts of China and that the only legitimate Chinese government is PRC. Through this, Taiwan is capable of participating in functions such as international forums.