Wow, my aim was really to be strict about the terminology and always talk about Beijing/PRC or Taipei/ROC, but I noticed that I was saying "China" and "Taiwan" a lot of the time. Lucky I'm not trying to be the President, eh?

I'm sorry it's so long, but on the other hand I think I speak pretty slow, so it's probably pretty amenable to sped-up listening. :-)

Or, you can skip ~27 minutes in to go straight to my overview of the current situation, without the "short" background.

Also, pardon my pronunciation of Chinese names, which is an unpredictable mix of Cantonese, Cantonese-accented Mandarin, Mandarin and English.

Background:

(Image license: public domain)

1644 Qing dynasty

1868 Meiji Restoration

1871 Imperial Japanese Army

1895 End of First Sino-Japanese War

Treaty of Shimonoseki, annexation of Formosa/Taiwan

1905

End of Russo-Japanese war, birth of Kwantung Army

Don't mix up Kwantung/Guandung and Guangdong! One is in Manchuria in the north-east, one is near Hong Kong in the south ...

Korea a Japanese protectorate

1910 Japan annexes Korea

1911 Xinhai Revolution

1919

End of World War I

Japan receives Germany's Chinese concessions

Kuomintang founded

1921 Communist Party of China

1924 Mongolian People's Republic

1925 Death of Sun Yat-sen

1928 Northern Expedition

1932

Mukden Incident

Manchukuo

1936 Xi'an incident (don't mix up general Chiang and general Zhang!)

1937 Japanese invasion, fall of Nanking

(Image license: CC-by-SA, Wikipedia users Rowanwindwhistler and W.wolny, based on public domain work created by the US federal government)

1945