NEW YORK -- Sallie Huang is a passionate advocate of Taiwan's independence. She argues that China is simply flaunting its ignorance and wrongheadedness in claiming Taiwan as part of its territory.
At one point in her sweeping monograph, "Fiction and Reality," she asks: "Can the Beijing government insist that Poland, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Burma, parts of Russia and many other countries are its territory simply because the Mongolian Empire conquered them at its apex? Can Communist China insist that Taiwan, Korea, Outer Mongolia, Vietnam and others are its territory simply because the Manchurian Empire once conquered or ruled them?"
This is a stark way to remind us of what we tend to forget: China has not been a continuous historical entity. The so-called Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) was in fact a period in which China, under Mongolian rule, ceased to exist as a sovereign entity. Similarly, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) was a period when the Manchurians, not the Hans, ruled the land.