For all the interest that the decades-long standoff across the Taiwan Strait has
generated in the American academic and policy literature, relatively little attention has
been devoted to tracing the origins of the deadlock between Taipei and Beijing.
Standard accounts of this deadlock in the West tend to accept as given and historically
grounded the strong nationalist feelings on both sides of the Strait about competing
visions for Taiwan’s future. This paper challenges this view and argues that the
hegemonic perception of Taiwan in the PRC as “part of the sacred territory” of China, as
the Preamble to its 1982 Constitution puts it, is a strategic social construction which
coincided with Taiwan’s exacerbated geostrategic value following the intensification of
the Cold War in East Asia after the Korean War. Seeking to prevent the establishment of
a separate state on Taiwan, promoted by Washington as part of the American containment
strategy in East Asia, the PRC government, through repeated propaganda campaigns,
sought to mobilize the nationalist masses and imprint in the collective conscience of the
Chinese nation the idea that “Taiwan is China’s sacred and inviolable territory” as a way
to enhance the credibility of its deterrent threat against Taiwanese independence.
