The Gaoshan ethnic minority

Zheng died five months after recovering the island, and his son succeeded him. The Zhengs governed Taiwan for 23 years. In 1683, the Qing court brought the island under central government control and this rule lasted for 212 years till Taiwan fell under Japanese rule following the signing of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895.

After the Opium War of 1840, British, American, Japanese and French colonialists invaded and plundered Taiwan one after another. The foreign invasion and plundering were met with fierce resistance. To fight the British invaders, the local people formed a volunteer army of 47,000 troops who beat back all the five British invasions.

Taiwan fell into the hands of the Japanese in 1895 after China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. Fighting shoulder to shoulder for five months, Gaoshan and Han people inflicted 32,315 casualties on the Japanese invaders.

During the 20 years from 1895 to 1915, the people of Taiwan staged some 100 armed uprisings against Japanese occupation. One of them was the Wushe Uprising mounted by the Gaoshan people in Taichung County in 1930. Enraged by the murder of a Gaoshan worker by Japanese police, over 300 Gaoshan villagers wiped out the 130 Japanese soldiers stationed there and held Wushe for three days. In the following months, the insurgents killed and wounded more than 4,000 Japanese occupationists. In retaliation, the Japanese moved in most of their garrison forces in Taiwan along with planes and guns and crushed the uprising. They slaughtered over 1,200 Gaoshans including all the insurgents.

After victory over Japan in 1945, Taiwan was returned to China and placed under Kuomintang rule.

Gaoshans on the Mainland

Twenty-nine hundred Gaoshans now live on the mainland. Though small in number, these Gaoshans have their deputies to the National People's Congress, China's supreme organ of power. They enjoy equal rights in the big family of all ethnic groups on the mainland.

The Gaoshan people share the aspiration of all other ethnic groups in China for peaceful reunification of the motherland, so that people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits will be reunited.