They were going to make it a democracy in the 60s until China said they’d invade if they did.
> China's leaders explicitly wanted to "preserve the colonial status of Hong Kong".[21] Liao Chengzhi, a senior Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong affairs, said in 1960 that China "shall not hesitate to take positive action to have Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Territories liberated" should the status quo (i.e. colonial administration) be changed. The warning killed any democratic development for the next three decades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_development_in_Ho...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/asia/china-began-pus...
Perhaps not for the first 10 years. But 60 years and two generations later, it doesn't make any sense at all to refuse to recognize the independence of a self-governing group of over 20 million people.
Taiwan is made up of 70% of native Taiwanese people. It is disingenuous to say that the people living there, are made up of escaped refugees from the china mainline.
The fact that 70% of the population living their, has ancenstry dating back hundreds of years, is what make their claim valid.
Taiwan also has indigenous people that were colonized.
Britain only started paying a bit of lip service to "freedom" and "democracy" when it became time to hand the territory back to China, and even now they aren't offering citizenship, they are simply saying they're considering allowing people to stay a few months longer in Britain.
> Both the ROC and PRC claim that Taiwan is part of China, but differ (obviously) as to which government is "legitimate".
We all know that if the "CCP" had lost the civil war and was reduced to ruling a tiny island off the coast, nobody would take the "PRC" any more seriously - as the true ruler of the whole country or as an independent state - than a "Confederate States of America" holed up on the Florida Keys.