Eyefusion, The US had made it clear sincde 1972 that it will not fight with China for Taiwan. Taiwan is a complex issue. It was under the Qing control before the Japanese took over. In 1945, when the Japanese withdrew, the province "legally" returned to China, that's why Jiang Jie Shi (Chiang Kai-Shek, in Wades-G romanization), went to Taiwan after the 8th Route Army lead by Marshall Peng Dahuai took over Beijing. Chian Kai-Shek believed that he would be able to fight the CCP from Tawian, and he considered his regime to be the legitimate regime of the whole China. For Chiang, Taiwan was more of a base, or a war time capital, as Nanjing had been. And this is one of the reasons he re-named Taiwan Zhonghua Min Guo (Republic of China), where as the CCP renamed the Mainland "Zhong Hua Ren Min Gong He Guo" (The People's Republic of China). Taiwan in the past considered itself a legitimate governmnet for China, than an independent country. And more than half of the Taiwanese, because of their historical and cultural links, tend to think themselves more as Chinese than Taiwanese. Of course, you can say that there's a Hakka majority and a group that speaks Fukkian than mandarin, but in Mainland there exists 56 ethnic groups with their own dialects! The US knew this, but in its drive against communism in the early years of the Cold War, they supported the Chiang regime, not as an independent country but as the "legitimate governmnet of China". After Nixon's historic world changing week-long trip to the PRC in 1972, the US cut its bilateral diplomatic ties with Taiwan, and established the ties with Mainland, symbolizing that the US now officially recongnizes the governmnet in Beijinga s the sole legitimate goverbnmnet of all of China, including Taiwan. The US then started to treat Taiwan as a province of China, something along the line of HK, and that it should eventually re-unite with the mainland.