After the Chinese civil war that ended in 1949, the communist regime took over Mainland China and the nationalist government relocated to Taiwan. Up until this day, China has considered Taiwan as a province, and pressured other countries with their economy into not recognizing Taiwan as an independent country, but a break away province of China. Taiwan has it's own government, currency, military, and functions like a country, because it is. Sadly in 1971 Taiwan lost it's UN Membership and got replaced by Mainland China. Today, very few nations in the UN recognize Taiwan.

The Chinese government have a really bad habit of claiming territory because Chinese people used to or have always be there. Just like the South China Sea, china has claimed the whole South China Sea as their own territorial waters because Chinese fishermen have always been fishing there, so have Filipino fishermen. International law states that territorial waters are a belt of coastal waters extending at most 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) from the coastline of a state. The South China Sea has Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Taiwanese and International waters, but according to China, all of that belongs to them.

They've also claimed some islands belonging to Japan, called the Senkaku Islands. The reason for the claim was that the islands have always belonged to China. But the islands got given to Japan during the Qing Dynasty. The Japanese government even agreed to buy the disputed islands off the Kurihara family a total of Y2.05 billion (£16.4 million).

So the same goes for Taiwan, because Chinese people have inhabited Taiwan for along time, China claimed sovereignty over Taiwan. They've even been paying people to spread Chinese Communist propaganda in Taiwan, e.g. Holding a Chinese flags, singing Chinese revolutionary songs etc. The Chinese government is taking advantage of Taiwan's democratic system and freedom of speech which doesn't exist in China. Even though Taiwanese people are ethnically Chinese, but when a civil war breaks out and the country splits apart, no one has the right to claim sovereignty over the other. Ancient China has been divided by different kings and war lords for a long time, those various kingdoms hated each other, but didn't just claim territory.

In conclusion, I hope that Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen can ban Chinese propaganda on Taiwan soil and put heavy penalties on those still doing so. Taiwan is a free country with a very democratic government, which western countries should respect and recognize, instead of letting China pressure them into submission.