Taiwan, formally the Republic of China, is a state in East Asia, with Taipei serving as its capital. The island, originally called "Formosa" ("beautiful") by Portuguese trraders, was inhabited by aborigines before the 17th century, when the Dutch and Spanish colonized the island and opened it to mass Han Chinese immigration. From 1661 to 1683, the island was ruled by Koxinga's Ming loyalist Kingdom of Tungning, but it was conquered by the Qing dynasty in 1683. It was a part of Qing China until 1895, when China ceded Formosa to Japan as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War. Following the Japanese surrender to the Allies at the end of World War II in 1945, the Republic of China took control of Taiwan. However, the resumption of the Chinese Civil War led to the Communist Party of China driving the nationalist Kuomintang from the mainland, and the ROC government fled to Taiwan in 1949.
The ROC continued to claim to be the legitimate government of China; from 1945 to 1971, it held China's seat in the United Nations, but the mainland took over this representation in 1971. In the early 1960s, Taiwan entered a period of rapid economic growth and industrialization, creating a stable industrial economy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan changed from a one-party military dictatorship dominated by the Kuomintang to a multi-party democracy with a semi-presidential system. Taiwan's high-tech industry played a key role in the global economy, and it would rank highly in freedom of the press, healthcare, public education, economic freedom, and human development. The county benefited from a highly-skilled workforce and was among the highest-educated countries in the world, boasting one of the highest percentages of its citizens holding a tertiary education degree. Taiwan's independence was unrecognized by the People's Republic of China, which refused to have diplomatic relations with countries that recognized Taiwan's independence. In addition, China threatened to declare war on Taiwan if it declared independence, or if peaceful unification was no longer possible. In 2017, Taiwan had a population of 23,550,077 people.
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