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o understand China's obsession, you have to go back to 1949. After a brutal civil war, Mao Zedong's Communist forces defeated the Nationalist government — the Kuomintang — and proclaimed the People's Republic of China. But the Nationalists didn't disappear. They fled across the Taiwan Strait and se…

o understand China's obsession, you have to go back to 1949. After a brutal civil war, Mao Zedong's Communist forces defeated the Nationalist government — the Kuomintang — and proclaimed the People's Republic of China. But the Nationalists didn't disappear. They fled across the Taiwan Strait and set up their own government on the island of Taiwan, calling it the Republic of China. From Beijing's perspective, the civil war was never truly finished. Taiwan is, in their words, a breakaway province