formosa

Taiwan developed from Formosa from the aid of western capitalist nations as a base for defense from China.

State Department's official position in 1959 was that Formosa was not a part of China as a country.

The people in Chaco or Formosa who barely have enough to support their families don't care about internet polls.

Given the PRC's stated intention to invade Formosa about 2027, the US and others likely will reply with sanctions and a trade war.

Taipei is a city on Formosa also under Republic of China control.

The fact that they may or may not start another one over the territory which they may or may not win is irrelevent - they do NOT control Formosa or any of the smaller islands around it at this point.

I suspect that they are willing to wait a few more years until they have built up their own chip making capacity so that disrupting Formosa won’t strongly affect their own economy, while it will hinder other developed countries.

The island's natural resistance to invasion would make them nigh impossible to dislodge (for comparison during WW2, the US judged an attack on Formosa to be impossible despite the Japanese only having about 170,000 troops there and the local population being hostile to Japan).

Internationally, representatives of Taipei and the surrounding area are sometimes said to be representing "Chinese Taipei", because Taipei is on Formosa and Formosa is Chinese.

Of course the issue is fraught and just saying "the country on Formosa is called the Republic of China" would be completely deceptive, but nobody is doing that.

Historically the South China Sea was named that in English because the British just sort of considered everything along the coast "China." This included Thailand (then Siam) and Taiwan (then Formosa).

The "little seafaring the Chinese did" in illegal trade was actually a huge business, and these "pirates" ended up merging with the remnants of the last Ming court, and eventually drove away the Dutch forces settled in Formosa (aka Taiwan).

There is only one China, and China is the rightful owner of Formosa, and one of its cities, Taipei.

The Republic of China is in control of the island formally known as Formosa.

The island of Taiwan/Formosa did have people on it before the RoC fled there, but they were not Chinese, they were aboriginal.