At last week’s summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping, the White House described the United States and China as World War II allies who “fought side by side to win the war.” It was a small phrase with a large omission. The government that represented China during the war, and fought alongside the United States against Japan, was the Republic of China (ROC). The government Xi leads – the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – did not exist until 1949, four years after Japan’s surrender. By collapsing the two into a single, unbroken “China,” the summit’s language risked allowing the PRC to inherit the legacy of a war it did not fight.

Taiwan’s government noticed. Its Mainland Affairs Council pushed back, insisting that the ROC was the “true ally” that fought with the United States during the war, and emphasizing that the PRC did not even exist during World War II. Deputy Foreign Minister Wu Chih-chung went further, calling the framing an act of “de-ROC-ization” – in which the Republic of China’s very existence is being erased from history, and replaced by the Chinese Communist Party. “We should feel very distressed,” Wu added. 

Taiwanese scholars echoed the concern, warning that if Washington adopts Beijing’s version of events, the result could be a further hollowing out of the ROC’s place in the historical record.

There is an obvious irony in Taipei’s complaint, however. Taiwan’s government has been taking steps to distance itself from the ROC moniker.

This year, Taiwan’s representative office in Los Angeles sent out National Day invitations branded “Taiwan National Day.” The previous year’s cards had read “Republic of China 114th National Day.” The same government whose deputy foreign minister accused Beijing of erasing the ROC internationally was removing references to the ROC from its own diplomatic correspondence.

This trend also impacts how Taiwan’s government speaks about World War II. In August 2025, marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, President Lai Ching-te referred to the occasion as the “end of the war” (終戰), rather than using the more traditional ROC-centered formulation, “victory in the War of Resistance” (抗戰勝利). Lai’s message emphasized the broader lessons of aggression, unity, and victory. Opposition lawmakers criticized the omission of the ROC’s wartime role, interpreting the terminology as part of a broader shift toward a more Taiwan-centered historical narrative.

The term “end of the war” is not new to Taiwan’s official vocabulary, nor does its use prove an effort to erase the ROC. But the choice of terminology in a major 80th anniversary commemoration illustrates a broader evolution in how Taipei frames the war and Taiwan’s place in it. The “Republic of China (Taiwan)” formulation associated with the Tsai Ing-wen era, together with Lai’s subsequent emphasis that the ROC and the People’s Republic are “not subordinate to each other,” has produced a more Taiwan-centered conception of ROC sovereignty. Critics argue that this can weaken the salience of the ROC’s pre-1949 history, the period when it controlled mainland China, even as Taipei continues to invoke the ROC as a sovereign state distinct from the PRC.

Successive Taiwanese governments have had domestic and diplomatic reasons to soften the ROC’s historical claims: a citizenry that increasingly identifies as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, a desire to avoid unnecessarily entangling Taiwan’s future with the mainland’s history, and a preference for language that does not appear to revive a rival claim to “all of China.” 

The argument here is not that Taiwan’s evolving democratic identity is morally equivalent to Beijing’s historical revisionism. One is the normal evolution of a pluralist society’s self-understanding; the other is a state-backed effort to shape historical memory in ways that support a broader political narrative. But the two are not unrelated, either. 

Taiwan’s own retreat from ROC symbolism complicates its ability to contest Beijing’s framing of “China.” It can narrow the space in which Taiwan is willing to defend the ROC’s history and identity, leaving more room for Beijing to present its own account of China’s wartime and postwar history.

Taipei has repeatedly emphasized that the PRC has never ruled Taiwan, and it has invoked the ROC’s historical continuity, as well as postwar arrangements including the San Francisco Peace Treaty, in making its case against Beijing’s territorial claims. These arguments depend in part on Taiwan being understood internationally as a political entity with its own historical trajectory – including a wartime and postwar history distinct from that of the PRC.

That creates a strategic paradox. The more Taipei reduces the visibility of the ROC’s historical identity in its own diplomatic and commemorative practice, the less salient that historical continuity may become internationally. This does not automatically strengthen Beijing’s legal case or alter Taiwan’s sovereignty. But it can give Beijing greater narrative space to portray the wartime “China” as an uninterrupted predecessor of today’s PRC, while making the ROC’s alternative historical continuity harder to communicate.

I have argued elsewhere that Taiwan’s assertion of sovereignty in its own waters suffers from a similar underlying problem: not insufficient assertiveness, but the absence of a coherent doctrine explaining when and why Taipei invokes its own claims. The same logic applies here. Beijing is contesting the historical identity of “China” itself, using the Trump-Xi summit as one more venue in which to do so.

Taiwan is right to object to historical formulations that erase the ROC’s role in World War II. But an objection becomes harder to sustain when the government’s own recent practice – from diplomatic invitations to commemorative language to evolving formulations of national identity – makes the ROC’s historical identity less visible.

None of this means Taiwan must reverse its democratic evolution or resurrect a mainland-centric ROC identity that most Taiwanese people no longer want. It does mean that Taipei cannot simultaneously retire the ROC as an inconvenient historical label and rely on it as part of the foundation of its case against Beijing. If Taiwan wants the ROC’s history to remain a live argument against the Chinese Communist Party’s claims to sovereignty over Taiwan, someone has to keep making that argument – including, consistently, the government in Taipei itself.