I studied at Columbia University in a Governmentsponsored program to prepare a contingent of Americans to participate in the eventual administration of the island once it had been wrested from Japanese control. As part of this training. we studied the history of Formosa and its people. the Native Taiwanese who have lived on the island for some hundreds of years. Although the people originally emigrated from China. by the 1940s they saw themselves as a separate nation and desperately wanted to be independent from both Japan and China. Today. the native Taiwanesethe nearly 16 million pre1949 inhabitants of the island. who are ruled by the some 2 million Chinese that set up the nationalist government headquarters on Taiwan after 1949do not often agree with the Kuomintang (KMT) policies. For over 30 years they have been excluded from the national level decisionmaking process. and until recently given little control over even their local affairs.
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emigrated