Product Description: For more than 40 years, the China-Taiwan conflict has effectively institutionalized the outcome of China's 1945-49 civil war. Since 1949, each side of the Taiwan Strait has been ruled by one of the two main parties to that conflict--the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang--and until the mid-1980s the claims of each to represent China's legitimate national government limited flexibility on both sides and rendered real movement in the relationship virtually impossible...read more