As Communist forces won the Chinese Civil War in 1948–49, Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China government, most of its army, and roughly one to two million civilian supporters and refugees relocated to Taiwan, which the ROC had administered since Japan's 1945 surrender. Chiang declared Taipei the ROC's provisional capital in December 1949 and imposed martial law that lasted until 1987, ruling over both the existing Taiwanese population and the new mainlander arrivals. The Communist-led People's Republic of China, proclaimed in October 1949, has never controlled Taiwan, producing a political division that persists today. The event reshaped Taiwan's demographics, politics, and its unresolved international status.
The defeated Republic of China (Kuomintang) government, military, and supporters relocated from mainland China to Taiwan as the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war
The 1946 count recorded about 6.09 million residents of Taiwan; by the end of 1950, after the Nationalist retreat, the island's population had risen to roughly 7.55 million. Estimates of the number who crossed with the Republic of China government range from about 1.2 to 2 million, including some 600,000 troops.
The relocation of between 950,000 and 2 million mainlanders (1.2 million is the most commonly cited figure in Taiwan; a declassified 1956 count records 1,024,233) was not itself lethal on a mass scale. The one large documented loss of life in transit is the sinking of the overloaded refugee steamer Taiping on 27 January 1949, in which over 1,500 people died with 35 survivors; smaller vessel losses are recorded but not systematically counted. The 228 Incident of 1947 and the ensuing White Terror, which killed thousands more, precede and follow the retreat and are counted separately by Taiwan's Transitional Justice Commission.
Taiwan, China