Category:Asia/Taiwan/

Coordinates: 23°46′01″N 121°00′00″E 23.767, 121

Taiwan

Taiwan (historically ���), also known as Formosa (from Portuguese (Ilha) Formosa, meaning "beautiful (island)"), is a self-governing island located in East Asia off the coast of Mainland China, southwest of the main islands of Japan but directly west of the end of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, and north-northwest of the Philippines. It is bound to the east by the Pacific Ocean, to the south by the South China Sea and the Luzon Strait, to the west by the Taiwan Strait and to the north by the East China Sea. The island is 394 kilometers (245 miles) long and 144 kilometers (89 miles) wide and consists of steep mountains covered by tropical and subtropical vegetation.Since 1945, Taiwan has been under the administration of the Republic of China (ROC), and has for all practical purposes been independent since then. The status of Taiwan however is disputed by the People's Republic of China (PRC), which considers itself the successor state to the Republic of China and therefore entitled to all its holdings, including Taiwan.Though for decades following the cessation of major hostilities in the Chinese Civil War in 1950, the ROC was a single-party authoritarian state, it has since evolved into a democracy. Its rapid economic growth in the decades after World War II has transformed it into an advanced economy status as one of the Four Asian Tigers. This economic rise is known as the Taiwan Miracle. It is categorized as an advanced economy by the IMF and high-income economy by the world bank. Its technology industry plays a key role in the global economy. Taiwanese companies manufacture a large proportion of the world's consumer electronics, although most of them are made in their factories in mainland China.^[1]

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