The exercises ended soon after the American ships arrived. The ships did not enter the strait. No invasion took place, and there was no confrontation. No one, however, could be sure the resolution of the next crisis would be as peaceful. Relations across the strait have been tense for decades.
China calls Taiwan a renegade province, a claim Taiwan rejects.
In fact, Taiwan had been a province of China for barely a decade when Japan annexed it in 1895 following the first Sino-Japanese War. The island had been regarded as a remote outpost of Chinese civilization, populated by aborigines of Polynesian stock and former residents of Fujian, the Chinese province nearest Taiwan. The latter group came not to plant the flag of the ancestral land, but to flee economic and social problems on the mainland. Four years later Chiang lost to the Communists and fled with his troops and other refugees to Taiwan. As the years passed, the Kuomintang's claim to all of China became increasingly unrealistic.