page_title: India–Taiwan relations
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: India–Taiwan relations / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: 10 Feb 1942, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, Head of China, and First Lady Madame Chiang visited India. The couple were welcomed by the host Mahatma Gandhi in front of his home. The photo was taken by the Republic of China Government on 10 Feb 1942. The copyright has been expired after 50 years.
context_page_description: The bilateral relations between India and Taiwan have improved since the 1990s despite both nations not maintaining official diplomatic relations. India recognises only the People's Republic of China and not the Republic of China's claims of being the legitimate government of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau - a conflict that emerged after the Chinese Civil War. However, India's economic and commercial links as well as people-to-people contacts with Taiwan have expanded in recent years.
  According to a 2010 Gallup poll, 21% of Taiwanese people approve of Indian leadership, with 19% disapproving and 60% uncertain. According to a December 2019 survey conducted via National Chengchi University's Election Study Center, 53.8% of Taiwanese people polled overall supported "increasing ties with India", with 73.1% of DPP voters supporting increasing ties with India and 44.6% of KMT voters supporting increasing ties.
context_section_description: Despite China proper and the Indian subcontinent, where two of the four ancient civilizations of the world emerged, having shared thousands of years of extensive trade and cultural exchanges, primarily through Buddhism, direct contact between Formosa and South Asia has historically been considerably more limited due to geographic constraints and distances. Tianzhu (天竺), situated in Buddhist cosmology at the "Western Heaven", has traditionally been regarded by Buddhists as an idealized holy land where their faith originated from, and subsequently served as a pilgrimage site for many who sought to receive Buddhist scriptures, as romanticized in the classical Chinese tale of Journey to the West. Hu Shih, the ROC Ambassador to the United States from 1938 to 1942, commented, albeit critically, on India's Buddhism almost completely subsuming Chinese society upon its introduction.
  ASIA is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.
  While never having actually visited India in his lifetime, Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China, occasionally spoke and wrote of India as a fellow Asian nation that was likewise subject to harsh Western exploitation, and frequently called for a Pan-Asian united front against all unjust imperialism; in a 1921 speech, Sun stated: "The Indians have long been oppressed by the British. They have now reacted with a change in their revolutionary thinking...There is progress in their revolutionary spirit, they will not be cowed down by Britain." To this day, there is a prominent street named Sun Yat-sen street in an old Chinatown in Calcutta (now known as Kolkata).
  Partially to enlist India's aid against both Japanese and Western imperialism in exchange for the ROC's support for Indian independence, Chiang Kai-shek visited India under British rule in 1942 and met with Jawaharlal Nehru, along with Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Despite pledges of mutual friendship and future cooperation between the two peoples, Chiang argued that while Gandhi's non-violent resistance was not necessarily invalid for the Indian people, it was an unrealistic worldview on a global context; Gandhi, who had at the time insisted on India refraining from participating in any war in any circumstances, in turn later noted that, "I would not say that I had learnt anything, and there was nothing that we could teach him." In their meeting in Calcutta, Jinnah tried to persuade Chiang, who had pressed Britain to relinquish India as soon as possible, of the necessity of establishing a separate nation for Muslims in the subcontinent, to which Chiang, who apparently recognized Congress as the sole nationalist force in the Raj, replied that if ten crores of Muslims could live peacefully with other communities in China, then there was no true necessity as he saw it of a separate state for a smaller population of nine crores of Muslims living in India.
  A division of the KMT's forces entered India around this time as the Chinese Army in India in their struggle against Japanese expansion in Southeast Asia. Dwarkanath Kotnis and four other Indian physicians traveled to a war-torn China to provide medical assistance against Japanese forces.
  Representatives of the Indian independence movement later invited Tibetan delegates to the 1947 Asian Relations Conference hosted in New Delhi at which the Tibetans were allowed to display their flag. According to Tibetologist A. Tom Grunfeld, the conference was not government-sponsored, and so Tibet's and the Tibetan flag's presence had "no diplomatic signif
caption: Chiang Kai-shek and his wife with Mahatma Gandhi
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