Political status of Taiwan across the Taiwan strait is only temporary and a reunified China including both mainland China and Taiwan will be the result. The position of the Republic of China had been that it was a "de jure" sovereign state. "Republic of China," according to the ROC government's definition, extended to both mainland China (Including Hong Kong and Macau) and the island of Taiwan. In 1991, President Lee Teng-hui unofficially claimed that the government would no longer challenge the rule of the Communists in mainland China, the ROC government under Kuomintang (KMT) rule actively maintained that it was the sole legitimate government
Free area of the Republic of China such constitutional changes, the Republic of China's official borders were to be regarded as all of mainland China in addition to the territories it controlled. (Until the mid-2000s, maps published in Taiwan depicted mainland provincial and national boundaries as they were in 1949, disregarding changes by the Communist administration post-1949.) While the 1991 revisions of the Constitution granted the sovereignty rights to the Taiwanese people, it did not explicitly name Taiwan and instead used the term "free area" to maintain the notion that the Republic of China encompassed more than Taiwan. In ordinary legislation, the term "Taiwan Area" is usually