The China-Taiwan Leverage Game

In 2001, Taiwan scientists announced the results of a research on the genetic origins of the island's Minnan (闽南, southern Fujian) majority. This is the part of the population known as Taiwanese, as opposed to mainlanders, Hakkas (客家) and the aborigines.

The research found that the Minnan people were descended from the Yueh people who were scattered along the southeastern coast of China during the later Zhou dynasty (770 - 221 B.C.).

The political implication is that the Taiwanese were not ethnically Chinese.

Not to be outdone, Chinese researchers announced a few months later that the four aboriginal groups in Taiwan exhibited a specific chromosomal pattern characteristic of the Li ethnic group on Hainan island (海南岛), and that all five groups were descended from the Baiyue people of eastern China. The Baiyue were said to have migrated to both Hainan and Taiwan, where they maintained the same lifestyle and customs.

The Chinese message: even Taiwan's aborigines had a connection with the mainland.

If there was not so much at stake, the tit for tat can actually be quite entertaining.