evidence: Many considered the socialist nation a puppet state of the Soviet Union, but for Taiwan the issue was more fundamental. At that time, the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) not only held onto its claim as the rightful ruler of China, but considered itself as a successor to all of the Qing Dynasty’s former lands, which included "Outer Mongolia." [...] "Outer Mongolia," which roughly corresponds to today’s Mongolia plus Russia’s Tuva Republic, fell under Qing Dynasty control in 1691 and remained part of the empire until its demise in 1911. Even though Mongolia declared independence then, the ROC claimed to have inherited the entirety of Qing territory per the Provisional Constitution promulgated in March 1912. [...] Even so, further iterations of the ROC constitution continued to claim Outer Mongolia as an inalienable part of the nation’s territory, wrote Liu Hsueh-tao (劉學銚) of the now defunct Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission in the 1997 article, "Examining the Outer Mongolia problem from a legal and political standpoint" (從法律政治層面看外蒙古問題).