Today in Taipei, the legacy of forced Sinicization under Chiang, and then his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, is visible everywhere. When I grab a coffee at a 7-Eleven here, the time stamp on my receipt doesn’t mark the year as 2019, but 108—Taiwan counts years beginning from the founding of the Republic of China, in 1911, when the island was still known as Japanese Formosa to the outside world.

Roads, city districts, schools, and universities throughout Taiwan are named after Chiang, often using his adopted name of Zhongzheng. Many streets here in Taipei are also named after Chinese cities—ones that the ROC was one day going to retake from the “Communist bandits,” as Mao’s government was called here during the Cold War. (Interestingly, no streets in China are named after Mao.)

The ROC constitution, meanwhile, still claims Taiwan, China, Mongolia, and the entire South China Sea as its territory, reflecting Chiang’s desire to restore control over areas the Qing Dynasty ruled or claimed at its height, before European, Japanese, and American colonialism began eating away at it. The legacy of Chiang’s obsession with retaking China is also manifest in Taiwan’s international presence. In 1971, he withdrew the Republic of China from the United Nations, just before it was about to lose a vote that would give the China seat on the Security Council to the government in Beijing. Years earlier, the U.S. had pushed him in vain to give up the seat in exchange for a Taiwan seat, as the myth of the Republic of China being the sole legal government of all of China (and Taiwan) began to unravel.

After Chiang’s death, in 1975, his son maintained the delusion that the Republic of China would triumphantly cross the Taiwan Strait and retake mainland China. In 1981, Chiang Ching-kuo’s government rejected the International Olympic Committee’s suggestion of competing in the Olympics under the name Taiwan, insisting on a name with a connection to China, settling on the one that Taiwanese athletes still compete under today: Chinese Taipei.

Read: Taiwan and the Trumpian uncertainty principle

Two years earlier, Jimmy Carter decided to abandon official diplomatic relations with Taipei in order to recognize Beijing, finalizing a process begun in 1972 by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Carter hadn’t notified Congress—whose Cold Warriors steadfastly supported the authoritarian Chiang regime against the Communists across the strait—and as a result, there was no mechanism for continuing relations with Taiwan on an unofficial level.

A perhaps unexpected protagonist, the American Chamber of Commerce, stepped into the fray to help Congress draft a vision for future relations, arguing for clear legal frameworks to underpin the substantial U.S. investments in Taiwan, as well as a system for providing Taiwan with the means of defending itself from China. From this came the Taiwan Relations Act, the 40th anniversary of which dozens of American officials, led by former House Speaker Paul Ryan, celebrated here in April. The TRA was passed by Congress with a veto-proof supermajority.