How I learned to talk politics with the Taiwanese

When I made plans for my first visit to Taiwan, a friend asked if I needed a visa for that country, then corrected himself. “Is it actually a country? What do I call it?” Despite having lived in Asia for several years by this point, I was a bit ashamed that I didn’t know the answer to that question. Now I realize there was no need for shame – not even the Taiwanese can agree on their status.

Most of us in the West are at least vaguely aware that Taiwan is in limbo, terrified that an outright declaration as an independent country could trigger a war with China, which claims Taiwan as a rogue break-away state that will one day be reclaimed. But it wasn’t until I lived in both China and Taiwan that I really understood the history of this complicated relationship.

The first time I was forced to contemplate the matter in any mindful way was in Shanghai during my first job as an editorial staff member. The magazine was in English with a mostly expat audience. We ran an article on meat-eating habits in China, or something of the sort. What I remember most was the illustration that ran with the piece – a cow with its body sectioned off into its various parts. Instead of being labelled shank, sirloin, chuck, etcetera, they were given names of China’s various provinces.

Every magazine in China is assigned a state “publisher”, which is just a noble euphemism for “censor”. At the last minute before publication of the meat item, our censor noticed that the cow didn’t encompass Taiwan. An amendment was insisted upon.

This incident was regaled for days by the incredulous staff as an example of the most absurd of China’s efforts to include Taiwan in its modern narrative. The joke, of course: What part of the cow could possibly represent islands not attached to the mainland? From what I recall, Taiwan was nonsensically slapped onto the illustration to please the authorities. In the end, though, it rather disparagingly looked like a puffy methane cloud emanating from the cow’s rear.

I had to wonder why this rather trivial matter became a subject of outrage among our mostly Western staff – “How dare they try to claim Taiwan! In our pages!” – considering that there were far more egregious instances of censorship that we gladly swallowed in every issue. I didn’t see the point of getting riled up over having to play along with China’s claim on the region, despite my support for Taiwan’s independence. Let China try to claim Taiwan or Antarctica or Micronesia for all I care. On this file, China has been all talk and no action – and when you look at what action they DO take on other files (jailing and torturing political dissidents, for instance), trying to occupy Taiwan by means of a cartoon cow should have been the least of anyone’s concerns. In fact, such deeds only underscore China’s impotence with regards to Taiwan. While the government in Taipei issues passports, prints its own money, delivers health care and other programs to its citizens, all Beijing can do is draw the island on its maps. China’s failure to govern Taiwan would be less obvious if they didn’t make such a big deal of it, especially when it comes to cartoon animals in English-language magazines. But I digress.

By the outrage that spread through the office, I realized what a strong knee-jerk reaction Westerners are conditioned to when it comes to Taiwan. For those of us foreigners living in China, we gladly didn’t mention “June 4” in public, because I suppose the fallout from the Tiananmen Square sock-hop was an internal housekeeping issue that didn’t affect us directly. But Taiwan – Democracy! Capitalism! – is just too close to our hearts. Growing up during the Cold War in the 1970s, we were habituated to recognizing any country that stood up to Communism as a nation of heroes, even if they were being governed by their own autocratic dictators.

It’s one thing to learn about an issue in classrooms or documentaries, or to understand an argument by reading different viewpoints. But I didn’t have any visceral sense of the situation until I lived in Taiwan for a few months and spoke with friends and their families about how the split from China has affected their lives and relationships with each other.

The Taiwanese are fiercely political and will deluge you with their views if you express even the most remote interest. While those in China will simply echo the standard “Taiwan is ours” rhetoric, the Taiwanese positions are more compelling because they face more complex issues about whether to claim independence, re-join China, or live with the status quo. Let’s put it this way: the Taiwanese are just as biased as the Chinese, but the Taiwanese biases are far more colourful.

Here’s the history in a nutshell: China enters a modern age of sorts in 1912, with the end of dynastic rule. After thousands of years of being governed by emperors, Sun Yat Sen and later Chiang Kai Shek become the country’s first modern presidents. In 1949, When Mao Zedong and the Communists take power in a revolt, Chiang Kai Shek, his military, their families, and thousands of followers flee to Taiwan, where they set up shop as the exiled government of China. The idea is that this displaced government – called the Kuomintang (pronounced Gwo-min-dahng) – will one day rule China again when the Communists are defeated. Both sides – the Kuomintang and the Communists – consider Taiwan territory of China. The only thing they disagree on is who the legitimate government of China is.

But now several generations have passed, and the vast majority of Taiwan’s inhabitants have only known life under their own democratically elected governments. Meanwhile, the Communists only strengthened their grip in China and show no sign of budging.

Flag proposed by Taiwan's
independence movement

Taiwan is now split between two factions. If you speak with Taiwanese who are descendants of those who came to Taiwan under Chiang Kai Shek in 1949, they are more likely to tell you that their ultimate desire is to reunify with China – however, not under Communist rule. If you speak with those ethnic Chinese or aboriginals whose families have been in Taiwan for hundreds of years, they might tell you stories of the interlopers who stole from the inhabitants and distributed the wealth amongst themselves. To some Taiwanese, Chiang Kai Shek is a hero; to others, he was just as bad as Mao.

Time has blurred some of the lines between these divisions. It was easier to take a clear-cut position back when China was isolated behind the Red Curtain and cut off from modern economies. In those days, Taiwan and Japan were the economic giants of Asia. But China is now open and fiercely capitalist, and they've been able to choke off a large portion of Taiwan's economy. As a result, a massive sector of Taiwan’s jobs and factories are flowing towards the mainland. Given China’s population of 1.3 billion to Taiwan’s 23 million, this has made Taiwan a deferential partner in cozy trading relationships with China.

As a result, Taiwanese are more likely to consider the practicality of their vote. Although a majority of Taiwanese today are pro-independence, enough of them are so concerned about jobs and the economy that they will vote for pro-China leaders. “No reason to poke the tiger,” one friend told me. On the other hand, for those who come from pro-unification families, enough time has passed that many of them don’t feel as strongly as their parents do about the issue, and tend to think that independence wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Regardless, divisions still exist, and you still find families whose political leanings run through their blood. One of my closest friends told stories about his family’s land being stolen by Chiang Kai Shek’s men 60 years ago. Yet another friend, this one from a pro-China family, talked about being ostracized in the schoolyard by other children who said he was not a “real Taiwanese.” He told me: “My family came here 100 years ago. Their families came here 400 years ago. So what? We all came from the same place.”

In Taipei, with my ardently pro-independence friend and his father, we watched a movie called Formosa Betrayed (Formosa being the name of Taiwan pre-revolution). It tells the tale of a Taiwanese academic assassinated on American soil to prevent him from completing a book he was writing about Kuomintang atrocities. It’s 1980, and a CIA agent takes his investigation to Taiwan, where he gets drawn into more intrigue and gets a few history lessons literally beaten into him.

My friend and his father paused the movie at various points to add their own anecdotes to the movie’s narrative. “Yes, this is exactly what happened to us under Chiang Kai Shek!” was the gist of their message. The film ends with a closing scrawl: “Because of the events depicted in this film, Taiwan is now a democracy.” My friend teared up a bit and said, “Please show this movie to your friends in Canada so they understand Taiwan.” When I watched the movie later with a Taiwanese friend from a pro-China family, his reaction to the closing scrawl was, “What bullshit!”

What I found delightfully captivating about these types of conversations was that I had never heard my Taiwanese friends in Vancouver speak so passionately and politically. I suppose there was no reason for them to talk shop about their mother country among Canadians like myself. Even when it came to the whole Taiwan/China dispute, it was something that my Chinese and Taiwanese friends seemed indifferent about, at least on the outside. But in Taiwan, it was revealing and somewhat enthralling to witness the political fervour that bubbles on the surface of their daily lives.

There were times when I felt compelled to take a side. Really, though, it was not any of my business as a foreigner, but this is who I am – I like to know a country by planting some roots and embracing as many aspects of local living as possible. That includes understanding the nation’s issues and politics. As the famous phrase goes, “the “personal is political”, and the Taiwanese are a magnificent example of this adage. Understanding a nation’s politics well enough to form an opinion was my way of feeling a sense of belonging and engaging with the country around me, so wherever I lived I'd pick up the paper and start talking about what I read. (Some friends I made in these places admired this penchant; others found it annoying.)

Nowadays, whenever I read an article in the Canadian press about Taiwan, I don’t react with, “Well, that was interesting.” I’m either agreeing or calling “Bullshit!”

The latter category is how I reacted to this article in a Vancouver weekly newspaper. In it, several Taiwanese immigrants to Canada complain about the gutlessness of powerful nations to stand up to China and officially support Taiwan independence. Reading their statements, I was reminded of something one friend in Taipei told me. When I talked about how my Taiwanese friends in Vancouver seemed so different from the Taiwanese in Taiwan, his explanation was that those who leave to hold foreign passports are more inclined to lay low in a safe haven until the dust settles in their homeland. This means being apolitical and a little bit "disloyal to the cause," or so I was told. So when I read these types of comments from Taiwanese Canadians, such as that Taiwan is “virtually an orphan, and this goes on because all the strong nations tolerate that,” I can’t help but think that it’s not just strong nations that are to blame – you could also say that those who abandoned the cause and fled Taiwan are just as culpable.

Many Taiwanese, such as those quoted in the aforementioned article, want the powerful countries of the world to cut ties with China in support of Taiwan. They want our governments to officially open embassies in Taipei, and our businesses to stop trading with the world’s second-largest economy in favour of the nineteenth largest. This is hypocritical, though, since Taiwan itself has formed many rewarding trade agreements with China, and they've done so with the backing of the people – the ruling Kuomintang party has won two elections in a row on a pro-China platform. Even the pro-independence party, the Democratic Progressive Party, softened its stance toward China to win two elections in 2000 and 2004. Why wouldn’t the DPP declare independence, despite that being their raison d'être? As one friend put it, nobody wanted them to “poke the tiger”.

This is where both sides of the Taiwan/China argument ring hollow. I don’t fault the Taiwanese for being cautious with regard to China. But they must also live with the fact that their approach leaves them open to being claimed by a more powerful country, and currently that’s China. If the Taiwanese want other nations to poke the tiger, they must poke the tiger first and make a clear declaration for the rest of the world to rally behind. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy – China’s official position is to attack Taiwan if it tries to secede (I don’t think it would come to that, but who really wants to find out the hard way?). It’s ludicrous, however, to ask other nations to antagonize China while Taiwan continues to profit from their own cozy relationship with the tiger.

Beijing itself is just as full of hot air. If Taiwan belongs to them, then why don’t they send their bureaucrats there to collect taxes, issue passports, supervise the military, print money, and plant their flag on every government building? A country is defined by its ability to control its borders, service its armed forces, and provide for its people. Beijing is unable to do any of these things in Taiwan. So how can they claim it as their territory?

I think it’s inevitable that Taiwan will be forced to re-join China at some point in the near future. Not through hostile means, but economic ones. The more reliant Taiwan becomes on China and its market, the more influence and power China will have in Taiwan’s affairs. Taiwan is already in China’s tentacles, and the merger will be a slow and gradual one. (But I’m also naively optimistic that China will transform over time and adopt some characteristics of a democracy, which would only encourage the reunification.)

For those reasons, I’m uncertain how I’d feel if I were a Taiwanese citizen with a real stake in the game, not just an opinionated foreigner. I would certainly be pro-independence, but I wonder how hard and how loudly I’d fight for it. As much as I’d fear getting too close to China, I’d have the same basic concern about my job and living standard, not to mention a potential war. Although I like to think the personal is political, the modern corollary to that saying should be, “... and the political is monetary”. As governments the world over are taking on more characteristics of being business managers while letting the free market chip away at our social programs, the day may soon come when it doesn’t matter which country we’re a part of. As for China, they're taking a very business-like approach to Taiwan: instead of attacking, they're simply buying them out.

For a better grasp on Taiwan's political realities, this article by Canadian historian Gwynne Dyer, posted just after Taiwan's 2012 presidential elections, gives a succinct and modern perspective on the thinking behind their current relationship with China.