A Personal Taiwan Awakening

As someone who resides in Taiwan with Taiwanese relatives, I am an ardent supporter of Taiwan as a country, its civil society, its history and culture. I firmly believe that notions like the “1992 Consensus” and “One Country, Two Systems” in which Taiwan is merely a subservient part of another nation are invalid. But I confess I wasn’t always so. In fact, I actually used to hold the opposite view.

Greater China illusions

As a high school student in Trinidad (the Caribbean nation I grew up in), I developed a strong interest in China, due to its economic and geopolitical rise, its long history and as the place where my ancestors came from. As China continued to boom during my university years, I resolved I would go there to work someday. Taiwan fit into this vision due to the common use of Mandarin and cultural similarities, as well as its political identity as the Republic of China, the remnant of China’s previous ruling regime. Coming to Taiwan after I graduated university, where half of my family is from, was the natural first step of my journey to China.

But when I visited Taiwan before my final year of university, I was disappointed to realize that the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the Taipei military martyrs’ shrine were just 20th-century replicas of old Chinese buildings. I’d mistakenly thought these were actual preexisting Qing Dynasty buildings that had then been converted to contemporary usage. To me, this further supported my idea of a “Greater China” that included Taiwan. Taiwan had no actual history and it was only by being under the Chinese national umbrella that it had an identity. I was wrong, but I’d only figure this out several years later.

I worked in Taiwan for several years, learned Mandarin, visited China several times, and then moved to Beijing to work in 2013. After over a year living there, amid the beginning of Xi Jinping’s repressive reign, which is still worsening in many ways to this day, I began to see the light. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained control of the country through online and media censorship as well as sweeping government crackdowns on different sectors of society. The country’s supposed economic prosperity only led to an increasingly smug and powerful Xi while fueling a lack of trust and civility amongst Chinese towards each other. It seemed like the country was getting richer but also more cutthroat.

The Sunflower Movement took place in Taiwan in March 2014, followed by the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong in September. Shamefully, I had been skeptical of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement but by the time the Umbrella Revolution happened, my formerly sympathetic stance towards China was shifting. While the two popular movements were not directly linked, they were both driven by dissatisfaction towards their respective governments and suspicion of China.

Not only did I lose hope in China, but I also knew Taiwan could never really be a true part of China. I would later leave Beijing in 2015.

Taiwan is Taiwan

My views toward Taiwan changed as I finally started appreciating Taiwan for itself and not as some idealized appendage of China.

Beyond the surface similarities of language, ethnic origins, and certain religious and cultural traditions, Taiwan is a completely different society than China. I would even go so far as to say it is like a completely different world, which is apparent when you fly from China once you step into Taoyuan Airport.

Not only is the internet and media uncensored, but there are protests, rallies, and elections. Taiwan has a very active and rigorous civil society that covers political issues, civic rights, workers, immigrants, gay rights, and religion, while China’s civil society has been cracked down on, repressed, and co-opted. While in Taiwan, everyone is free to practice their faith, in China, churches, mosques and even Buddhist temples are increasingly suffering from the heavy hand of the state. While the recent referendums in Taiwan’s local elections last November may not have gone the way that many had hoped, it was still a vivid testament to Taiwan’s political freedom.

I realized I was wrong in thinking that Taiwan had no history after finding out the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall was built no earlier than 1980. Taiwan has almost 400 years of history spanning European, Qing and Japanese colonization leading to the present, while its indigenous peoples have over thousands of years of history.

Of course, Taiwan does not have the long recorded history of larger countries like China or Japan. But being a young or small country is nothing to feel shameful of, and it certainly has not hindered the likes of Singapore or New Zealand or Qatar from prospering.

My disappointment now is not that the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial and the military Martyrs’ Shrine were not genuinely old, but that they were built to look like old Chinese buildings in the first place. While the authoritarian KMT regime that ruled during the martial era up to the nineties may have thought Taiwan could be their idyllic little version of China, that is not realistic nor something the majority of Taiwanese want. For that same reason, I don’t think Taiwan is China with democracy or that it is the “real China,” which some non-Taiwanese intend as a well-meaning but misleading compliment.

I belatedly accepted that Taiwan, far from being a miniature version or substitute for China, is Taiwan, something many Taiwanese and expats already do. Many Taiwanese certainly do believe in a distinct identity, whether solely Taiwanese or both Taiwanese and Chinese, but very few as merely Chinese, as polls have shown.

Documentary filmmaker Fu Yue, who won an award at the Golden Horse Awards in November, openly declared that while receiving her prize, as did President Tsai Ing-wen who backed her in response to Chinese criticisms.

In fact, Tsai has displayed exemplary courage and integrity of her own in refusing to bow to China’s demands to acquiesce to the “1992 Consensus” despite China’s provocations and threats since then. Tsai was proven right after Xi Jinping’s speech on January 2, when he made it very clear that the “1992 Consensus” meant accepting “unification” as a subservient part of China. That is not something that most Taiwanese would want.

It will not be easy for Taiwan to stand firm and resolve its identity issues, but there should be no doubt that Taiwan can and does stand on its own feet. I only wish I had realized that sooner.