Arnaud does a great job tackling the ahistorical assertion that China just recently noticed Taiwan in the 90s and decided to grab it out of greed. What?

Look I’m a woman of a certain age who grew up in Taiwan. When I was a little girl, we were still taught in our textbooks that we have to rescue our compatriots from the commie bandits and bring light back to the Ancestral Land! Back then there was no confusion: We are Chinese and so are you, but WE should be in charge.

People forget that even former DPP President Tsai Ing-wen at one point referred to herself at Chinese. In the clip she was so matter of fact. The Taiwanese were Chinese. It wad known, until it wasn’t.

But wasn’t there always a Taiwanese independence movement? Sure…but it only recently became mainstream. Even when the DPP was founded there was a panoply of views on how the two sides of the straits should relate. That’s why at opposition rallies they often parade some old geezer as « a founding member of the DPP » to talk about how the DPP went the wrong way and then try to get him off the stage before he says something off-brand like « long live communism! »

The pro-independence faction did take over the DPP. And at some point Taiwan’s history was retconned to make it a narrative of evil Chinese KMT regime oppressing the freedom-loving people of Taiwan.

Chiang Kai-shek era bloody crackdowns were weaponized. And his achievements of his son Chiang Ching-Guo totally ignored. Chiang the younger was the model authoritarian technocrat. He built the state, loved the people, did his work, and then he died. And the people loved him back. You can see the thick crowds of people lining the streets to mourn his funeral procession clips on YouTube. And during his life CCK was known for slipping out without security to mingle with the folks and eat some beef noodle or something. You think he could do that if he was the evil oppressive KMT dictator?

Anyhow. Doesn’t matter the kids don’t even know who he is now. I suppose they think the Taiwan economic miracle of the 90s happened because we democratized and then Magic Morris Chang got sick of being underestimated at Texas Instruments so he came home and started TSMC. Ha!

Arnaud’s comparison of Taiwan as China’s Alsace-lorraine is so apt. It’s a piece of itself that China painfully lost at a point of weakness in its history. There’s no letting it go while still feeling whole. I know because it was how the Chinese people of Taiwan felt about the rest of China.

Once I was talking to an old American uncle who lived for a bit in Taipei in the 80s. He was complaining about how he couldn’t any girl in Taipei to give him the time of day unless he accepted the utterly delusion belief that the KMT was going to retake the mainland.

But what is to be done? Taiwan is more complicated than Alsace-lorrain. That’s a region. It never had its own functioning government and economy for decades. The Taiwanese have gotten used to democracy and freedom of speech. It’s intolerable for China to lose Taiwan, but also intolerable for the people of Taiwan to lose the way of life they have become accustomed to.

I like the formulation of Annette Lu. Instead of « one China »一個中國 let’s use the formulation « one Sinosphere »一個中華 using the framework of the 92 Consensus, a somewhat ambiguous document to be sure. But it’s also an agreement negotiated at the peak of Taiwan’s clout vs China and we’ll never get a better deal.

Before you call this an aging KMT delusion, I should let you know that Annette Lu was the DPP vice president between 2000 and 2008 and she was a feminist activist jailed for five years for sedition by the KMT. She’s 80 now and has no influence within the DPP but still active and makes good sense.

In the words Annette Lu, Taiwan and China are distant relatives and close neighbors and should use wisdom to resolve our differences.