The Republic of Confusion

The Republic of Confusion
Everyone in Taiwan knows who the enemy is — or so we’re told. But while Beijing rattles sabres, the greater threat may be internal: the part of Taiwan that still sees itself as part of China.

Much has been made of the People's Republic's aggression — the encirclement drills, the cyber intrusions, the ominous talk of “reunification.” But the deeper crisis is psychological. A not insignificant share of Taiwan’s older generations still identifies not as Taiwanese, but as Chinese — not metaphorically, but quite literally. Ask them, and they will tell you so, sometimes in a language not native to this land.

This is not simply nostalgia. It’s a consequence of deliberate policies of cultural displacement. After 1945, the Kuomintang regime fled the Chinese mainland and established its seat in Taiwan, not as a homeland but as a base of operations. The Taiwanese people, who had just emerged from fifty years of Japanese colonial rule, were subjected to yet another regime that imposed its flag, its language, and its national mythos. The Republic of China was never native to Taiwan. It was a colonial import dressed in Chinese robes.

That colonial project succeeded beyond its founders’ wildest hopes. Today, Taiwan remains peppered with institutions that proudly bear the name “Chunghwa” — Chinese: Chunghwa Telecom, Chunghwa Post, China Airlines — which, despite the name, is neither based in China nor affiliated with the PRC, yet remains Taiwan’s national carrier. Its constitution still claims all of China as sovereign territory, its official language is not the majority's mother tongue, and its national flag — the same flag that originated in mainland China and is still waved by exiled Chinese nationalists abroad — was never meant to represent Taiwan.

And yet, many Taiwanese today still believe this identity crisis can be reconciled. They wave the ROC flag at protests and international events, not out of loyalty to the Kuomintang or dreams of retaking the mainland, but because they have grown up believing — or been taught — that the ROC is Taiwan. It is a kind of civic amnesia: a generation raised to conflate statehood with survival, unaware that the very flag they cherish was never designed to represent them. Ironically, it continues to be raised by exiled nationalists abroad — not as a symbol of Taiwan, but of a long-defeated vision for China.

Among intellectual elites, the contradictions grow even more uncomfortable. There are prominent academics in Taiwan who maintain ongoing relationships with institutions in Hong Kong and even in mainland China. Some have reportedly collaborated with entities tied to figures like Wang Lijun — the infamous former police chief of Chongqing known for both his brutality and bizarre scientific experiments, including a so-called “brain impact simulator” designed for interrogation. These are not harmless exchanges of scholarship. They raise deeper questions about where the loyalties of some in Taiwan’s academic class truly lie.

This isn’t about purism. It’s about sovereignty. So long as Taiwan remains entangled in the symbolic debris of the Chinese civil war — clinging to names, flags, and frameworks that were never its own — it cannot fully chart its future. A child growing up under the shadow of both the ROC and the PRC is not growing up free. They are growing up confused, displaced, and primed to be used — as economic tools, political pawns, or, in the darkest sense, just more bodies for the machine.

Taiwan has the trappings of a modern democracy, but the soul of its nationhood remains captive to a myth imposed by outsiders. The irony is that many who speak most fervently of “returning to their roots” in China have no intention of leaving Taiwan. They are happy to enjoy its liberties while dreaming of another flag, another capital, another history.

Let them go. If they truly wish to honour their ancestral homeland, they are free to follow Chao Shao-kang to East Africa on one of his whimsical root-tracing expeditions. But leave Taiwan out of it.

The real choice before Taiwan is not between war and peace. It is between delusion and clarity. A nation that wishes to survive must first learn who it is — and who it isn’t.

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