Wang Ya-june didn’t think much of the town where she washed up in the autumn of 1949. When she stepped off a Chinese Nationalist warship laden with refugees and injured and dead soldiers in Keelung on that rainy day, the port on the northern tip of Taiwan was just another Chinese city to her, just another place for seeking temporary refuge.
For 14 of the 16 years of her life, Wang had been following her mother and three older sisters around China, fleeing first Japanese invasion forces and then the Communist army. They were lucky to secure a spot on one of the last ships evacuating the remainders of China’s collapsing Nationalist, or Kuomintang, government and military to Taiwan as Communist forces were closing in.
“It looked desolate and backward,” Wang, now 90, says of the first glimpse she caught of the island, as she haltingly pieces together her memories. Little did she know that she was joining a centuries-long line of migrants, refugees and colonisers on these shores, or that she would spend the rest of her life here and become part of a nation quite distinct from the one the Chinese Communist party built on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
Since the KMT’s escape to Taiwan 75 years ago, the CCP has claimed the island as part of its territory and threatened to take it by force if Taipei resists unification indefinitely. As Taiwan’s citizens prepare to elect their next president on January 13, Beijing is sending them stark reminders of that threat. Warning them against keeping in power the Democratic Progressive party, the homegrown political force Beijing denounces as separatist because it refuses to define the country as part of China, a Chinese official said last month: “We believe that the Taiwan compatriots will . . . make the right choice between ‘peace and war’.” In a New Year’s message, Chinese leader Xi Jinping repeated his claim that “reunification” was a “historical inevitability”.
The belligerent rhetoric paired with the People’s Liberation Army’s frequent demonstrations of its growing prowess in the skies and waters close to Taiwan has triggered concerns that Beijing might act on its threat and assault the country. This is making the DPP-KMT face-off a notch shriller than usual: the opposition is accusing DPP candidate Lai Ching-te of risking war with China, while the ruling party suggests KMT hopeful Hou Yu-ih’s intention to seek more compromise with Beijing would endanger Taiwan’s sovereignty and security.
Most Taiwanese appreciate foreign governments’ and analysts’ calls for restraint to avert open conflict. But many lament that foreign powers only look at today’s Taiwan as a product of the 1949 clash between China’s Communist party and its predecessor regime. This cannot resolve the question over the island’s future and falls far short in understanding why the dispute is so inextricable.
“Taiwan has never belonged to China,” says Hsieh Jolan, a professor of indigenous studies from the indigenous Siraya people. “We have come to be on two different paths quite naturally. Even more, if we embrace our indigenous identity, we can’t possibly pursue unification with China.” She and many other Taiwanese see their history as a succession of colonial regimes that has left multiple faultlines in the national identity.
While ethnic Chinese make up more than 95 per cent of Taiwan’s population today, Austronesian peoples were its only inhabitants for centuries before they arrived. In the early 17th century, Spain set up a colony in the north of the island and the Dutch East India Company colonised the south-western plains. Here, they encountered the Siraya, Hsieh’s ancestors. The Dutch rendition of the Siraya name of the place where they settled, Tayovan, is believed to be the origin of the island’s name today.
Dutch rule facilitated Chinese immigration: after they built forts, subjugated some indigenous tribes and negotiated land access with others, Taiwan’s Chinese population swelled from a little over 1,000 temporary dwellers to more than 30,000 permanent residents in the 1660s.
Pirate leader Zheng Chenggong was the first Chinese to rule Taiwan, when he drove out the Dutch in 1662. But rather than incorporate the island into China, Zheng, also known as Koxinga, made it his base for fighting the Manchurian Qing dynasty that had conquered China in 1644. Even after annexing Taiwan in 1684, the Qing kept it at arm’s length, restricting migration to the island and focusing on putting down rebellions. Taiwan was made a Chinese province only in 1887, less than 10 years before the Qing ceded it to Japan as a war reparation.
Japan became the first colonial power to gain control over all of Taiwan. To extract natural resources including tropical timber, sugarcane, coal, gold and copper, the Japanese colonisers built railways and an electricity grid. Their 50-year rule also left Taiwan with a state school system, universities, hospitals, and a legal system and building code modelled on the Japanese ones.
“Looking at it from today’s perspective, coming into Taiwan from China in the 1940s was coming into a foreign country,” says Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang, a historian at the University of Missouri, and author of a book about the Chinese who fled to Taiwan in 1949 like Wang Ya-june. “Taiwanese back then identified as Chinese in a cultural sense and as local Taiwanese, while seeing themselves as Japanese colonial subjects — a hybrid identity miles away from a Chinese national identity.”
None of China’s leading politicians appeared to even consider the possibility of regaining control over Taiwan until well into the second world war.
The Communists — who now call Taiwan an “inalienable part” of the country “since ancient times” — long treated it as a foreign territory. In a 1935 resolution, the CCP supported independence for Taiwan. Until 1943, it continued to refer to the Taiwanese people alongside other foreign nations. Not until March 1949 did the party state for the first time its goal of “liberating Taiwan”.
Nationalist strongman Chiang Kai-shek started eyeing the island when the prospects of a Chinese victory over Japan improved in 1942, according to Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at Soas University of London.
At the November 1943 Cairo Conference, the US and its allies agreed to Chiang’s demand that Taiwan should be “returned” to the Republic of China after a Japanese defeat. US president Franklin D Roosevelt was concerned that the Chinese leader might otherwise negotiate a peace deal with Japan on his own. Although the 1951 peace treaty with Japan did not mention a transfer of sovereignty, the allies had Japanese forces surrender the island to Chiang’s troops in 1945. From 1949, when the Communist party founded the People’s Republic of China, the ROC continued to exist only in Taiwan, which uses its name, flag and constitution to this day.
The military government Chiang installed in Taipei proceeded to plunder the island’s resources for the civil war effort in China, triggering runaway inflation and food shortages. Corruption, mismanagement and a high-pressure campaign to rid the Taiwanese of their Japanese ways and turn them into Chinese sparked protests on February 28 1947, which the KMT suppressed with a bloody crackdown and a systematic persecution of local elites now known as “the 228 Incident”.
“In 1945, many Taiwanese had the illusion that they were returning to the motherland,” says 76-year-old Wang Wen-hung, whose father, a community leader in the southern city of Kaohsiung, was killed in a massacre shortly after February 28. In 1945, Wang’s brothers went to the pier to greet the KMT troops for the Japanese surrender. “But the soldiers who came were like beggars,” he says. A KMT soldier’s attempt to light his cigarette on a car headlight met with laughter.
Two years later, the ridicule turned to hatred after Wang’s father was shot dead and his oldest brother had to identify the body from trucks full of bullet-riddled corpses. “They robbed and raped, and they treated our people like second-class citizens,” Wang says.
Young Wang Ya-june, newly arrived from mainland China, did not notice any of this. Her mother and the girls were busy making a living. Wang learnt to sell a dish cooked from soaked dried squid. She tied fishing nets, made toothbrushes and knitted sweaters for money.
Asked about 228, Wang says she did not witness any conflict, and she thinks the date refers to mistreatment of the Taiwanese by Japanese officials. She doesn’t remember struggling to communicate, either — despite the fact that in 1945 locals spoke Taiwanese and Japanese but no Mandarin. “The soldiers and government officials all spoke Mandarin, and the government was teaching everyone the national language,” she says.
Researchers studying the arrival of Chinese refugees in 1949 attribute their apparent ignorance of the conflict between the Taiwanese and their new rulers to their own recent past. The vast regional differences and social chaos they encountered during their years-long treks throughout China meant that what they saw in Taiwan was nothing new. “They were sojourners, so what did they care about the local population?” says Yang.
In the years after their arrival in Taiwan — during which Wang married a KMT military official and started a family that would grow to eight children — the classified section of the KMT’s Central Daily News was teeming with ads for Chinese native place associations seeking members and Chinese alma mater clubs calling on alumni to join. “These people were trying to rebuild their social networks and associating preferably with those who spoke the same dialect,” says Yang. “They were living in their little cocoons.”
The immigration wave turned Taiwan’s society upside down. According to Taiwanese census data, about 640,000 Chinese civilians alone arrived on the island between 1945 and 1956. Together with the Nationalist armed forces, the inflow is estimated at more than 2mn people — over a third of Taiwan’s 1945 population.
With heavy prodding from the US, the KMT government enacted land reforms and later broader investment programmes in infrastructure, education and industry that sparked an economic boom from the 1960s onwards.
But many of the native Taiwanese, whose families had left China generations earlier and lived through the Japanese era, came to view the mainlanders as new colonisers. After the Chiang regime imposed martial law in May 1949, which would stay in place for 38 years, police would conduct monthly household registration checks. While those checks were often a formality, Wang Wen-hung’s family were harassed with visits from armed policemen in the middle of the night.
His mother and older siblings tried to protect him, the youngest of eight children who was only 32 days old when his father was shot dead. “Nobody told me anything,” he says. “Sometimes I would hear them talk about 228, and it confused me: I kept thinking, two plus two is four, and two times two is four, too. So how can it be eight?”
Once the boys were out of school, their mother sent them abroad to protect them from political persecution. After joining other dissidents in the US, Wang Wen-hung became an ardent supporter of Taiwan independence.
In the 1970s and 1980s, many of those who’d stayed behind started protesting against the KMT regime, forming a civil rights movement. Thousands became political prisoners, but their actions ultimately drove the KMT to lift martial law in 1987, spawned the DPP, and eventually helped transform Taiwan into one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.
Still, it took many years to shake off decades of suppression and indoctrination. Hsieh, the Siraya professor, used to spend holidays at her grandparents’ tribal village as a child. “Watching them, I always knew that we were different — the Siraya are a matriarchal society, and everything was different from how the Chinese lived,” she says.
Born in 1967, Hsieh witnessed the onset of democracy only after growing up under KMT rule. Her childhood exposed her to the regime’s full-force assimilation policies. In a textbook from the 1970s, her primary-school days, one lesson reads: “I am Chinese. I put down roots in China. I love China more than anything. Our Chinese language is the language I like best. Our Chinese mountains and rivers are the landscape I love most. How warm is our Chinese family!”
Those days are long past. A curriculum exclusively focused on Chinese history and geography has been replaced with textbooks that teach Taiwanese students about their homeland first, before moving on to China as part of regional history.
Mushrooming political parties and civil society groups have also led to efforts at transitional justice: compensating victims of KMT persecution and educating society about their fate, returning public assets that the KMT, once one of the world’s richest political parties, had appropriated during its authoritarian rule, and trying to undo centuries of forced assimilation of indigenous peoples.
That education and open political debate have produced a very different generation. Chen Ling-yang, a magazine editor and doctoral student of Taiwanese history, was born in 1991, the year Taiwan conducted its first free national-level elections.
Like Wang Wen-hung, Chen’s family experienced persecution in the aftermath of the 228 Incident: his grandfather, a former policeman under the Japanese government, had to go into hiding for almost two years after a colleague at the agricultural machinery factory where he later worked filed a false accusation against him in 1947.
Chen learnt about 228 at school. A history book written by a Taiwan independence advocate led him to investigate some more on his own, including in government archives on the authoritarian era, now open to the public. “I found out the denunciator claimed that my grandfather had bought 20 red bicycles and schemed to revolt and rob the company’s savings,” Chen says. “The suggestion with the alleged red bikes was of course that he was a Communist. But it was all false.”
Chen felt that the commemorations of 228 were too focused on the victimisation of the Taiwanese. He worked with other students to celebrate the role of Taiwanese youth in political resistance, forming a movement that hatched a music festival and a non-profit youth association.
Such activism, and the fading memory that comes with generational change, has helped bridge some internal political divides. Still, Taiwan has much work left to do reconciling the ethnic groups that its consecutive colonial regimes pitted against each other.
Emboldened by democracy, many of the Taiwanese whose ancestors arrived from China centuries ago have begun criticising Chiang Kai-shek and demanding to replace the ROC with a Taiwan republic. Their feelings need to be balanced with those of the 1949 immigrants and their descendants, who see themselves as victims as well, having lost their homes in China.
Despite the push by the early-arrival Taiwanese against the Chinese nationalist regime, their own group has yet to right many of the historic wrongs committed against Taiwan’s indigenous groups. Although the DPP has promoted Taiwan’s non-Chinese heritage, large parts of the population take little or no interest in their indigenous compatriots. “We all need to decolonise,” says Hsieh. “There is still so much discrimination and so much stigma.”
But that is where Beijing’s claim on Taiwan and its threat to annex the island by force impose strict limits. The Chinese government has made clear that moves to change the official Republic of China name, the flag and the constitution and other symbolic acts would cross its red lines. It has also denounced changes made to Taiwan’s textbooks as part of a “desinicisation” campaign by the “separatist” DPP.
Tsai Ing-wen, the incumbent president, has tried to keep the balance by rallying the nation behind a hybrid identity, praising the ROC’s history in Taiwan — its economic miracle, democratisation and tolerant political and social culture — as a common achievement, and frequently calling the country “Republic of China Taiwan”.
“I understand that she wants to forge a national consensus on identity and that her hands are tied, so I can accept it,” says Hsieh. “Still, I hate that Republic of China name and I hate that flag. I worry that it confuses people and will water down their Taiwan identity.”
But others believe the pressure from China will strengthen internal cohesion.
“In my generation, many are not as sensitive to our historical backgrounds as our parents or grandparents,” Chen says. “Current events have come to play at least as important a role in shaping our identities. In 2012, the acquisition of media assets by pro-China figures triggered concerns that China was infiltrating our media. Then we got concerned that China could gradually erode Taiwan’s sovereignty and economic autonomy.” Students occupied parliament in 2014 to stop KMT lawmakers from forcing through a services trade agreement with China — a backlash against policies many felt were making their country too dependent on its neighbour.
Yang, the historian, is optimistic that democracy and generational change are gradually narrowing the memory divide between Taiwan’s different groups of colonisers and colonised. “What we are seeing is two nationalisms, the Taiwan one and the ROC one, gradually coming together,” he says. “China’s inflexible course is only accelerating that.”
Wang Ya-june may be a case in point. She says that Taiwan, not China, is her home now, and she feels repelled by anyone who would consider disrupting the peace. “Why is it that people feel they have to go to war all the time?” she asks. “I have had enough bitterness in my life.”
Kathrin Hille is the FT’s Greater China correspondent
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