In the seven decades since the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) relocated from China to Taiwan in 1949, it has been unable to break out of the pro-unification box.
The two Chiangs — Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) — pledged to wipe out the communists and retake the other side of the Taiwan Strait. They were succeeded by former president and KMT chairman Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), who firmly stuck to localization and rejected any attempts of unification by China.
After Lee’s exit from both the presidency and the KMT, and following former vice president and KMT chairman Lien Chan’s (連戰) two defeats in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the party made a U-turn and is now willing to be unified by China.
On Dec. 23, KMT Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) gave a speech during a visit to a pro-unification cross-strait exchange association. When an association member shouted “peaceful unification”, Wu quickly told him not to bring up the issue, saying that the unification of Taiwan and China would occur naturally.
One might say that Wu is “naturally pro-unification.”
Wu later explained that the purpose of his remark was to emphasize that it is not necessary to bring up peaceful unification at the moment, but this is the kind of explanation that makes things even worse. He sounds more like his teacher, former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who tried to attract votes before the presidential elections by saying that Taiwanese would be allowed to decide their future for themselves, only to actively lean toward unification with China after his election.
Judging by Wu’s claim that unification would occur naturally, he is clearly not in line with most people either of his generation or of the young generation, who support “natural” independence. This makes his claim seem anything but natural.
Perhaps he was trying to make his pro-unification approach look more palatable by saying that unification will come naturally. From this perspective, he might be more devious than New Party Chairman Yok Mu-ming (郁慕明) and some of the New Party members who have allegedly leaked information to a Chinese spy.
During Lee’s presidency, a Taiwanese official stationed in the US once spoke sternly to a group of pro-unification overseas Taiwanese, telling them to move back to Taiwan if they insisted on promoting unification. He criticized them for living a life of leisure and freedom abroad while calling on Taiwan to be annexed by China when they would not have to bear the negative consequences of such an event.
By the same token, those in Taiwan who support the concept of “natural unification” are now left with two options. They can either move to China to bask in the glory of being a “great power,” or stand as candidates in Taiwan’s free and fair elections, so as to allow the public to decide what they want.
Taiwanese law does not prohibit calls for unification with China. However, that does not mean that pro-unification activists who would rather become slaves to Beijing enjoy special privileges that allow them to break the law.
Quite a few media outlets and academics in Taiwan support cross-strait unification and they certainly have the freedom to do so, as long as they do not break the law. However, the New Party members suspected of leaking information in an espionage case acted shamelessly, while complaining tearfully that they are victims of political persecution.
They came off looking just as bad as the Ji Feng (疾風) magazine employees, who beat up pro-independence activists while shouting that “patriotism is not a crime” in 1979.
James Wang is a senior journalist.
Translated by Eddy Chang
We are used to hearing that whenever something happens, it means Taiwan is about to fall to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot change the color of his socks without China experts claiming it means an invasion is imminent. So, it is no surprise that what happened in Venezuela over the weekend triggered the knee-jerk reaction of saying that Taiwan is next. That is not an opinion on whether US President Donald Trump was right to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro the way he did or if it is good for Venezuela and the world. There are other, more qualified
China’s recent aggressive military posture around Taiwan simply reflects the truth that China is a millennium behind, as Kobe City Councilor Norihiro Uehata has commented. While democratic countries work for peace, prosperity and progress, authoritarian countries such as Russia and China only care about territorial expansion, superpower status and world dominance, while their people suffer. Two millennia ago, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子) would have advised Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that “people are the most important, state is lesser, and the ruler is the least important.” In fact, the reverse order is causing the great depression in China right now,
This should be the year in which the democracies, especially those in East Asia, lose their fear of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China principle” plus its nuclear “Cognitive Warfare” coercion strategies, all designed to achieve hegemony without fighting. For 2025, stoking regional and global fear was a major goal for the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), following on Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Little Red Book admonition, “We must be ruthless to our enemies; we must overpower and annihilate them.” But on Dec. 17, 2025, the Trump Administration demonstrated direct defiance of CCP terror with its record US$11.1 billion arms
The immediate response in Taiwan to the extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the US over the weekend was to say that it was an example of violence by a major power against a smaller nation and that, as such, it gave Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) carte blanche to invade Taiwan. That assessment is vastly oversimplistic and, on more sober reflection, likely incorrect. Generally speaking, there are three basic interpretations from commentators in Taiwan. The first is that the US is no longer interested in what is happening beyond its own backyard, and no longer preoccupied with regions in other
RSS