A new French documentary titled Nous Sommes Taiwan demonstrates through interviews with Taiwanese, including politicians and businesspeople, that the nation has developed its own national identity.
Directed by Reporters Without Borders France president Pierre Haski, the documentary shows that Taiwanese have a unique identity informed by the arrival of different cultures throughout Taiwan’s past, and by its transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy. Presidential Office spokeswoman Kolas Yotaka, who was among those interviewed for the film, said those different cultures “converged to form new identities, cultures, beliefs and customs.”
Haski said that building a national identity around democracy “has allowed Taiwan to construct a society that’s relatively harmonious, that shows respect for ethnic, linguistic and gender minorities... That’s the exact opposite of what’s happening in China.”
This important reminder comes at a time when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as those in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), New Party and other parties in Taiwan who would collaborate with the CCP are seeking to undermine that harmony and respect by pushing the fabricated notion of a shared cross-strait identity. Former KMT secretary-general Lin Join-sane (林中森) and New Party founder Yok Mu-ming (郁慕明) this week attended an event in China to worship the mythological Yellow Emperor, a deity that China calls the progenitor of Han people.
Speaking at the event, which Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Mei-hui (王美惠) said was part of China’s “united front” strategy, Shaanxi Governor Zhao Gang (趙剛) said he was attending “with the peoples of China from both sides of the Taiwan Strait, together as one family.” Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) contributed to this farcical narrative when he at the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, China, on Tuesday said: “The people of both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese nation.”
The idea of Chinese and Taiwanese having a shared identity has plagued rhetoric on both sides of the Taiwan Strait since the Chinese Civil War, but has featured especially prominently since Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) took office. In January, Xi called people on both sides of the Strait “members of one and the same family,” and said that he “sincerely hopes that our compatriots on both sides of the Strait will work together with a unity of purpose to jointly foster lasting prosperity of the Chinese nation.”
Beijing has long employed the strategy of using insincere sentiments such as “one family” to trick Taiwanese into believing that cross-strait animosity is Taipei’s fault, National Cheng Kung University professor Hung Chin-fu (洪敬富) said in response.
Putting aside that the concept of a Han ethnic majority in China is widely understood as a modern invention, there are also more cultural differences than similarities within China, let alone between Taiwan and China. Even Chinese acknowledge this, as a common saying acknowledges that “northerners eat noodles, while southerners eat rice.” There are also several hundred dialects and languages in China, and most are mutually incomprehensible.
That will not stop the CCP from using such rhetoric, but unfortunately for the CCP it is a bit late to the show. While only about 20 percent of Taiwanese identified as “Taiwanese” and “not Chinese” at the time martial law in Taiwan was lifted, that number rose to 83.2 percent in a 2020 poll conducted by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation. It is unclear whether China’s united front tactics will have any impact on Taiwanese identity — particularly as members of Taiwan’s political parties facilitate those tactics — but for the sake of national security, the DPP and other pan-green parties should do all they can to emphasize Taiwan’s cultural uniqueness. Documentaries like Haski’s, and school curricula that emphasize local art and literature, are a great place to start.
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