Taiwan’s victory in the World Baseball Softball Confederation’s Premier12 championship is a wonderful moment for the country and a reminder of the power of sports to bring people together and instill public pride in the nation.
Taiwan is in a golden age of soft power and international visibility. Taiwan’s baseball heroes joining the nation’s democracy and LGBTQ+ rights movements, former president Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) internationally renowned leadership and now diplomatic role, the nation’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, its semiconductor and advanced technology industries, and Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), the pride of Taiwan’s queer community, who won US reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race in April, are all manifesting Taiwan’s spirit and values on the world stage.
It is a reminder that when Taiwan is given an opportunity to express itself, it makes a warm and positive contribution to the world.
Baseball is one of the few things that can unite Taiwanese across the political divide, allowing people to find common ground in support of a shared passion. However, while the whole nation came together in supporting the team, the messages of congratulations from politicians — “Team Taiwan” or “Team Chinese Taipei” — brought to the fore hidden fractures, revealing the polarized national vision of the two sides.
Introduced to Taiwan by Japan during the colonial era, the sport was strategically embraced by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) as a vehicle to promote its version of Chinese nationalism. Taiwan’s domination of Little League Baseball — winning 17 championships in less than 30 years from the 1960s through the 1990s — was linked to strong interventions by the KMT, which helped the regime maintain its ideological legitimacy at home and abroad as the “real China,” Fu Jen Catholic University adjunct assistant professor of sociology Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun (孫又揆) wrote on the topic.
However, with democratization in the 1990s and the KMT no longer the only powerful party, the meaning of the sport has changed, and it is now an important symbol of Taiwanese identity. In recent years, “Team Taiwan” has become the go-to phrase for Taiwanese to support their team in international competitions, a symbolic assertion of identity against the “Chinese Taipei” strictures imposed by geopolitical attempts to sideline the nation.
However, despite the ideology of Chinese nationalism giving way to a Taiwanese identity in the public sphere, KMT politicians are still wedded to that earlier ideology. In sending their congratulations to the team after their victory, Democratic Progressive Party politicians used the term “Team Taiwan,” while KMT mayors, lawmakers and mainstream politicians used the term “Chinese Taipei,” drawing mockery online.
This usage has not only brought to the fore the nation’s political fractures, but also brought into sharp relief the KMT’s modern identity crisis in clinging to an outdated China ideology that views Taiwan as a part of a larger Chinese whole, while seeking to govern a Taiwanese electorate that views their nation as independent.
However, one leading KMT politician did use “Team Taiwan” in his message of congratulations — Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) — suggesting that he has his sights set on a higher political office. In democratic Taiwan, KMT politicians have had to show flexibility to stay electorally competitive, with ambitious political entrepreneurs de-emphasizing their China ideology while burnishing their Taiwanese bona fides when seeking to be elected president. That includes, among others, “new Taiwanese” former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), also a former Taipei mayor.
In the event of a war with China, Taiwan has some surprisingly tough defenses that could make it as difficult to tackle as a porcupine: A shoreline dotted with swamps, rocks and concrete barriers; conscription for all adult men; highways and airports that are built to double as hardened combat facilities. This porcupine has a soft underbelly, though, and the war in Iran is exposing it: energy. About 39,000 ships dock at Taiwan’s ports each year, more than the 30,000 that transit the Strait of Hormuz. About one-fifth of their inbound tonnage is coal, oil, refined fuels and liquefied natural gas (LNG),
To counter the CCP’s escalating threats, Taiwan must build a national consensus and demonstrate the capability and the will to fight. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) often leans on a seductive mantra to soften its threats, such as “Chinese do not kill Chinese.” The slogan is designed to frame territorial conquest (annexation) as a domestic family matter. A look at the historical ledger reveals a different truth. For the CCP, being labeled “family” has never been a guarantee of safety; it has been the primary prerequisite for state-sanctioned slaughter. From the forced starvation of 150,000 civilians at the Siege of Changchun
The two major opposition parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), jointly announced on Tuesday last week that former TPP lawmaker Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) would be their joint candidate for Chiayi mayor, following polling conducted earlier this month. It is the first case of blue-white (KMT-TPP) cooperation in selecting a joint candidate under an agreement signed by their chairpersons last month. KMT and TPP supporters have blamed their 2024 presidential election loss on failing to decide on a joint candidate, which ended in a dramatic breakdown with participants pointing fingers, calling polls unfair, sobbing and walking
In the opening remarks of her meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) framed her visit as a historic occasion. In his own remarks, Xi had also emphasized the history of the relationship between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Where they differed was that Cheng’s account, while flawed by its omissions, at least partially corresponded to reality. The meeting was certainly historic, albeit not in the way that Cheng and Xi were signaling, and not from the perspective
RSS