Sun, Jan 11, 2026 page8

• China’s ‘inevitable’ not accepted

  • By Noa Wynn
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  Taiwan has been living on borrowed time according to outside predictions for longer than most countries have existed. Every decade brings new analysis about why this will be the one where Taiwan’s separate status finally ends, where the military imbalance becomes too great to counter, where acceptance of unification becomes the only rational choice.

  The analysts change, the specific arguments evolve, but the underlying certainty remains constant: Taiwan’s existence is temporary and everyone should start preparing for its inevitable end.

  These predictions have been wrong for 70 years, but that does not stop them from appearing with fresh certainty.

  What they usually miss is that Taiwan’s resilience comes from historical memory about what happens when you accept someone else’s version of your inevitable future.

  The latest version arrived in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) New Year’s address, in which he declared Taiwan’s unification “unstoppable,” and invoked bonds of blood and kinship between the people of China and Taiwan.

  The speech came right after China launched military drills called “Justice Mission 2025,” two days of exercises simulating blockades around Taiwan and training to prevent foreign forces access to the area.

  The message was clear: Resistance is pointless, your separate existence is temporary and accepting unification is the only rational response to overwhelming power. It is the same argument colonial powers and authoritarian regimes have always made and it misses the same thing they all missed about how people actually respond to threats.

  Taiwan spent 50 years under Japanese colonial rule after the Qing Dynasty ceded it in 1895. Then came decades under the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) authoritarian control, including the 228 Incident in 1947, when government troops massacred thousands of civilians who were protesting corruption.

  The period known as the White Terror came next, 38 years of martial law during which more than 100,000 people were imprisoned and more than 1,000 executed for political thoughts the government deemed dangerous.

  These are not just dates in Taiwan’s history. They are lived experiences that shaped how an entire society understands what authoritarian rule actually means when it arrives claiming legitimacy through shared culture or historical destiny.

  The Japanese colonial period taught Taiwan what it means when a foreign power asserts that its control is permanent and beneficial.

  The White Terror taught them what happens when a government with shared ethnic heritage decides certain opinions justify imprisonment or execution. Both regimes were confident about Taiwan’s destiny. Both claimed resistance was pointless. Both regimes lost power — the Japanese after defeat in World War II and the KMT through democratization — not because their departure was inevitable, but because Taiwanese refused to accept what those in power claimed was predetermined.

  When Xi invokes blood and kinship as justification for unification, Taiwanese already know what those appeals are worth. Shared ancestry did not prevent the KMT from killing people in the night for 38 years. Shared cultural claims did not make Japanese assimilation policies less brutal. The pattern is clear: Authoritarian governments always have sophisticated reasons for their control being natural and right, and those reasons never prevent them from brutalizing the people they claimed kinship with.

  The remarkable thing is how that historical trauma shaped Taiwan’s response to current threats. You would expect a society that experienced that much violence and oppression to either submit more easily or fracture under pressure. Instead, Taiwan’s identity has gotten stronger precisely because of China’s increasing aggression.

  Research tracking public opinion from 2018 to 2020 found that as Beijing expanded military threats and showed what it was doing in Hong Kong, Taiwanese shifted significantly toward identifying as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. Now, 67 percent see themselves as primarily Taiwanese. Only 3 percent identify as primarily Chinese. Support for unification “as soon as possible” dropped to 0.7 percent, which is essentially nobody.

  Beijing’s approach seems to assume that enough military pressure would eventually convince Taiwanese that resistance is pointless, that the cost of defiance would outweigh the value of autonomy.

  This badly misreads how historical memory functions in a democratic society.

  Each military drill does not make unification seem more inevitable, but rather confirms why Taiwan spent decades fighting for the right to determine its own future.

  There is psychological research showing that collective trauma processed socially rather than individually can build resilience instead of breaking people. Taiwan is living proof of that. There is no panic about China’s military drills and no denial that the threat exists. The response is closer to recognition, the kind that comes from having seen threats before and survived them.

  That is the lesson Taiwan carries. When China frames unification as unstoppable, Taiwanese remember every other power that made similar claims.

  Taiwan has already survived what China is threatening, in different forms and under different names.

  The colonization, the massacres, the decades of authoritarian rule, all of it was supposed to be permanent and inevitable, too.

  The fact that Taiwan is still here, and has in recent decades become a democratic society with its own identity, proves that inevitability is just another word powerful countries use when they want something and cannot get it through persuasion. Taiwan learned that lesson the hard way, and it is not a lesson you forget.

  Historical memory like that matters more than military exercises.

  Noa Wynn is a researcher and journalist focusing on international security, social dynamics and the forces shaping modern societies. He has reported on political and social issues across multiple regions, with a particular interest in how global pressures shape local realities.
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