During the portion of his Double Ten National Day address that focused on cross-strait relations, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) turned to ethnicity to play down the differences between the two countries.
“The people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are ethnic Chinese — descendants of the legendary emperors Yan and Huang,” Ma said.
While many would dispute this contention, emphasizing ethnicity and ancestry as a means to encourage reconciliation or, conversely, foster alienation misses the point completely. The reason is simple: The longstanding conflict across the Taiwan Strait has nothing to do with ethnicity and lies instead in the political, ideological and imaginary spheres.
History is replete with examples of leaders who used ethnicity to stoke nationalistic fervor, often with devastating consequences. When it comes to Taiwan, this device has two fundamental flaws that make it unsuited as an element of political discourse.
The first is the exclusionary nature of nations built on race or ethnicity. In an increasingly mobile world, genetics have lost relevance in terms of buttressing one’s nationality. Consequently, nationality is no longer predicated on ethnicity, but rather on one’s association to a land or people. That is why the concept of “foreign,” a term often used in Taiwan, has an entirely different, and in many cases irrelevant, connotation in multi-ethnic countries such as the US, Canada or the UK. That is why immigrant societies — and Taiwan is such a society — embrace peoples of all backgrounds as participants in the national experiment. That is why a person of Haitian background, for example, could serve as the representative of Queen Elizabeth in Canada, or why a man with Kenyan ancestry can sit in the White House.
This leads us to the second flaw in the argument of ethnicity as a determinant of nationality: Nations, in contrast to countries, exist in the head and transcend geography. As such, genetic variance or similarity has absolutely no bearing on the state of relations between two groups of people. Far more relevant are social mores developed over time, the systems of governance chosen through social experimentation, as well as the shared ideational components that tie a people together.
Ma, like his Beijing counterparts, can rely all he wants on the idea of shared ethnicity to glue his amorphous empire together, but this will never change the fact that at the end of the day, groups of people that are victims of repression — such as Tibetans, Uighurs, Aborigines and, yes, Taiwanese — are in that situation because of concepts that have no relation to ethnicity. In other words, whether they are “Han Chinese” or not, or agree that they are “descendants of the legendary emperors Yan and Huang,” is inconsequential, as either way they will be repressed and prevented from living their lives in a manner that fully reflects their identity.
There is no denying that Taiwan and China have much in common, including overlapping periods of history, cultural elements, language, writing systems and so on, all of which are the result of geographical proximity. That said, the formative experiences of the two peoples, the “social genes,” have been wildly divergent for decades, if not centuries. That, in part, stems from the fact that Taiwan is an island nation, which, though less than 200km from the continent, not only creates a physical barrier to external influence, but also imposes its own idiosyncratic identity.
Terms like freedom and democracy are often bandied about without their conjurers fully understanding what those concepts mean, but however ill-defined, they nevertheless are part of the fabric of Taiwanese national identity, as are the shedding of authoritarianism and the influence that the countless thousands of Taiwanese who studied abroad brought back with them over the decades.
Genetic similarity or not, Taiwan is unique, and nothing Ma (or Beijing) says will ever change that.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017