As Chinese People’s Liberation Army fighter jets sped toward Taiwan on Friday, life in Taiwan carried on as normal.
Andy Huang, a restaurateur in Taipei, said he has become desensitized to military threats from China.
“I’ve been hearing about China invading for 30 years,” he said.
Photo courtesy of the Kaohsiung Tourism Bureau
Taiwan’s government is racing to counter China, buying nearly US$19 billion in military equipment from the US, and extending military conscription for men to a year starting next year. Nevertheless, many say they do not feel the threat.
That might be partly due to the nuanced views many Taiwanese hold of China. While polls indicate that most people reject unification with China, many say they are attracted to their much larger neighbor’s dynamic economy, and its shared language and culture. Others are simply numb to hearing about the threat in their backyard.
Taiwanese politicians have not been shy about sounding the alarm.
“In order to keep the peace, we need to strengthen ourselves,” President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said last month at a war memorial commemorating the last time Taiwan and China battled in 1958 during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.
Members of the public say they do not feel that urgency.
Coco Wang is one of the many people who feel a connection to China without considering themselves Chinese.
Her grandparents came to Taiwan among people fleeing the 1949 communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, she said.
Her grandparents kept in touch with relatives in China, she said, adding that she remembers summers traveling through the country’s rural areas with her parents.
Wang said she considers herself Taiwanese, but worked in Shanghai for a year before the COVID-19 pandemic and is thinking of going back.
The opportunities in China are so much bigger, she said.
“There’s this feeling that if you just go in and you really work at it, then you can really achieve something,” she said.
China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, receiving 39 percent of its exports last year, despite new trade barriers imposed amid rising tensions.
While Wang says she feels drawn to China, she acknowledged that it is not entirely possible to leave politics at the door when working there.
Colleagues in Shanghai occasionally called her a “Taiwanese separatist,” she said.
She knew they meant it as a joke, but said it made her uncomfortable.
“We are already independent. Taiwan is just Taiwan,” she said.
Her viewpoint is widely shared.
Since polling began in the 1990s, majorities on Taiwan have said they favor the “status quo,” rejecting proposals for unification with China or a formal declaration of independence that could mean war.
A closely watched poll question that asks people whether they consider themselves Chinese has shown that Taiwanese are growing further from China, said Yu Ching-hsin (游清鑫), the head of National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center.
When polling began in 1992, more than two-thirds of respondents said they were Chinese and Taiwanese, or just Chinese. Today, close to two-thirds say they are just Taiwanese, and about 30 percent identify as both.
Those attitudes do not translate directly into views on relations with China, but among the majority who identify as Taiwanese there has been a subtle shift toward favoring the “status quo” for now, but with “eventual independence,” Yu said.
Huang said that he was taught in school that he was Chinese, but as an adult came to consider himself just Taiwanese.
His restaurant in Taipei, which specializes in Taiwanese cuisine, has a “Lennon Wall” dedicated to the now-banned Hong Kong democracy movement, decorated with hundreds of notes with messages from patrons.
Huang shut down in solidarity with protesters during Taiwan’s Sunflower movement in 2014, when tens of thousands demonstrated against a trade deal with China.
He said that the Chinese population is “brainwashed.”
He said he wants independence now, but can wait until more Taiwanese are convinced.
He does not think much about war, he said.
“Whether they attack or not, that’s for China’s leaders to decide. It’s pointless for us to worry,” Huang said.
For others, like Chen Shih-wei, they consider themselves Chinese and Taiwanese.
Chen said his family immigrated to Taiwan during the Ming Dynasty, which ended in 1644.
“I’m Chinese and I’m Taiwanese. This can’t be separated,” he said. “We’ve read the history, including the clan records, and we are clear that we came from the mainland, and came from people who had landed in Taiwan, and grew up here.”
Chen, who is from Taichung, traveled to China many times as a young athlete, starting in 1990.
He said he encountered more similarities than differences in China.
Chen is pro-unification, but said he does not believe it will happen in his lifetime.
He lives in Lienchiang County (Matsu), a group of islands that are closer to China than Taiwan proper.
He said he is somewhat worried about the prospect of conflict.
“This is not what the public on both sides want to see,” he said.
None see an easy way out of the accumulated antagonism of the past several years, whether military, diplomatic or economic.
However, Wang said that the tensions are between the two governments, not between people.
“Taiwanese and mainlanders are largely friendly to each other. Why is it like this?” she said.
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