What is a left position on Taiwan? This question was posed to us – the three editors of praxis, Rebecca Karl, Aminda Smith, and Fabio Lanza – at a recent social event in New York. The query came from someone who works as a political operative in the city. He came to us with a certain political urgency: he lamented how Alexandra Ocasio- Cortez had quite miserably and quite infamously fumbled the “Taiwan question” at the Munich Security Conference. We, all historians of modern China, grappled for an answer that could express both a leftist position in absolute terms and a “leftish” position that someone like AOC might be able to articulate in the realpolitik of our times. We struggled, in search of the right words and the right articulation. In the end, we failed to offer anything that sounded convincing, either to our interlocutor or to ourselves. With our own sense of political urgency, we approached our colleagues, scholars with expertise in Taiwan and cross-strait relationships, who also share our political concerns. Here are their answers.
Leftist and Left-ish, Wang Chih-Ming
1. A left position for the US must begin by first denouncing US imperialism from the mid-1850s to the present, acknowledging that the US has been a settler colonial power and that must be changed. The US state has benefited from colonial pilfering from the first nations in North America, Hawaii, and Pacific islands, including the Philippines, Okinawa, and Taiwan, with an aim to participate in the colonial scramble in China in the late 19th Century, pursue an anti-communist agenda in the Cold War, and profit from the mainland Chinese market in the neoliberal post-Cold War era. The US approach to Taiwan has been embedded in its settler colonial history and capitalist imperialist ambition. This can be seen from the various propositions (by Townsend Harris, Matthew Perry, and Peter Parker) that the state department annex the island in the 1850s and set up a colonial post and navy base to the failed expedition to Taiwan in 1867 (over the shipwrecked Rover barque). It was evident in the former US consul Charles le Gendre’s involvement in Meiji Japan’s invasion of Taiwan and in the Operation Causeway that aimed to invade and capture Taiwan from Japan to end the Pacific War. And US imperialism then continued, from 1945 to the present, through US support of settler colonial regimes, from the Kuomintang (KMT) to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), often in the name of anticommunism. For the US, a left position on Taiwan must begin with a sincere reflection on this history.
Second, if leftist politics entails a dream of liberation and respect for self-determination, the US should refrain from using Taiwan as a bargaining chip with China, stop giving Taiwan false hope of independence, and negotiate with China in good faith to ensure Taiwan’s autonomy and democratic way of life, not by a show of force, but by persuasion, based on values. Taiwan is not and should not be deemed a pawn for US strategic or national interest, but a partner in upholding liberal values. For more than three decades, Taiwan has demonstrated that democracy can work in a Chinese society; it is not perfect, but it can work and has real benefits. The last thing the world wishes to see is the disappearance of a democratic society by a war not of its choosing. To keep Taiwan democratic and alive is to win the long game against totalitarianism and imperial expansionism.
Third, the Taiwan issue is the result of complex histories, and it is impossible to keep China out of the picture, as Taiwan was historically a part of China, which had partial jurisdiction over the indigenous people before 1895. Taiwan was also restored to China in 1945 and was then governed by the KMT in the name of the Republic of China. The KMT then retreated to Taiwan in 1949, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Anyone who has been to Taiwan knows this place has deep cultural ties with China. Hence, while Taiwan does enjoy de facto independence now, it has a complicated relationship with China that cannot be reduced, simply, to an inter-state relationship. A leftist approach to the Taiwan issue that values equality and fairness must acknowledge these historical and political nuances, to recognize that while there is aspiration for Taiwan independence, the ties across the Taiwan Strait are genuine and strong, and not simply the result of China’s united front tactics. The US should listen to voices on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to encourage constructive dialogue and work out differences, believing such work is indispensable to the peace and prosperity of the East Asia and the world today. The US should know and respect that the PRC prefers to reintegrate Taiwan peacefully, and the US role should be to ensure that no violence or coercion is used to change the status quo, leaving the final resolution to be deliberated by people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Finally, a leftist position on Taiwan must avoid war absolutely. The US has no position, except an imperialist one, to start a war on Taiwan, just as it had no position to start wars in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. The US should withdraw from its imperial ambition and lead the world by example in starting to disarm its military. This requires US politicians to think beyond US-centrism and MAGA programs and to focus more on planetarian concerns of co-existence and ecological security. The rush to AI must be curtailed and repurposed for social welfare and justice, not weaponized for self-interest or capitalist gains. The US, while it still can, should strive to create a real “liberal international order” that encourages global governance by honoring local differences and deflating populist politics, rather than imposing one-suits-all global capitalism that benefits from war mongering and arms sales.
2. A “leftish” position for US politicians in the 2028 presidential campaign could read as follows:
a. The US honors and supports Taiwan’s democracy and autonomy as a de facto state and respects its complex relationship with China. The US honors and affirms that it has not wavered on its One China Policy but insists that the state of Taiwan and its people be duly represented and given effective participation in international organizations.
b. Deeply reflecting on its settler colonial history and imperial blunders from the past, the US commits to withdrawing from its imperial ambition and to leading by example in global disarmament as well as in the development of technology to reduce and manage ecological disaster. The US will also commit to imposing stricter restrictions on the development of AI technology to avoid overconsumption of energy and the weaponization of AI technology.
c. The US commits to working with authorities and members of civil society in China and Taiwan to encourage peaceful and constructive dialogue on the Taiwan-China relationship, to pursue stability and co-existence in the region, and to ensure that future development in the Taiwan Strait will proceed on the principles of peaceful negotiation and mutual respect.
Wang Chih-Ming is Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
A Leftist Position on Taiwan, James Lin
Despite being caught in a great power conflict between the US and China and a potential catalyst for a global war, a Taiwan policy remains difficult to articulate for even some of the most policy-inclined politicians in DC. In part, this is expected. The US policy of strategic ambiguity has given the US substantial flexibility in the past half century to exercise dual deterrence — deterring Taipei from taking unilateral action to provoke Beijing and deterring Beijing from taking unilateral military action against Taipei. But at its core, strategic ambiguity maintains a status quo that appears to be eroding.
Structural conditions in Taiwan, China, and the US are shifting. Taiwan transformed from an authoritarian state ruling through martial law into a democratic, pluralistic society that values free speech, advanced same sex marriage, and protects democratic institutions. As part of their grappling with decolonization from historical Chinese Nationalist rule, Taiwanese citizens overwhelmingly reject political affiliation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with only a tiny 3% of its population identifying as Chinese, a trend that shows no signs of reversing. For Beijing, “unifying” with (really, annexing) Taiwan has been a longstanding state objective. PRC military capability has improved dramatically in recent years. The possibility of a successful invasion of Taiwan increases each year, as well as the broadening range of gray zone options short of invasion, such as an ongoing robust cyber and misinformation campaign to influence Taiwanese society. The United States since 2016 has taken an increasingly hostile position toward China, portraying it as a threat to American supremacy. Some American policymakers have used Taiwan as a potential cudgel and wedge issue in broader US-China relations.
Because of its potential to catalyze a war between two major global powers and crash the global economy (Bloomberg estimates to the tune of $1 trillion dollars, which exceeds the economic fallout of both the 2009 Great Financial Crisis and the 2020 COVID pandemic), taking a principled and nuanced position on Taiwan is paramount.
Where to stand
Basic principles of a leftist international policy apply to Taiwan as with anywhere else: diplomacy and collaboration over aggression and rivalry. Multilateral engagement and consensus building over unilateral action. Recognition of global issues that demand cooperation, such as addressing global economic inequality exacerbated by unchecked capitalism that transcends national borders, and ongoing climate change that is an existential threat to every living being.
An absolute leftist position on Taiwan would be to oppose imperialism in all forms. This means opposing American desires to exert hegemonic influence in the Indo-Pacific amidst its decline as a global empire by co-opting Taiwan as a wedge issue against China. At the same time, it also means rejecting the People’s Republic of China’s irredentist nationalist claims to Taiwan, including its sovereignty over Taiwanese peoples. Taiwan’s cultural and migration histories have tied it to the larger Sinosphere, but cultural ties are not grounds for claims of sovereignty, and they certainly do not justify the annexation of Taiwan. Despite PRC efforts to denigrate Taiwanese independence movement activists as merely propagandists, Taiwan’s desires for self-rule date back over a century, and have deep support because of its hard-fought decolonization from both Japanese imperial and Chinese Nationalist authoritarian rule.
Instead, leftists should support the diversity of voices from within Taiwan. The majority do not identify with China and reject Beijing’s claims of sovereignty, with only 1.1% supporting immediate unification and 6.1% supporting unification at some point in the future (likely under a different regime in Beijing). But other voices need to be amplified as well, including the Indigenous Taiwanese who have been marginalized by centuries of settler colonialism and whose stewardship of Taiwan predates nation-states by millennia. Leftists should speak in solidarity against the ongoing settler colonization of Indigenous peoples, the exploitation of wage and migrant laborers, and the ceding of civil society and governance to populism, nationalism, and neoliberalism in Taiwan, China, the US, and the rest of the world.
This position would be difficult for mainstream politicians, even on the left, to articulate publicly without opening themselves to critiques of naivete, especially in the current moment with unilaterally launched wars in Ukraine, Palestine, and Iran. This position is also difficult to translate into policy. For example, a signal of total US withdrawal, such as a clear statement that the US will not intervene in the Taiwan Strait under any condition, will very likely invite PRC invasion. A statement of the opposite, that the US will commit to the defense of Taiwan under any circumstance, will also likely trigger war if Beijing feels it is cornered into taking action. The leftist position of prominent figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – that the global rise of authoritarianism calls for reforming the international political economy to support workers – may indeed help reduce the reliance on nationalism and saber-rattling for Beijing, but the PRC government’s grip on the state appears to be ironclad in both boom and bust cycles, and their irredentist position on Taiwan has remained more or less consistent since the 1950s.
Still, leftists should avoid falling into a trap of seeing this issue as a binary choice. Most Taiwanese appear to favor the US and the US alliance system, but there are clearly problems with this – Taiwan’s implicit support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine is one clear example. Taiwanese parades celebrating President Trump (during his first administration) and admiration for recently passed Japanese right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leader, Shinzo Abe, are both problematic political positions that implicate Taiwanese in settler colonial, xenophobic, misogynistic political forces across the world. Some Taiwanese leftists have rejected the US for this reason, but veer too far in the opposite direction and romanticize the PRC, which has clearly publicly articulated plans for annexation that would impose an authoritarian system of rule in Taiwan, and deny the real postcolonial legitimacy of popular support for Taiwanese sovereignty. Beyond the direct loss of lives in military conflict and the shock to a global economy that would cause secondary and tertiary collapses in food and health, PRC rule would almost certainly entail a bleak return to authoritarian rule for Taiwan. Beijing’s track record in Xinjiang and Hong Kong leave no room for optimism about a different path for Taiwan.
How do we balance the ideals of maintaining diplomacy without provocation, yet still provide a measure of security for Taiwan to satisfy the more realpolitik leaning among us?
A modified leftist position:
From the perspective of the United States, a central issue is commitment. Anti-war voices in the US foreign policy world, such as Jennifer Kavanagh and Stephen Wertheim, have argued for not involving the US in any conflict related to Taiwan. But they have not framed this as total withdrawal. In fact, they argue selling arms to Taiwan is a good thing because it means the US does not need to commit its own military to the defense of Taiwan. They argue that Taiwan needs to take responsibility for its own defense, a position mirrored across the entire political spectrum in DC. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act guarantees the sales of arms to Taiwan, something that is difficult to swallow given its direct benefits to US defense contractors and war hawks in DC. Ideally, we should aim for a world with fewer arms, not more. In Taiwan’s case, however, the PRC has stated in no uncertain terms that it sees the annexation of Taiwan as a domestic matter and a historical inevitability, which justifies the use of force in taking Taiwan. This may be the best realistic compromise between a leftist position and a realist one.
A modified leftist policy from the perspective of Taiwan needs to balance multiple extremes. It cannot fully reject a relationship with the US military industrial complex, but it must not attach itself to a military-industrial complex that is responsible for the deaths of millions. Taiwan should focus on a porcupine strategy that offers it a measure of security to deter conflict and allows it to acquire what it needs to accomplish this. Offensive weapons are not only unnecessary, but also reduce Taiwan’s ability to provide important domestic needs, such as maintaining social welfare, universal health insurance, etc.
Taiwan must also continue to engage with Beijing in a manner that keeps communications and possibilities open. Even though tourism from China is unpopular, Taiwan should still welcome Chinese students as it did in the past and others who are genuinely interested in experiencing Taiwanese society firsthand. Young Chinese have less exposure to Taiwan than previous generations, and thus less understanding of Taiwan’s positionality. It is true Beijing seeks to annex Taiwan and usually is the one to take a more uncompromising position vis a vis diplomacy. Despite this and despite Beijing’s unwillingness to engage with the current ruling Democratic Progressive Party, Taipei should not be discouraged. It may seem pointless, but history sometimes takes unexpected turns. Scholars like Hsiao-ting Lin and Joseph Torigian have shown that even at the height of the Cold War, seemingly ideologically rigid leaders still have room to maneuver and negotiate on important political issues. Activists in the Baltic states in the 1980s would also not have foreseen the changes in the 1990s that led to their emergence as independent nations. One may have a low opinion of the effectiveness of diplomacy, but it costs almost nothing to pursue.
Both Taiwan and the US should continue to make abundantly clear to the rest of the world that Beijing’s aggression toward Taiwan is irredentist nationalism and imperial ambition. Both should encourage other powers to reject Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is a domestic matter and assert that Taiwanese should determine their own future. To counteract misinformation campaigns from Beijing about Taiwan, Taiwanese and the US should highlight the plural voices of Taiwanese, not just those descended from Han settlers, but also Indigenous Taiwanese, “new” immigrants from Southeast Asia, and other historically marginalized voices. The US and other nations should support Taiwan’s representation in international forums, from the World Health Organization to the United Nations.
China continues to proclaim itself a responsible global player, and we should hold China to the expected norms of responsible power. Even though liberal arguments for international norms are perhaps at an all-time low, China’s foreign policy shows it still pays lip service to the norms of the international system and a multipolar international society, not one dominated by any one power (including itself). Leftists should encourage all members of the international system to urge China to respect the wishes of Taiwanese to continue their existence without threat. Power holders in China should consider that any aggressive action toward Taiwan, even a blockade, substantially erodes China’s image as a responsible nation and undermines decades of work to build relationships with small powers and to offer an alternative to a Western-led international system.
Voices on the left and right have called for US allies to take a greater security role in maintaining peace in East Asia. While Japan has shown the most enthusiasm for supporting Taiwan outside of the US, support cannot just come from the LDP far right, which has waxed nostalgically about the Japanese Empire, a position deeply troubling to the PRC, South Korea, and other powers in the region. The US needs to emphasize across the region that peace in the Taiwan Strait is in everyone’s best interest, not just those who are inclined to be skeptical of Beijing. States in the region must hold both the US and China accountable for escalatory actions. Even those who economically benefit from close relations with China, such as South Korea, Australia, and European nations, need to be willing to exert diplomatic pressure on China when it takes unilateral destabilizing actions, such as launching missiles toward Taiwan (and to the US as well, of course).
Above all, leftists in the US, China, and Taiwan should assert that peace is the ultimate goal. Leftists need to hold their political leaders to that goal. We must not fall into the trap of forgoing the possibility of a peaceful resolution, even if it seems pointless in the face of military buildup and aggression in the age of Ukraine, Palestine, and Iran. States respond to pressure from below, and as Taiwan has shown us historically, this is true even for authoritarian states. Speaking in unison and in solidarity offers the best path for amplifying that message.
James Lin is Associate Professor and Taiwan Studies Program Chair at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
Rethinking the Left: AOC, Taiwan, and the Crisis of Progressive Politics, Joyce C.H. Liu
When Bloomberg Television host Francine Lacqua asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Munich Security Conference — “If China takes action, should the United States actually send troops to defend Taiwan?” — AOC fell into a prolonged speechlessness, unable to offer an immediate response. As a Taiwan-based humanities scholar, a thinker of the left who has long engaged with the complex Taiwan-China question and who critiques every form of internal colonialism, I want to propose a rethinking of what “the left” means today.
What is a left position today when “left” becomes totally ambiguous? The growing ambiguity of “the left” as a political category has gradually drained progressive politics of its force. We must first be clear: the core of “the left” as a political category has never been anti-war or anti-intervention as such, but rather the critique of structural oppression and the defense of the political subjectivity of the oppressed. When anti-intervention becomes an end in itself rather than a means, the left loses its fundamental criterion of judgment. This is the root of the current impasse.
AOC’s speechlessness at Munich reveals the structural embarrassment of the American progressive left. The long-standing anti-military-intervention position of the American progressive left forms the ideological undertone of AOC’s evasion. Within this framework, any explicit commitment to sending troops to defend Taiwan would inevitably antagonize the anti-war sentiment within her electoral base. Some might argue that AOC’s forty seconds of hesitation ultimately preserved the standard “long-term policy” position — maintaining the principle of strategic ambiguity by neither publicly committing to nor refusing military action, in order to avoid conflict. Yet this very defense exposes the problem.
AOC’s silence on Taiwan further reveals the deeper structural contradictions of the American progressive left on the Taiwan/China question. Progressive foreign policy is fundamentally organized around a critique of “American imperialist” hegemony. Yet this anti-hegemonic premise, when confronted with China’s regional expansionism — and especially China’s military threat toward Taiwan — appears unable to mount a critique of Chinese hegemonic expansion. Bound by its anti-war and anti-intervention positions, it cannot articulate support for defending Taiwan.
At Munich, AOC explicitly expressed concern about “the dangers of authoritarianism,” while simultaneously equivocating on Taiwan. This paradox reveals the selectivity of the progressive left’s critique of authoritarianism: the critical framework tends to be applied preferentially to right-wing populist politics (such as Trumpism), while China’s authoritarian expansion is addressed through the deflecting language of “conflict prevention” and “multilateralism,” avoiding direct confrontation.
The progressive left emphasizes human rights, democracy, and self-determination. Taiwan is precisely the site where these values are practiced. Taiwan underwent peaceful democratic reform in the 1980s, transitioning away from an authoritarian regime, and has since maintained a functioning democracy that respects human rights and affirms self-determination. Yet the progressive left’s anti-military stance constitutes a structural obstacle that prevents it from translating its human rights discourse into concrete security commitments.
In her response, AOC invoked “economic research and global deployment” to prevent conflict, emphasizing the importance of ensuring that “the question never even arises.” This rhetorical logic is a characteristic progressive left strategy of displacing security questions onto economic ones, reflecting its electoral base’s prioritization of “supply chain nationalism” over “military alliance commitments.” This substitution evades the core of the Taiwan question: no purely economic or diplomatic pathway is sufficient to address an asymmetric military threat.
Behind the stigmatization of the left lies a problem of cognitive dislocation. Bernie Sanders’ core policy proposals — universal healthcare, a higher minimum wage, free public university education — have long commanded bipartisan majority support in polls, yet Sanders himself and his policies have been persistently stigmatized as “radical” and “unrealistic” by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party establishment. In fact, these policies are not radical at all; they are standard practice in most European welfare states. This cognitive dislocation deserves serious attention.
The most striking dimension of the left’s current crisis is the way the American right has appropriated left-wing language. Trump and those around him — including Vance and Bannon — have adopted the rhetorical framework of left-wing anti-capitalism, deploying the language of anti-establishment, anti-elite, and anti-Wall Street sentiment at scale. Bannon has explicitly studied Lenin’s organizational strategies and publicly acknowledged borrowing from them. The right has converted left-wing anti-capitalist critique into a nationalist conspiracy theory directed against “oligarchs” and the “deep state.” (Former) Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, along with various MAGA circles, has similarly advanced anti-war and anti-interventionist arguments. When “anti-intervention” is severed from any genuine concern for the political subjectivity of the oppressed, it can be seamlessly annexed by any political position — including positions that serve authoritarian expansion.
This crisis of “the left” has its counterpart in Taiwan. Part of the older Taiwanese left has equated China with socialist history and, on that basis, insisted on opposing American imperialism while preferring to support the supposedly socialist China — a fundamental error of historical epistemology. Moreover, this older left ignores the fact that China has become an authoritarian capitalist state. The Taiwanese left also positions itself through an “anti-war” stance, while ignoring that the “China” it faces is an authoritarian empire that sacrifices human rights, and also ignoring the need to affirm the political subjectivity of the Taiwanese people themselves.
The question facing AOC, or any left political actor today, should not be framed as a simple binary between war and anti-war, or between China and Taiwan. The question that must come first is: Where are the people? How is popular sovereignty to be protected? Should the left sacrifice the freedom of thought, expression, and autonomous life of the people in order to preserve its anti-war self-image? Can more active political and diplomatic means be pursued to prevent any act of military aggression before it occurs? Can the left, in the name of human rights, work to preserve Taiwan’s status as a democratic political entity in which the people exercise self-determination?
A genuinely left position must take the political subjectivity of the oppressed as its criterion of judgment, rather than beginning from a prior commitment to geopolitical camp alignment. The practice of democratic self-governance that the Taiwanese people have sustained under authoritarian pressure is itself precisely what the left should support — not because Taiwan stands on the side of the United States, but because the Taiwanese people have the right to determine the form of their own political life. To support Taiwan’s self-determination is not to support American hegemony. It is to refuse to allow another empire to take hegemony’s place under the banner of “anti-imperialism.”
Joyce C.H. Liu is professor at the International Graduate Program in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan`
Are We Friends? What AOC Can Learn from a Taiwanese Historical Romance Novel, P. Kerim Friedman
One of the central questions in Taiwan Travelogue, the historical romance novel that won this year’s International Booker Prize, is whether or not the two main characters are friends. Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese writer, is visiting Taiwan (then a part of Japan) right before the Second World War, and develops strong feelings for her translator, whom she has nicknamed Chi-chan, thus prompting the question about friendship. Chi-chan refuses to answer. Instead, she says, “If you consider us to be friends, then I will do the same.” Her ambiguous reply works for a while, but as Aoyama’s feelings towards her become more and more insistent, Chi-chan can no longer avoid giving a proper response.
Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who seems set to run for president in 2028, was similarly placed on the spot when she was asked whether or not she would “commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan” in the face of Chinese aggression. Her opponents quickly jumped on her fumbling reply as proof of her lack of foreign policy experience. But, even if she could have said it more eloquently, she was simply articulating the long-standing US practice of maintaining “strategic ambiguity” with regard to Taiwan.
As Jonathan Sullivan and Lev Nachman put it in their book, Taiwan: A Contested Democracy Under Threat, “Strategic ambiguity boils down to whether or not the US would come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a military conflict.” The goal is as much to make China think twice about invading as it is to make Taiwan think twice about acting unilaterally. While some presidents have sought to replace ambiguity with clarity, as when Biden answered the same question asked of AOC with an emphatic “Yes,” such efforts are quickly walked back by the foreign policy establishment. The same is true in the other direction, as happened when Trump said that “he had been discussing Taiwan arms sales with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”
As with Chi-chan’s relationship with Aoyama, ambiguity worked for a time, but is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Changing geopolitical relationships are forcing the issue. I do not know what kind of Taiwan policy AOC could articulate that could satisfy both those who worry about maintaining US global hegemony, as well as those who would like to dismantle the US empire. Perhaps she could take a page from Chi-chan’s climatic reply to Aoyama [spoiler alert]:
As time passed and I grew closer to you, I found that if we continued this way, we would surely open our hearts to each other and play significant roles in each other’s lives. But I felt afraid of this future, because the person that you treasure and care for is the docile Islander interpreter who needs your protection. Yet that person is not the real Ō Chizuru—not the real Ông Tshian-hóh—not the real me!
A common feature of debates over Taiwan policy is that they take place without any understanding of the real Taiwan, and without any input from the Taiwanese themselves. I’m not a foreign policy expert, nor am I an expert on military strategy, but as an anthropologist and a Taiwanese citizen, I do know a few things about my adopted home that I think should be taken into account in any such discussion. In particular, I hope to show that, like Chi-chan, most people accept strategic ambiguity as a survival strategy at the state level, but are adamant about being “Taiwanese” when it comes to their individual identity.
Following World War II, the US supported an autocratic regime in Taiwan in order to contain the spread of Communism. As a result, Taiwanese people suffered from decades of brutal repression, during which thousands were killed or disappeared, and many others were put in jail. I have friends who spent a decade in prison simply for having read the wrong books. This period is known in Taiwan as the “White Terror.”
During this time, the Republic of China (ROC) was ruled by the Nationalist Party, or KMT, who justified their repression by claiming to be the true rulers of China, even though, in reality, they only ruled Taiwan and a handful of smaller islands. To maintain the myth, they treated Taiwan as just one province among many. There was even a parliament with representatives from each of the other provinces in China, including Tibet and Mongolia. Since they couldn’t hold elections in these provinces, the “Ten Thousand Year Parliament” (as Taiwanese nicknamed it) had aging representatives, some of whom had to be brought out in wheelchairs to vote.
This was the Cold War as ordinary Taiwanese experienced it. Not as some grand geopolitical chess game between the US and China, but as a brutal dictatorship that justified its rule by pretending to still be at war with China, decades after real hostilities had ended. Taiwanese sought independence from this imaginary China conjured up by the KMT, not the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which has never ruled Taiwan. Taiwanese wanted freedom of expression, democratic elections, the right to speak their own languages, and the right to learn about their own history. (China-centric school textbooks spent more time teaching about railways in China than about local history.)
They wanted all of that, and they got it. Nobody gave it to them. They fought for it, putting their bodies on the line. They got rid of the Ten Thousand Year Parliament, ended the war with China and, when the KMT was finally voted out of power in 2016, 1 Taiwan’s first female President, Tsai Ing-wen, established a Transitional Justice Commission to shed light on their crimes, and an Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee to strip them of some of the tremendous wealth they had stolen.
No one can deny that Taiwan, as a nation, has thrived under the policy of strategic ambiguity. Despite only about a dozen nations, including the Vatican, recognizing Taiwan as a country, Taiwan’s passport is ranked number thirty one in terms of the number of countries that grant its holders visa-free entry, just behind Serbia and Peru. And Taiwan’s ambiguous status allowed it to function as a middleman between the US and China, with Taiwanese firms like Foxconn managing Chinese factories for many of the leading US tech firms, including Apple.
Taiwanese have largely been comfortable with the arrangement as well. In poll after poll, Taiwanese state that they support maintaining the “status quo,” even as the numbers who identify primarily as “Taiwanese” have long overtaken those who identify as “Chinese.” That the personal identities of ordinary Taiwanese have already outpaced geopolitics is one of the things that most worries China, which has passed laws that seek to enforce Beijing’s view of ethnic unity.
Just as Taiwanese are beginning to feel that they might be able to put the Cold War behind them, rejecting ethnonationalism in favor of local identities, adopting a practical approach to cross-strait relations, and forging a new pluralistic and democratic nation, they now find themselves being shoved back into the Cold War box. Some of the people doing the shoving are their allies, and some are their fellow Taiwanese.
The pact that has sustained peaceful relations across the Taiwan Strait for decades is no longer up to the task. A big part of that is due to Xi Jinping’s increasingly aggressive stance towards the “Taiwan question.”
China has vastly increased the frequency and scope of violations of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) . . . It has positioned PLA Navy and Chinese Coast Guard vessels around Taiwan on a near-continuous basis. China has declared exclusion zones in international airspace and waters to conduct complex multiday military exercises around Taiwan, disrupting the island’s commerce. Most provocatively, China violated Taiwan’s territorial airspace with a military drone for the first time in January 2026. (Sacks, 2026)
One of the ironies of the present moment is that former enemies, the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are now on the same side. This is the result of changes on both sides of the Strait. China today is a capitalist country, where ethnonationalism has largely replaced communism as its legitimating ideology, thus bringing the CCP closer to the KMT ideologically. The KMT, whose officials are known to pay tribute to the Yellow Emperor, the mythical “progenitor of the Chinese nation,” reject the idea of a unique Taiwanese identity, even though such an identity is espoused by most of their own supporters.
As a result, the KMT and the CCP now see each other as useful partners. Stripped of power and pushed into the role of opposition party, the KMT plays up their pragmatism on China as their main selling point. They portray themselves as the responsible adults in the room when it comes to negotiations with China. For its part, China milks this for all it is worth, courting KMT politicians who need photo-ops with Chinese officials in order to prove that they can deliver on their promises.
If ethnonationalism threatens to undermine Taiwanese democratic pluralism from the right, another doctrine threatens to undermine it from the left. There is a strong current of misplaced nostalgia for the Cold War among anti-imperialists.They long for a counterweight to US hegemony. This is sometimes articulated in the language of “multipolarity.” Such language, as Kavita Krishnan has argued, is indistinguishable from the Realpolitik once espoused by Kissinger and Nixon.
Left realists have made strange bedfellows among the far right. That the “Donroe Doctrine,” put forward by Donald Trump, is fully compatible with Putin and Xi’s stated desire “to establish a just multipolar system of international relations” should give anyone pause. As Craig Smith has argued, “When regional leadership is framed as destiny, guardianship, or as a civilizational centre, it becomes increasingly easier to obfuscate the difference between benevolence and hegemony.”
Just as the fictional translator Chi-chan finds Aoyama’s friendship oppressive, so too do Taiwanese reject Chinese claims to be one big family. Chi-chan rejects her colonial benefactor’s friendship because doing so would erase her very identity. The listing of her multiple names is illustrative of just how complex Taiwan’s cultural heritage actually is. As the historian Evan Dawley has argued, the Japanese colonial experience was central to the development of a unique Taiwanese identity. Many leftist supporters of the PRC hate Taiwan Travelogue precisely because it openly acknowledges this. A left response to the Taiwan question from Americans must, above all else, acknowledge and respect such Taiwanese voices.
At the same time, we must take heed of Chi-chan’s assertion that she is not simply some “docile Islander,” in need of protection. The same is true of the Taiwanese state. The alternative to Realpolitik is not to naively treat international relations as a morality play, with Taiwan cast as the victim. As I discussed in a previous post, even as Taiwan’s domestic politics have shifted, its foreign policy remains stuck in a Cold War paradigm in which it is more than willing to overlook war crimes and human rights abuses in its search for allies.
But genuine leftist solidarity needs to look beyond the nation-state, building horizontal solidarity between groups at the grassroots level. It is here that we can see Taiwanese civil society trying to move beyond “Cold War binaries.” Lebanese-Palestinian writer Elia Ayoub points to the “Milk Tea Alliance,” which sought to build alliances between local groups in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Myanmar, and sometimes even further afield, as a model for how people on the periphery can start “building more organic bonds in our lands and between our diasporas.”
China understands the threat such solidarity-building poses to its hegemony and actively tries to stop it, pressuring allies and international agencies to deny access to Taiwanese delegates. Whether it is a conference on the impact of climate change for the world’s oceans, a meeting of the International Association of Judges, a convention of civil society and human rights advocates, a summit on social development, the World Health Assembly, or a WorldPride event, Taiwanese participation is blocked when permission is denied or revoked, events are cancelled, or participants physically deported from the host country.
One concrete step progressive politicians in the US, such as AOC, can take would be to work to protect the rights of ordinary Taiwanese citizens to be heard on a global stage by participating in international events and other solidarity-building activities. Nor should the price of admission to such events be a betrayal of their identity as Taiwanese. Just as the fictional Aoyama Chizuko eventually learns to let her Chi-chan be Ông Tshian-hóh, the world needs to let Taiwan be Taiwan.
P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University (NDHU) in Taiwan
Of Taiwan, Palestine, Vietnam, and Venice, I-Yi Hsieh
When news of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s blunder at the Munich conference reached me, I was just in transit from Amsterdam to Venice. It was the morning after a three-day conference entitled “Wayward Visuality: The Question of Violence and Visuality” hosted by the School of Social Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, in which the PhD student organizers incorporated Palestinian issues, Palestinian film screenings, and hands-on workshops into an occasion that was expected to be packed with theoretical discussions. I can get very uneasy at these events, upon hearing familiar names of theorists such as Judith Butler or Saidiya Hartman thrown into the air, without any acknowledgement of the situated racial, gender, social and economic disparities among the participants in the room. The kind of pursuit for a unifying universal position for the left in the field of cultural studies frightens me much more than the short speeches given in Italian at a strike of the cultural workers in Venice – of which I could understand only about 30 percent. Once I got to Venice, I went to support this second rendition of such cultural workers strike, as it was organized by my Italian friends who had, on May 8th this year, launched an unprecedented strike among the cultural workers in the lagoon and shut down many pavilions of those artists participating in the 2026 Venice Biennale. My scholar friend Marco Baravalle, the central figure of S.a.L.E. Docks collective in Venice, has repeatedly emphasized that these Venetian strikes take great lessons from the Palestinian movement: they are accumulative efforts piling up since the Italian national strikes for Palestine in fall 2025, followed by the Venetian efforts in blocking shipments at Port Marghera meant to sail for Israel. At some of these protests and strikes, I saw my Italian installation team members driving their small motorboats to surround the humungous commercial cruise ships.. These were impossible gestures and wayward tactics at the time.
While being in Venice with my Italian activist friends at these strikes and protests, I sometimes would think of Ho Chi Minh in 1919, standing outside the Versailles Conference, after which he took a failed petition for the independent Vietnamese back to Vietnam and started his militarized movements. I think of Ho Chi Minh because he reminds me a lot of my academic Taiwanese friends who are now deeply involved in the Kuma civilian military training group mobilizing ordinary Taiwanese people for an impending PRC invasion. The Versailles Conference as much as the Munich conference mean so little for the colonized, despite their lofty goals. As much as I want to believe that talks between Taiwan and the PRC can bring positive results, the truth is we all have seen what has happened to Hong Kong. My painful awareness of this fact is shared by my Punjabi friend, who, in her forceful involvement in the Palestinian movement, continues to espouse a sharp criticism of the decolonization project once promised to those colonized in the postwar era: the rosy dream held dear by many in the south Asian continent as the decolonial project crumbles into more nationalist and religious divides. So, what is left for the Taiwanese left, if not this painful awareness of the meaninglessness and the so-called “strategic ambiguity” that may be what actually lingered in the pauses in AOC’s Munich conference speech?
What could be more productive for AOC is indeed a speech of refusal to settler colonialism, that which underlies both the genocide in Gaza and the issue of the Taiwan Strait. In 1945-1949, one-million mainland Chinese refugees fled to Taiwan alongside the defeated Chiang Kai-shek troops. To say that Taiwan is a part of China is to say that Palestine is a part of Israel. Because, before the arrival of Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese fascist regime supported by the US as the buffer against the spread of communism, the island had been colonized by the Japanese Empire (1895-1945), the Qing Empire (1683-1895), the Tungning/Cheng Family pirates (1662-1683), the Spanish colonizers in northern Taiwan (1626-1642), and the Dutch colonial occupation in southern Taiwan. To say that Taiwan is a part of China not only upholds a settler colonial narrative ingrained as the K.M.T. fantasy in defense of its own defeat in 1949, it also presents a twisted history in the PRC victors’ desire to claim a territory that it does not hold. The settler colonial discourse many still hold is so historically inaccurate, it is as uncanny as the Palestinian and even Ho Chi Minh’s frustration in 1919: these are unresolved issues deeply embedded in the postcolonial and decolonial process of the past and the present. If AOC, or whoever is going to represent the democratic socialist wing of the US Democratic Party should engage with the Taiwan issue in the future, the first step would be to reverse and reject this settler colonial framework.
The rising sentiment of abandoning Taiwan in the scenario of a PRC attack among the US left reflects on the international ignorance about Taiwanese history, where there exists a long genealogy of guerrilla warfare in the island’s mountainous areas. That was the case during the Japanese colonial rule as well as the Taiwanese communist guerrillas who fought against Chiang Kai-shek’ s White Terror by hiding in the mountains. The pursuit of autonomy is a feature shared by Ukraine and Taiwan in their self-defense against respective authoritarian aggressions. The Kuma group in Taiwan is such a civilian defense training group that has in recent years gathered tremendous support from different arrays of citizens on the island. They reflect on the public’s anger toward the constant threats from PRC and its increasingly brazen military agenda. Without the current democratic mechanism, in which the Congress in Taiwan and the US still maintain the power to review the budgets for military sales, we would surely see a rise of nationalist figures answering the Taiwanese public’s call for self-defense.
And at this point, I again wonder what Ho Chi Minh might have said or done. After changing his name to Ho Chi Minh in 1940, the one-time believer in the liberal promises of decolonization and Vietnamese independence led by US, instead established the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Ming Hoi (League for the Independence of Vietnam). Many consider this a historical shift of Ho’s toward a peculiar Vietnamese nationalist position. Embarking on a new path toward a nationalist independence, Ho then went to China seeking for Chiang Kai-shek’s help. But Ho ended up being imprisoned by Chiang Kai-shek for 18 months. During his imprisonment in China, Ho wrote what later became known as The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh, a collection of short poems written in classical Chinese. In one of the poems, entitled NANNING JAIL, he writes:
Here is a jail built in ultra-modern style,
All night the compound is brightly flooded with modern electricity,
But as every meal is nothing more than a bowl of rice-gruel,
The stomach is forever in a state of quivering protest. 2
Caught in between imperial powers, Ho was keenly aware of an imperative for wayward strategies, however delivered with quivering.
It is our deepest hope that Taiwan won’t come to the stage of such perpetuated state of quivering, suffering, and war. If Ho Chi Minh’s petition was ever heard at the Versailles Conference in 1919, or addressed properly in later decades, the US may not have created an adversary so fiercely against itself in later years. For AOC and her Democratic Socialist comrades, perhaps a visit to Taiwan and listening to Taiwanese speaking for themselves can bring genuine reflections. A well-informed, grounded US policy on Taiwan may be the only way out of the current deadlock.
I-Yi Hsieh is Assistant Professor, Institute of Visual Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
