Contrary to many of my compatriots, I find Taiwan’s noisy democracy charming. After living in China for nearly a decade, where the apparatus for silencing is robust and ever-present, I revel in the cacophony of campaign trucks blaring pleads for votes and thousand-strong rallies with hawkers selling unlicensed campaign merch. I’m not even embarrassed by the lawmakers fist-fighting in parliament (legislative yuan) anymore.
I have been watching the recall votes in Taiwan with pride. The recall mechanism was built into the constitution of the Republic of China, Taiwan, but it had never been deployed at this scale, targeting Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang 31 members of the Legislative Yuan.
In January of 2024, Taiwan elected a Democratic Progressive Party president, but the two opposition parties, Kuomingtang (KMT, Nationalist Party) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) earned a slight majority in the legislature. The two parties formed an alliance and shoved through new legislation that many found suspect. By May of 2024, people were protesting in the streets.
The main street where people protested is called 青島東路, or Blue Island East Road. But when social media platforms started down-ranking the phrase, netizens cleverly swapped out the word 島 island for 鳥 bird to outrun the algorithm. It became the Bluebird Movement, the beginning of this recall campaign.
Voter turnout for the recall was strong for something that had been over a year in the making. Volunteers—many of them women, many politically activated for the first time—organized across cities and international borders. Citizens and lawmakers alike canvassed, protested, argued loudly (and sometimes physically). That’s democracy persisting.
As C.J. Cregg said in The West Wing: In a democracy, oftentimes, the other people win. The July 26 vote, aimed at the first 24 lawmakers, did not succeed. Another 7 are being voted on Saturday, August 23, but those are even less likely to pass.
Many of my friends and family felt like the campaign was a lot of noise for nothing. Many international headlines claimed the recall votes failed, that the pro-China faction won. My left-leaning friends on the losing side express worry about the future of our young democracy. My right-leaning relatives say the recall was indecent and divisive, some going as far as saying it’s authoritarian.
I should point out here that while the KMT accused the Democratic Progressive Party for upending democracy, they themselves did try to stage a recall campaign. They not only failed to gather the necessary signatures to do so, dozens of officials were arrested for faking signatures from deceased voters.
I’m not worried about Taiwan’s democratic health. A long recall campaign that required consistent participation, gave dissent a democratic outlet, with an outcome that was peacefully accepted is democracy in great form. What I am concerned about is the intensifying identity politics.
The recall campaign language was fueled with anti-Chinese discrimination, which is not the same as vigilance in the face of constant threats from the CCP against Taiwan’s sovereignty. Slogans and discourse (online and off) have proclaimed that if you didn’t vote for the recall, you are either not Taiwanese, or you’re a Chinese Communist sympathizer. Seemingly innocuous online posts were boasting “I’m Taiwanese! I add taro to my hot pot! I support the recall! ” and “I’m Taiwanese! I speak Tâi-gí (Taiwanese Hokkien)! I support the recall!”
It made me question whether I’m still Taiwanese enough. Am I somehow undeserving of this identity because I couldn’t afford to fly home and cast a vote for the recall? My Taiwanese Hokkien is limited and accented; I wish it was even half as good as my English. Does that make me less Tai? Does it matter if I tried to support the vote from afar and do my best to represent my country well while living abroad?
On the other end of the political spectrum, I worry that many Taiwanese people aren’t vigilant enough about CCP’s threats. The majority in Taiwan would like to maintain the status quo—not because this ambiguity is fair or right, but simply because nobody wants a war—And some 28% surveyed by Pew Research in 2023 identify as both Chinese and Taiwanese. A not insignificant portion of Taiwanese citizens believe that closer ties with China would make life in Taiwan better, at least economically.
I know, because I was one of them.
I come from a deeply KMT (Nationalist or Kuomintang) family. My grandfather, Wang Wei-shih, carried the national seal of the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949, working for a government that imposed martial law on Taiwan for 38 years and persecuted thousands during White Terror. We are called waishengren, or outside province people, and make up just 13% the population. Depending on class, some were refugees of war; others were colonizers with clear privileges and advantages.
I’ve been trying to make sense of this complicated identity for years. I thought living in China would help me understand my Chinese heritage, but more than anything, it made me realize that I am Taiwanese, with Chinese heritage.
Every government produces propaganda; growing up, the Kuomintang government tried to teach me that the Communist Chinese government and people couldn’t be trusted. That the Communists wanted to ruin our way of life, and had run us out of China, a land I had never seen but was rightfully ours. I studied Chinese geography and history before learning about the 16+ Indigenous tribes in Taiwan.
My time in China helped undo propaganda that taught me to fear and judge Chinese people as a monolith, and I became friends with many of them as individuals rather than caricatures.
Prior to my time in Shanghai, I took to the propaganda the way one may have taken the words of a struggling single mother: Your father (The CCP) can’t be trusted. He doesn’t want what’s best for you. Also he has to eat tree bark to survive.
Partly out of rebellion and partly out of economic necessity, I thought to myself: Maybe mother wasn’t right about everything. They had parted on bad terms (the Chinese Civil War). Dad seems to be doing better. He’s got a real job, a bed frame, and is promising to buy me a car (economic independence). Maybe I’ll go live with Dad for a few years.
A few years turned into nearly ten. Dad welcomed me back with open arms (Taiwanese nationals don’t need a work permit or visa to visit or stay in China), but he was also exerting serious control on how I lived my life, what I’m allowed to say, who and what I was allowed to see, how I was supposed to think. But financial independence, for a millennial who graduated college straight into the 2008 financial crisis, was intoxicating. So I compromised.
I minimized my Taiwanese identity. I shrugged off comments about “Taiwan Province.” I side-stepped questions about why the people in Taiwan don’t want to “return to the motherland.” I owned an iPhone that didn’t have the Taiwanese flag emoji.
It’s fine, I told myself. I can still fly home and vote.
If I was a frog in a slowly boiling pot, the Shanghai lockdown was the lid that sealed it. The lockdown gave me a limited trial run of the human rights violations people in Xinjiang, Tibet, Wuhan, Hong Kong, and beyond have been enduring. For 60 days, I lost my freedom entirely, trapped at home except for mass PCR testing, my human contact reduced to watching the cries for help on my phone being wiped by censors minutes after they’d been posted; friends and colleagues were in my WeChat feed begging for baby formula, insulin, and sanitary pads.
Turns out, Mother Propaganda wasn’t right about everything… But she also wasn’t wrong about everything. I sure didn’t think life without democracy would be that big of a deal. After all, elections are so messy and loud. Have you seen the fistfights in our parliament?
But the China threat is real. No amount of economic benefits is worth compromising Taiwan’s hard-earned democracy.
I wish I knew how to make Taiwanese people see that you can be prepared for an invasion from a government and not discriminate against their people. My Chinese friends and colleagues are not so different from us. They just want to go to work, start a family, maybe make enough to go on a vacation once in a while. When we felt safe enough, they told me stories of relatives who endured the Cultural Revolution, and the ones who didn’t survive. I, in turn, talked about what the CCP has been doing to Taiwan while domestically painting a rosy picture of a distant island that will one day be united “again” with Mother China.
Hundreds of warplanes in our defense zone a month, military drills simulating blockade, open threats of invasion from Chinese officials, exclusion from the UN, WHO, WTO, Interpol, our national flag and anthem are banned from the Olympics… All par for the course for being Taiwanese. My Chinese friends had no clue any of this was happening.
I am Taiwanese. Taiwan is a country. These shouldn’t be political statements, but being born Taiwanese is to have your existence politicized whether you like it or not.
The Taiwanese identity has always been a point of conflict. Yes, CCP disinformation is adding fuel to a fire, but the fire has always been burning. Japanese colonizers wanted the Han to be second-class Japanese. The Republic of China Nationalist government banned Taiwanese Hokkien (Tâi-gí), Hakka, all Indigenous languages and forced everyone to learn Mandarin Chinese. Now, Taiwanese citizens casually discriminate against Southeast Asian migrants doing the toughest work to keep our society functioning.
Taiwanese is a young distinction. We’re still in the process of defining it. But I hope for a Taiwanese identity that’s more expansive, not a status one has to earn. I want the younger generations to learn about the dark chapters of our history that my textbooks glossed over. I want Mandarin spoken in any accent to be welcomed, and I want more investments in native language education.
Being anti-China is not an identity. Hate cannot be the thing that defines us. If we are to have any chance of upholding our democratic way of life, we’re going to have to learn to expand the definition of what makes someone Taiwanese.
Born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, Vickie Wang is a bilingual writer, interpreter, and stand-up comedian fluent in Mandarin Chinese, English, and American cultural references. New York-based as of 2024, she has lived in Taiwan, China, Sweden, and the good ol’ American Midwest.
Her work has been published in The New York Times, RADII, China Media Project, and The World of Chinese. As a stand-up comedian, she’s performed in Taipei, Shanghai, New York City, and opened for renown international headliners like Atsuko Okatsuka, Jenny Yang, and Elena Gabrielle.
She is currently working on a memoir on Taiwanese identity, shaped by her experiences living through COVID in China and performing stand-up comedy under censorship.
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