Island elegy: Coming to terms with Taiwan’s potential demise

What do we talk about when we talk about our country coming to an end?

***

“We’ll all be mainlanders by then anyway,” the driver said.

It was around the Lunar New Year this year, and I got into a taxi with my aunt. Our driver, in his sixties with a clear benshengren accent, told us exactly what he thought about Taiwan’s future.

(Běnshěngrén 本省人 are those whose families moved to Taiwan from mainland China by the time of Japanese colonization in 1895, as opposed to wàishěngrén 外省人, who arrived in or after 1945. The former, the majority, are more likely to support Taiwanese independence and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP.)

Taiwan is done for, he said. We are living in the last few years before regime collapse, like Ming China in the early 1640s before Manchu cavalry breached the Great Wall. War is coming, a war we stand no chance of winning.

I might not have paid much attention to a taxi driver’s opinions. But many of his arguments I had recently read in The Overall Defense Concept, the 2022 book by Admiral Lee Hsi-ming (李喜明 Lǐ Xǐmíng), formerly Chief of the General Staff of the Republic of China Armed Forces. (The regime known as the Republic of China, or R.O.C., founded after the 1911 Revolution, relocated to Taiwan after the Communists’ triumph in 1949. “Republic of China” remains Taiwan’s official name.)

***

Taiwan is hopelessly outgunned.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy is already bigger than even the U.S. Navy by hull count. In the event of all-out war, the entirety of the small R.O.C. navy will likely be sunk.

In 2020, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文 Cài Yīngwén) finalized the purchase of 66 additional F-16V fighter jets as Taiwan continued to upgrade its existing F-16A/Bs. And in August, the Biden administration announced the sale of $500 million of new equipment augmenting those F-16s. But, besides sizable fleets of other planes, the PLA Air Force possesses over 200 J-20s, fifth-generation stealth fighters against which F-16s stand no more than a fighting chance.

Moreover, in the event of war, the PLA will first bomb Taiwan’s airfields, destroying many of those fighters or making it impossible for them to take off. The planes, which absorb much of Taiwan’s defense budget, will be all but useless. And that budget is and always will be a small fraction of the military budget on the other side.

In 2013, Taiwan shortened its mandatory military service to four months, too brief to provide genuine combat training to conscripts. President Tsai’s government has lengthened the term to one year for men born in or after 2005, but the quality of training may remain subpar.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wargamed a potential Chinese invasion and concluded that the U.S. can pull out a “Pyrrhic victory” only if the Taiwanese mount a determined defense. “If Taiwan surrenders before U.S. forces can be brought to bear, the rest is futile.”

But in Taiwan, we can’t agree on whether we’d be fighting for the R.O.C. or a nascent Taiwanese Republic. Believers in the one won’t risk their lives for the other.

The Taiwanese also have a record of quick capitulation. In 1683, after the Qing took the outlying Penghu Islands, the Ming-loyalist regime on Taiwan surrendered without a fight.

In 1895, having lost the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing signed Taiwan over to Japan as a colony. To obstruct the Japanese, the Taiwanese declared their own republic. But they lost heart as soon as Japanese forces landed. The republic’s president fled in disguise.

Many today may similarly flee. For decades, upwardly mobile Taiwanese of all political stripes have sought citizenships of Western countries, particularly the U.S. (I’m a dual citizen of New Zealand). When President Tsai visited the U.S. in April, she caught up with two sisters and a brother, all residents there. The grandson of the currently leading presidential candidate, Vice President Lai Ching-te (賴清德 Lài Qīngdé), was born in the U.S.

Many of us have places to go.

***

The driver said he had spent four years in the special forces and three as a presidential bodyguard.

“It’ll be boys in their twenties that we send out as cannon fodder first,” he added. “Then it’ll be your age group. If we need to send guys my age out to fight, then we’re finished anyway.”

When we got out of the car, I looked to my aunt.

“All my friends think the same thing,” she shrugged.

***

Experts disagree on the likelihood of war.

Former head of U.S. Indo-Pacific command Admiral Philip Davidson has predicted war by 2027. According to CIA Director William Burns, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 has instructed the PLA to be prepared for action by then. General Mike Minihan of the U.S. Air Force has suggested 2025.

On the other hand, scholars at the Brookings Institution have argued that conflict is not inevitable.

Maybe. But the chances of a hot war breaking out are certainly non-negligible.

***

How will I feel to see the neighborhood where I played as a child come under enemy occupation? How can I process the polity to which I swore allegiance entering the history books?

Most of us have never experienced national demise. But enough dynasties and kingdoms have died in Chinese history that we have a term for a fallen regime’s survivors: yímín 遺民, literally, “leftover people.”

After they took control of Taiwan in 1683, Qing troops transported the leaders and soldiers of the fallen Ming-loyalist regime to Beijing, where these yimin had to serve in their conquerors’ army.

The collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644 traumatized that generation of yimin. Confucianism barred children of one regime from serving its usurpers. Many literati renounced careers as scholar-officials, even if — a common scenario — doing so meant poverty. Many of them turned to the arts.

***

Speaking of Confucianism, I keep thinking about one ancient group of yimin.

The famed scholar Hu Shih (胡適 Hú Shì) once wrote an essay called “Regarding the Confucians,” or “Regarding the Ru.” The philosophical tradition known in English by the name of its greatest exponent is known in Chinese as the school of “Ru.” But where does this character Rú 儒 come from?

Hu argued that the Ru were the priestly class of the Shang dynasty. When the Shang fell to the Zhou dynasty in 1046 B.C., the Ru became yimin.

Being conquered subjects, the Ru developed a philosophy of the weak, emphasizing benevolence and justice over might.

And a prophecy circulated among them: “In 500 years, a king shall rise” (五百年必有王者興).

The dispossessed ancient Israelites prophesied that a king from David’s bloodline would rise to lead them, and some Jews came to identify that Messiah with Jesus. Similarly, the Ru identified Confucius, born almost exactly 500 years after the fall of the Shang, as their anointed king.

In the end, both Jesus and Confucius became “kings” not in the political but the moral sense. Confucianism became a dominant philosophy of China.

So the yimin of the Shang effected an ideological conquest of China for the rest of history.

***

I can’t know whether the yimin of Taiwan, with their memory of democracy, may in time exercise a similar influence. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking. Perhaps even to compare my own cohort with the yimin of the Shang is fantastical hubris.

But, if I have no way of knowing that it will be so, then I have no way of knowing that it will not.

As a prospective member of a new crop of yimin, maybe that’s the best I can do.

And then I’ll just have to find solace in the arts, like the Ming literati.

Perhaps poetry.

The emperor-poet “the Latter Ruler Li” 李後主 surrendered his kingdom to the Song dynasty in A.D. 975 only to be poisoned by its agents. But he left us with this poem (as I translate it), indelible in the Chinese psyche:

Is there no end to these spring flowers and this autumn moon?

How many memories come back to me

Last night an east wind arose again outside my little pavilion

And I can’t bear to look upon my lost kingdom, reflected in the moon

The sculpted balustrades and jade staircase of my palace remain

But the lovely faces are all changed

You ask how much melancholy can I feel?

As much as there is water in that river flowing eastward, after a spring rain