In some parts of the world, a few words are enough to go from peace to war. This is the case in the Taiwan Strait, where the tone adopted by the island’s new president towards China is the subject of the greatest attention. Lai Ching-te, elected in January and taken office in May, weighing his words, considers that it is necessary to tell things as they are, at the risk of contributing to increasing tensions with Beijing. “The Republic of China that took root in Taiwan (…) and the People’s Republic of China are in no way subordinate to each other.declared the Taiwanese president in his first National Day speech on Thursday, October 10, promising to maintain the status quo but also to resist. “annexation or violations of our sovereignty”. “China has no right to represent Taiwan”said.
The date marks the beginning of the rebellion that put an end to Imperial China in 1911, symbolizing the historical complexity that characterizes the question of the island of Taiwan. The former master of Republican China, Chiang Kai-shek, defeated on the mainland by Mao Zedong’s communist soldiers, retired there in 1949, giving rise to a kind of continuity of his regime on the island and intending to return one day, as illustrated by the official name of “Republic of China” which, today, persists without corresponding to the geographical reality of the island.
The generalissimo’s formation, the Nationalist Party or Kouomintang (KMT), reigned terror on the island for four decades before accepting the democratic game. Beijing and Taipei, under a KMT government, agreed in the early 1990s to a sort of tacit declaration that there would be only one China, each free to make its own interpretation. A formula that, for the Chinese Communist Party, has the merit of underlining its vision according to which the island is Chinese and, therefore, has the vocation of one day being politically linked to it.
A clean political identity
But, for the party that has been in power for eight years, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the result of the fight for democracy and freedoms that took root in Taiwan, where over decades it forged its own political identity , this so-called one-party-Chinese principle is nonsense, a denial of reality. President from 2016 to 2024, Tsai Ing-wen tried to escape this discourse, periodically affirming the reality of the sovereignty of the island, which has its political system, its currency, its army, its passports and all the attributes of a State yes No international recognition.
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