Taiwan and the end of the Myth of "Retaking the Mainland" -Parallels to Trump and the Epstein List?
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This week, we look at post World War Two Taiwan under the Kuo Min Tang, the Kuo Min Tang being Chiang Kai Shek’s political party, aka “the Nationalists,” as an example of a government built on fantasy that lost support from its citizens as the fantasy became recognized as a fantasy and the government lost credibility.
Of course, Taiwan under the Kuo Min Tang is not the only example of such a government.
Some would argue that we are watching such a situation play itself out right now in the USA. The MAGA movement and its hard core, cult-like Qanon supporters are focused in large part on a group of connected beliefs involving a secret network of elites (politicians, billionaires, celebrities, and so on) who commit child abuse and use their money and influence to escape punishment, control the mainstream media narrative, and hide the evidence of their misdeeds. 1 This narrative was encouraged, spread, and some argue even created with the full consent and encouragement of Donald Trump, current president of the USA.
However, after promising for years to get to the bottom of this conspiracy and punish these global elites / predatory pedophiles, Donald Trump has a problem because it’s becoming obvious that there are widespread claims that he is among those global elites / predatory pedophiles and spent way too much time hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell visiting their island, flying on their plane, and even helping them recruit girls for exploitation. (I wrote a bit about Epstein and Trump this earlier this week. See POLITICS - Epstein, yet another dangerously weird billionaire )
It may be a bit of a stretch to compare the problem of Donald Trump and the Trump Regime’s having to fulfill promises to expose a shadowy cabal of manipulative, predatory sex offenders that includes Donald Trump himself, with the issues of Taiwan’s post war fantasy politics, but as it’s an interesting comparison that will enable me to talk about Taiwan and its unusual history, let’s explore it.
Where did this crazy idea come from?
Celestia N Ward is, along with Ben Radford, one of the minds behind the Squaring the Strange Podcast. (Some of you may recall that I was once a guest on that podcast, see Dim Mak, the Kung Fu Death Touch and the Squaring the Strange Podcast ) Recently on Facebook, she posted the following:
“Folklorists! Anyone know of examples from history where a dictator or king used conspiracy/rumors to gain power and then, once in power, those same rumors became his undoing because he could not deliver? Tagging Ben Radford, Jeannie Banks Thomas and Daisy Ahlstone because I really am curious, and would like the news to be informed by history!”
I took it as a challenge and thought of post World War Two Taiwan in the 1980s.
Taiwan and the Republic of China, a complex, complicated, overlapping relationship.
Let’s start with a few basics, and if I skip footnoting for a bit, please remember most of what I am saying is pretty basic and easily verified. Also, I lived in Taiwan for approximately four years of my life, although those fours were not sequential. Taiwan is an island about the size of New Jersey located about 130 to 220 kilometers or 81 to 140 miles from the coast of Fujian, part of the Chinese mainland. It currently has a population of over 20 million most living close to relatively close to its coastline with rugged mountains in the middle of the island.
The political situation between the government of Taiwan today and the government of mainland China is complex as is the history of the relationship, but for the moment its probably enough to say that prior to the 17th Century, few if any Chinese lived on Taiwan although there were (and still are) other, non-Chinese people there from several indigenous tribes. These people have been genetically linked to Polynesians and still live there. (FYI, during the period we are discussing, one issue in Taiwan is that the government had no special office devoted to their needs and issues, although it did have a division of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs despite their being very few Tibetans or Mongolians in Taiwan at this time.) Chinese people came to live there during the 17th Century and ever since Taiwan has sometimes been controlled by the same government as China and sometimes was not controlled by the same government as China. More details to follow.
However, and historical context is coming, if one were to visit or go to live in Taiwan in the 1980s, like I did, then you would find yourself living in this bizarre, surreal environment with very strange politics. For instance, while the government would proudly assert that it was a democracy, the fact was that most of its government was not elected at all. And the entire issue of how its president was elected was quite strange. So it really did not resemble a democracy in most ways, but if one were to ask, one would be told in no uncertain terms that it was indeed a democracy. And there were soldiers everywhere, and the citizens and foreign residents knew there were people reporting on their conversations to the government. In the decades prior, thousands of residents of Taiwan had been imprisoned or disappeared for speaking out about their government’s non-democractic tendencies and its lack of connection to Taiwanese reality.
In fact, what it resembled in many ways was a dictatorship despite the assertions that it was, indeed, a democracy.
And if you were to ask around, you would learn that many common businesses, such as night clubs and discotheques, while clearly open and running in plain sight, were in fact illegal and against the law. This is because by the time the 1980s came around, a lot but not all of the provisions of the government’s decades long “temporary martial law” provisions were being ignored despite not have been lifted. One foreign resident I met commented, “This is the only place in the world where you can have a democracy, a dictatorship, and total anarchy in the same place at the same time.”
If one dug a bit deeper, it would be explained to you that the government of the island was, in fact, a perfectly fine and well organized and properly structured democracy. The problem though was that it was a democratic government designed and intended for the entire Chinese mainland (plus Mongolia as well, plus Taiwan) and if the government of Taiwan were removed from Taiwan and instead put in China, ideally in Nanjing, China where it was supposed to be and had been in in 1937, and allowed to run things there, then it would, indeed be a very good and very democratic government of China. The only problem, and the only hindrance to it being a good, democratic government is that it was not running China like it should have been and was instead only running Taiwan. 2
In fact, in the 1980s when Taiwanese met foreign visitors, they would often ask them, “Which government of China do you support, ours or theirs?” -clearly seeing the government on Taiwan as an alternative to the one actually running China. You know, the one in Beijing ( 北京 ), a Chinese term that means “Northern Capital,” but that everyone in Taiwan insisted on renaming “Beiping” (北平) a term that means “Northern City.” 3 And, of course, if you said “Beijng,” some local person would “correct” you and tell you to say “Beiping” which meant that I developed the habit of saying “Peking” just to avoid the entire controversy and kept it for several years.
Now some people who had never been to Taiwan at that point would say things like “Taiwan is the Republic of China, and China is the People’s Republic of China,” which sounds clear and simple and sensible, but the problem with it is that it was not true.
The government in Beijing was claiming to rule a place named “the People’s Republic of China,” and it included not just the territory of China but also the island of Taiwan. Undoubtedly, if you are here now reading this, you have seen maps of the People’s Republic of China before. However for reference, I have placed one below near the end of this column. Notice that maps of the People’s Republic of China ALWAYS include Taiwan. ALWAYS! This is despite the fact that the government of the People’s Republic of China has NEVER ruled the island of Taiwan. NEVER! NOT FOR ONE SINGLE DAY HAS THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA RULED THE ISLAND OF TAIWAN. NOT EVER. Taiwan has never, not one day, been under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party yet they claim to be its rightful rulers.
By contrast, in the category of claims to govern territory that they never once controlled, the Republic of China government of the 1980s, the one located on Taiwan, was an even bigger offender.
While they controlled this territory here, the large island of Taiwan and the much smaller islands of Quemoy and Matsu and Penghu and a handful of others. 4
What they claimed to actually control was all of this below. Please note the boundaries of this conceptual entity, the conceptual entity called “the Republic of China” are NOT the same as the boundaries of the conceptual entity known as “the People’s Republic of China. While there is an extensive overlap, they are NOT the same. Note that the former includes pretty much the entire territory of the nation of Mongolia (which was Chinese territory during the Qing Dynasty, the government that predated the foundation of the Republic of China in 1911) as well as disputed territory that China claimed on its western and southern border.
In the 1980s, many people in Taiwan believed that their government was going to inevitably, someday, retake all of this territory and restore democracy to everyone who lived there. It was illegal to say otherwise and people had been punished for it.
So why did this change? Why do so few people on Taiwan these days speak of “retaking the mainland”?
First this is not standard history, there are many proposed answers to the above question and a lot of debate, but it is an interpretation of events consistent with the facts. In 1949, the Chinese Civil War ended, the Communist Party took control ("liberated the country"), the Nationalist Party (aka Kuo Min Tang or KMT) under Chiang Kai Shek fled to Taiwan and relocated their government there stating this was a temporary measure due to the "temporary seizure of the mainland by Communist inspired bandits." They publicly stated the plans was to "retake the mainland" and put the island of Taiwan under martial law due to "the temporary state of emergency." This continued for over 35 years. It was particularly weird for the local Taiwan people who were mostly of Chinese descent as from 1894-1945 they had been a Japanese colony and separated from China with little interaction. (More residents of Taiwan spoke Japanese than Mandarin in 1945 when it was turned over to China after World War Two, and many residents of Taiwan had served in the Japanese military during that war with very, very few if any having served in the Chinese military during the war.)
Also there had soon been tension between the KMT and ultimately widespread protests by the Taiwanese leading to widespread massacres beginning on February 28, 1947, a day that is now a holiday to remember the massacre and subsequent persecution of the Taiwanese people by the Nationalist troops who were occupying it after the war following its return to Chinese rule in 1945.)
As the decades went on, people inside and outside Taiwan began asking "How will an island of approximately 20 million take over China, a nation with approximately 1 billion?" And the official answer was "The people of China are oppressed and starving. They desperately seek freedom from the oppressive Communist inspired bandit regime. Some day they will rise up and try to overthrow their oppressors. When that happens, they will crave leadership and expertise and we will return to the mainland, announce our presence, and they will join us and together we and the people of China will overthrow the Communist Party and restore democracy to China." (something like that, and I question how widespread democracy ever was in China under the ROC but that's another issue)
In the 1980s when I spent six months in Taiwan, I was constantly asked "Which government of China do YOU personally support? Ours or theirs?" (which threw me for a loop but lead to some interesting discussions. When I returned in 1990, that didn't happen anymore. I asked one Taiwanese friend, a KMT supporter, about it and she said that she thought what had happened was the Tiananmen Square inicdent / massacre of 1989. For weeks it appeared as though the people of China were trying to rise up, but then they did, the KMT did nothing and the Communists simply massacred the protesters in large numbers. People, my friend said, realized that what their government had been saying was not true and would never happen. They realized that Taiwan and China were basically separate and that was a good thing for Taiwan, not a bad thing. --- Now there were other events that happened, too. There was a real aging of the KMT leadership and its mainlander clique was simply dying off from old age, the people who had been holding "provincial" offices and representing mainland Chinese offices in the parliament since 1949 on Taiwan were dying off and the structure of their government -a government designed for China not Taiwan- made no sense and defied any sane definition of democracy for 35+ years. Lee Teng-Hui, a native Taiwanese (and veteran of the Japanese military and a Cornell grad) became president and made extensive efforts to democratize and integrate ethnic Taiwanese Chinese into the system more fairly. The Min Jin Tang or DPP -Democractic Progressive Party was founded and soon became a legal party running in actual elections all around the same time. But same think the Tiananmen Square massacre exposed the lie that the KMT on Taiwan would invade China and retake it.
Footnotes and Biography
Such belief systems are actually thousands of years old in Western civilization, and their history is very interesting. I wrote about them in part in my book, “More Scams from the Great Beyond,” but you can also learn about them on this video.
To completely explain what happened requires some complicated history. Let’s begin by looking at the Legislative Yuan of the Republic of China and some of its history. While the Republic of China was officially founded in 1911 as an attempt to create a modern Republican government in China, it was essentially a nice idea that never worked quite like it was supposed to. This lack of success was for a variety of reasons, most of which lay outside the control of the well-intentioned and generally competent people who created it. Its exact structure and degree of democratization varied widely depending on things like territory actually controlled and who was in charge.
It’s Legislative Yuan, the law making body, was founded in 1928, after one such restructuring. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_(1912%E2%80%931949)
It had 51 members who were each appointed for two year terms. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Yuan
According to: https://www.taiwan-database.net/LL-M05.htm#LL-M05-02
”Due to the military conflict with Japan which began in September 1931 in Manchuria and spread to the Chinese heartland in July 1937, in the fourth legislative period of the Legislative Yuan the number of members was increased to 194 and their term in office extended to 14 years.”
In 1948, things were restructured and there were 760 elected members of the legistlative yuan. At this time the government of the Republic of China was based in mainland China and not in Taiwan. According to: https://www.taiwan-database.net/LL-M05.htm#LL-M05-02
The next year, the Communists gained control of China, and the government fled to Tawain. There were no elections for the legislative yuan until 1969 but these were only partial elections that elected 11 representatives and only 11 representatives for “the province of Taiwan,” considered to be just on small province of the much large conceptual entity known as “the Republic of China.” (of which you have a seen a map).
As the years went by the representatives from the mainland who had been elected in 1948 died off and were not replaced while the representatives from “the province of Taiwan” increased slightly but the elected members were never enough to become a majority.
According to Wikipedia, “Over the years, deceased members elected on the mainland were not replaced while additional seats were created for Taiwan starting with eleven seats in 1969. Fifty-one new members were elected to a three-year term in 1972, fifty-two in s1975, ninety-seven in 1980, ninety-eight in 1983, one hundred in 1986, and one hundred thirty in 1989. Although the elected members of the Legislative Yuan did not have the majority to defeat legislation, they were able to use the Legislative Yuan as a platform to express political dissent. Opposition parties were formally illegal until 1991, but in the 1970s candidates to the Legislative Yuan would run as Tangwai ("outside the party"), and in 1985 candidates began to run under the banner of the Democratic Progressive Party.”
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Yuan
After this, the number of legislators varied but they generally represented territory controlled by the government on Taiwan, a government that was sometimes referred to as “the Republic of China,” but did not really control the territory often considered to be the territory of the conceptual entity known as “the Republic of China.”This is, of course, around the same time as there began to be a populist push for Taiwan independence and a strong populist belief in Taiwan independence,
While the old term for “Beijing” is “Peking,” it also means “Northern Capital” but comes from the Cantonese pronunciation. If you are old enough to remember, there was a period when many Americans referred to the same city as “Peiping,” and now you know why. The change in terms was intended to delegitimize the government of China as the government China. And for what it is worth “Nanjing” or 南京 means “Southern Capital” with “Nanking” being the southern or Cantonese pronunciation.