When Li Yuan-hsin, a 36-year-old high school teacher, travels abroad, people often see her as Chinese. “No,” Li replies, and explains that she is Taiwanese.
For her, the distinction is important. China may be the land of his ancestors, but Taiwan is where he was born and raised, a home Li defines as much for its lush mountains and bustling night markets as it does for its robust democracy. When she was a high school student, she stuck a little blue flag on her desk to show support for her candidate; since then, he has voted in every presidential election. “I love this island,” he says. “I love the freedom here.”
Well over 90% of Taiwan’s population has origins in mainland China, but Beijing’s noisy authoritarianism — and its claim to Taiwan — has only solidified the island’s identity, now at the center of a dispute that has turned the strait into one of main points of potential conflict in Asia.
For Beijing, Taiwan’s move to distinguish itself from mainland China represents a powerful obstacle to the regime’s efforts to lure (or coerce) the island into its political orbit. Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned in October against the trend he sees as secession: “Those who forget their legacy, betray their motherland and try to divide the country will not come to a good end.”
Most Taiwanese are not interested in being absorbed into Communist China, but they do not push for formal independence, preferring to avoid the risk of war. This leaves the two sides in a dangerous impasse. The more Taipei’s identity is asserted, the more Beijing may feel compelled to intensify its military and diplomatic campaign to pressure the island to respect its claim to sovereignty.
Li is one of more than 60 percent of the island’s 23 million people who identify only as Taiwanese, triple the percentage in 1992, according to polls by the Center for Election Studies at National Chengchi University in Taipei. Only 2% identified as Chinese, up from 25% 30 years ago.
Part of the change is generational: Li’s 82-year-old grandmother Wang Yu-lan, for example, is part of that minority. For her, who fled the mainland decades ago, being Chinese means celebrating family and cultural roots. She paints classic landscapes in India ink and displays them on the walls of her home; spends hours practicing erhu, a traditional Chinese two-stringed instrument; tells stories of a land so beloved that its grandparents took a handful of soil when they left; and he still wonders what happened to the gold and silver bars they had buried under a bed of heated bricks in Beijing.
Wang was 9 years old when he arrived in Taiwan in 1948, among the roughly 1 million Chinese who retreated with the Nationalists during the civil war with the Communists. The island is approximately 100 miles off the southeastern coast of China, but to many newcomers it felt like another world.
Chinese settlers who had lived there for centuries — and formed the majority — spoke a different dialect. The first settlers had arrived thousands of years ago and were more closely related to the peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific than to the Chinese. Europeans had set up trading posts on the island, and the Japanese had ruled it for 50 years.
Wang and the other exiles lived in villages designated for mainland military officers, where the aroma of black pepper typical of Sichuan cuisine mingled with the pungent odors of delicacies from the southern province of Guizhou. Every day, she and other women in the village would gather to shout slogans like “Take the country back from the communist bandits!”
Over time, that dream dissipated. In 1971, the UN severed diplomatic ties with Taipei and formally recognized Beijing’s government. The US and other countries would soon follow suit, which came as a shock to Chinese like Wang. How could she still consider herself Chinese if the world didn’t recognize her as such?
Wang and others who wanted to return to the mainland had always been a minority in Taiwan. A few generations later, among his children and grandchildren, yearning turned to fear of Beijing’s expansionist ambitions. Under Xi, China has demonstrated its impatience with Taiwan in increasingly threatening ways, sending military jets to cut through Taiwanese airspace on an almost daily basis.
When Hong Kong on the mainland erupted in anti-regime protests in 2019, Li followed the news daily. She saw Beijing’s crackdown and destruction of civil liberties as evidence that the Communist Party could not be trusted to keep its promise to preserve Taiwan’s autonomy if there was unification.
Under its current president, Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwanese government has positioned the island as a Chinese society that is democratic and tolerant, unlike the colossus across the strait. As Beijing increased its crackdown on ethnic minorities in the name of national unity, Taipei sought to include indigenous groups and other minorities. “[A ilha] represents both an affront to the narrative and a hindrance to the Chinese Communist Party’s regional ambitions,” the policy said last year.
Today, as China under Xi becomes more authoritarian, the political chasm separating it from Taiwan seems less and less surmountable. “After Xi took office, he pushed back democracy,” says Li. She cites a 2018 measure that abolished the presidential term limit, paving the way for him to rule indefinitely. “So I felt that unification would be impossible.”
The Taiwanese points to Beijing’s controls on free expression and dissent as the antithesis of Taiwan. She compares Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which she visited in 2005 as a university student, with public spaces in Taipei. In the Chinese capital, surveillance cameras pointed in all directions as armed police watched the crowd. Her government-approved guide made no mention of the Communist Party’s brutal 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, which she had learned about as a high school student in Taiwan.
She thought, by comparison, of Taipei’s Freedom Square, a vast space where people gather to play music, dance, exercise and protest. “After that trip, I appreciated Taiwan a lot more.”
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