The Weekend Intelligence: Inside Taiwan's identity struggle

台湾的身份认同

The Intelligence from The Economist

2025-05-10

48 分钟
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In this episode of The Weekend Intelligence our Senior China correspondent Alice Su, whose family has lived in Taiwan for generations, goes in search of Taiwanese identity. Both her own, and her country's.  For four decades what it meant to be Taiwanese was defined by a brutal dictatorship and its relation to the mainland. In the four decades since, the people of Taiwan have been trying to work out who they are. If and when China makes a move on Taiwan, everything will hinge on whether Taiwanese people unite to defend themselves. What it means to be Taiwanese is not just personal but existential.  Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—Subscribe to Economist Podcasts+ For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.
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  • The Economist.

  • The island of Taiwan is one of those places in the world that's changed hands for centuries.

  • Back in the 17th, it was populated by a mosaic of Malayo Polynesian tribes, till the Spanish and the Dutch showed up.

  • Soon dynastic ructions in China drove members of the old Ming dynasty in.

  • Then in the 19th came the Japanese, who got Taiwan as spoils of the Sino-Japanese War.

  • You keeping up here?

  • Then in the 20th century, revolution in China, no more dynasties.

  • The new central government was under the loose rule of a nationalist party called the Kuomintang.

  • Marxism took root and the Kuomen Tang got help from the new Chinese Communist Party to make its loose rule a lot tighter.

  • Taiwan, meanwhile, was handed to the Kuoman Tang by the Japanese, again, as spoils of war in 1945.

  • Long story, still long, The nationalists and the communists, they fell out in a big way.

  • In the ensuing civil war, millions of the Kuomintang faithful flooded into Taiwan, their last refuge.

  • Then they set up martial law, violently suppressing local languages and histories, for nearly 40 years.

  • I'm Jason Palmer, this is the Weekend Intelligence, and I promise this episode won't just be a big long history lesson.

  • In a few months, Taiwan's democracy will have lasted longer than its dictatorship.

  • That's got the people of the capital Taipei thinking about Taiwanese identity, an idea that's been fraught for centuries,

  • because Taiwan has been the focus of tussles for centuries.

  • Still is.

  • And as we keep telling you, it's really likely to be a flashpoint in big time great power conflict between China and America.

  • That identity and conflict idea is not at all new to Alice Su,