Talk about a few imaginations about Taiwan

The first imagination of Taiwan : the mainstream narrative of the CCP, the narrative of the great rejuvenation of the reunification of the Chinese nation. This is the most mainstream and most widely publicized narrative in China. In this narrative, the Chinese nation is equal to all the subjects of the Qing Empire plus part of the people of the tributary countries, and the Chinese nation is the modern heir to the Chinese imperial lineage that has existed since ancient times. The legitimacy of the CCP's governance lies in the fact that it can achieve national rejuvenation and the rise of an empire. Since 1840, the Celestial Empire's system has been challenged by the Westphalian order, and it has successfully rebuilt a new tributary system. Unifying Taiwan is an imperial ideology with victimhood narrative.

Of course, before Taiwan's democratization, its narrative used a mix of Marxism and official nationalism (official/artificial nationalism) to "liberate Taiwan" and "overthrow the Kuomintang reactionaries", but the problem it could not face was that the early Chinese Communist Party According to the principle of "national self-determination" of the Comintern and long-term support for Taiwan's independence, Xie Xuehong, an important leader of the Communist Party of Taiwan, still insisted on "a high degree of Taiwan autonomy" even after he fled back to the mainland. The Taiwanese Communist Party, which was the earliest branch of the Communist Party of Japan, implemented the Comintern's "one country, one party" principle. Using the Marxist viewpoint, even if the reactionary and decadent Chiang Dynasty was overthrown, it still established a revolutionary and independent "Taiwan Social Republic". , or take the Soviet road to become a republic of the "Chinese Federal Republic of Soviets".

Therefore, after the reform and opening up and Taiwan’s democratization, the CCP quickly abandoned the Marxist proposition and completely adopted the imperial narrative of Greater China. origin. (The DPP government does not recognize the consensus.) Or according to Hu Jintao, anyone or any party in Taiwan, as long as you do not advocate Taiwan independence, as long as you agree with the 1992 consensus, can talk. The CCP understands very well that the PRC and the ROC are both empires without monarchy. As long as you agree with the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, there is the possibility of eventually being united by it, because the CCP is the only political force in reality that can maintain or even revive and expand the Chinese empire. The main enemy of the CCP has been transformed from the Chiang family to Taiwan nationalism/independence, and its narrative has also become a political theological discourse of Chinese imperialism, such as the descendants of Yan and Huang, family relatives, and betrayal of their ancestors.

Taiwan's second imagination : the anti-communist base imagination of counter-attacking the mainland and reviving the Republic of China. This kind of imagination was mainly advocated by Xiao Jiang in the 1980s, and many representatives of the democracy movement in the 1980s, such as Wang Bingzhang, held this view. Although this kind of imagination has been completely marginalized by the changes of the times, there is still a large market in many mainland and overseas Republic of China fans (such as Xin Haonian). This kind of imagination has some kind of mirror relationship with the first kind of imagination. For example, the slogan of some Republican factions "Expel Marxism-Leninism and restore China", its logic is almost the same as that of the CCP: the innocence of the Republic of China was defeated by some evil Western force, Polluted, but the Republican Party also verbally acknowledged that the Republic of China is the first democratic republic in Asia, but its narrative of the Chinese nation is highly consistent with the CCP: China (Chinese civilization) is innocent, and the problem is the Western forces: whether it is oppressing China The imperialist forces are still the so-called Marxist-Leninist cult.

Due to the fundamental change in the military power ratio between China and Taiwan in the past ten years, very few people openly advocate the recovery of the mainland by force, but an invisible theory of recovering the mainland has emerged, that is, a democratized Taiwan is obliged to help the mainland achieve democratization, A democratized China and Taiwan must be "peacefully reunified" (in whatever form) . This kind of argument probably accounts for the vast majority of China's democracy movement. Behind this argument, there is still the old myth of the same language, the same species, and the Han people. The biggest paradox of this argument is that the Kuomintang, which supports the one-China principle, has become an agent of the CCP in Taiwan, while the DPP, which defends Taiwan's democracy, is a Taiwan independence party. What the Liberation and the Republic of China factions do not understand is that Taiwan's democratization and Taiwan independence are actually two sides of the same coin. The Republic of China faction's democracy movement like Wang Bingzhang, on the one hand, supports the DPP to promote Taiwan's democratization, but on the other hand, it also advocates the Three Principles of the People, The dream of reunifying China is self-contradictory.

Taiwan's third imagination: Chinese orthodoxy with perverted Huayi is in Taiwan. This kind of imagination is very attractive to many overseas Chinese and even Westerners, and it is also very attractive to many Chinese tourists who are depoliticized. Its essence can be described in one sentence: Taiwan is a free China, and Taiwan retains traditional Chinese culture, which is why Taiwan has developed so well. The theory of "Hua-Yi Metamorphosis" originally came from Japanese and Korean Confucianism. Its essence is to not recognize that the Chinese mainland regime is the orthodox heir of China and Chinese civilization without giving up the concept of Hua-Yi in the Celestial Dynasty, and that he is the inheritor of the Tang and Han dynasties. Civilized "Real China". There are many manifestations of this discourse in Taiwan: For example, many mainlanders believe that Taiwanese are friendly to people and kindness only because they retain Confucian traditions. This argument has been refuted by Joseph Henrich (2019), ignoring interpersonal prosociality and impersonal prosociality The difference between the two is that in history, Taiwan was originally an island of sailing, business, and commerce. Taiwan has just abandoned the influence of Confucianism and moved towards an order based on universal rules. Some people think that the traditional Chinese characters in Taiwan are normal characters, so as to prove that the Chinese mainland, which is reformed in Chinese characters, is not an orthodox China. However, they do not know that the cultural imperialism policy of the Kuomintang authorities has brutally suppressed the living space of the Taiwanese language, and even a year after the so-called Restoration The complete ban on Japanese and Japanese has caused a generation of Taiwanese elites to lose their language, and Chinese characters were originally the imperial language that eliminated the “separation of language and language” from imperial dialects.

Another modern variant is the "free China" imagination, which of course does not take traditional Chinese culture as the only criterion for "orthodox China", but wants to use Taiwan to demonstrate that Chinese culture is compatible with the liberal democratic system, or that Taiwan is orthodox. Democratic China. However, if Chinese culture = Confucian culture, then why does no one think that the successful democratization of South Korea can prove that China can also democratize, why is South Korea not "free China"? Why Taiwan? What's more, Taiwan is a nation-state, while China is still a pre-modern empire. It can be seen that behind this imagination is still the inevitable Greater Chinaism and the Celestial order, which is incompatible with the liberal international order.

The fourth imagination of Taiwan: the imagination of Taiwan's "Chinese independence" in the Republic of China. The Republic of China=Taiwan, Penghu, Jinma, this kind of imagination avoids the future positioning of Taiwan. The relationship between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China is like the relationship between the Republic of Korea and the Korean People's Republic, but the actual rule of the Republic of China is only Taiwan, Penghu, Jinma. This is a realist "backdoor listing" argument, which is actually a way of maintaining the status quo.

The Republic of China will neither go to recover the mainland, nor will it actually recognize the "one China" principle, but it masks the more fundamental Taiwanese nationalism behind it, forming a strange "two China" theory that abandons reunification. This kind of imagination serves the psychology of many Taiwanese who want to maintain the status quo, and has its practical value. However, it is not a normative discourse in political philosophy after all. A last resort under the threat of survival is also a necessary step to build a consensus in Taiwan against CCP imperialism.

The Fifth Imagination of Taiwan: Wilsonism/Leninism. In the 1920s, with the end of World War I and the collapse of several empires, Lenin and Wilson affirmed the principle of national self-determination from a left-wing and liberal perspective, respectively, as a response to the disintegration of empires. Of course, Lenin's national self-determination does not include the national self-determination of the Russian Empire. Its essence is to restore the Russian Empire by means of the republics, which is a later story. At this time, Japan was in the illusion of Taisho democracy, and it was under this circumstance that Taiwanese nationalism arose, and its essence was to oppose the nationalist narrative that China and Japan promoted the world imperial system in the name of "Oriental Royalism".

This narrative of Taiwan nationalism does not argue from a factual point of view that "Taiwan has never belonged to China" or "Taiwan was originally an independent country", but argues from the perspective of why the Taiwanese nation should break away from the Eastern Empire and exist in As a forest of nations in the free world, the Taiwanese nation needs to move from a nation in itself to a nation for itself, and then strive to establish a nation-state that joins the liberal international order. This is tantamount to throwing a strategic nuclear weapon on various forms, including anti-communist Greater China imperialists and Confucian cosmopolitans. As a branch of the Communist Party of Japan, the Communist Party of Taiwan put forward the slogan of "Taiwan Nation, Taiwan Revolution, Taiwan Independence". Because Taiwanese nationalism has a distinct left-wing color, it opposes Confucian patriarchy and imperialism (whether it is Japan's Chaoke) The modern co-prosperity sphere is still China's great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation) has a highly integrated part, which is as uncomfortable as eating flies for the Chinese imperialists who advocate Confucianism. At the same time, the construction of the Taiwanese nation is different from the national independence movements of East Turkestan and Tibet in that it not only deconstructs the concept of the Chinese nation, but also deconstructs the concept of the Chinese and Han nationalities. In the face of Tibet and East Turkestan, Chinese imperialists often use "since ancient times" as the justification for their imperialism, while in the face of Taiwan, they even raise the big questions of "betraying their ancestors" and "forgetting their ancestors" The flag has become a "beast" under Confucian ethics and morality, and can carry out special military operations of "staying on the island without leaving people".

The legitimacy of Taiwanese nationalism actually disintegrates the legitimacy of China (whether PRC or ROC), which in the Taiwanese nationalist narrative is an "empire without monarchy", a "pre-modern celestial empire disguised as a nation-state", Taiwan's independence is not a division of the country, but the decolonization of the empire. The Chinese nation, the descendants of the Yellow Emperor and the Yellow Emperor are all concepts of imperialist mythology. This is also why the vast majority of the so-called "democracy activists" who are anti-Communist show their ferocity on the Taiwan issue, and why those "overseas Chinese" Zhou Wenwei who regard the unification of the Chinese Empire as their political religion will launch jihad against the Taiwanese.

In the final analysis, according to Wang Feiling, the unified Chinese order (actually the dream of a celestial imperialist world empire) is the "legitimate, superior, reasonable and only order" in the minds of the Chinese at home and abroad. It is necessary to wage a jihad against you for blaspheming the Prophet in front of the Islamic State terrorists.