On October 10, 2024, the people of Taiwan celebrated the 113th National Day of the Republic of China (ROC). Known affectionately as “Double Ten Day,” the holiday commemorates Sun Yat-sen’s founding of the world’s first Chinese democracy in 1911—toppling nearly 5,000 years of family dynasties.
In recent years, Taiwan has catapulted to the international stage, driven primarily by deteriorating relations with its much larger neighbor, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The PRC, which claims Taiwan as its 23rd province, has vowed to pursue national reunification by any means necessary, including military force. In May, Lai Ching-te took office four months after being elected president of the Republic of China. Even with a portrait of Sun Yat-sen—the Founding Father of Modern China—in the background, Lai’s election showed how much Taiwan’s politics have changed over the last half-century.
In the late 1940s, as the Communists rapidly seized control of the Chinese mainland, the ROC government—led by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces—withdrew to the island of Taiwan, where Japanese colonial rule had ended just a few years prior. By the time Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing on October 1, 1949, the Nationalists had reestablished their government in Taipei, Taiwan. Originally, the Nationalists viewed Taiwan to be simply a place of temporary exile as they sought to retake the Mainland from the Communists. For his entire life, Chiang believed firmly that the ROC could—and would—reestablish its national pride by invading the mainland.
Taking one look at modern tensions between Beijing and Taipei shows the irony of Chiang’s wish. Today, international analysts fear a military invasion of Taiwan by the PRC’s People’s Liberation Army—one that would decimate Taiwan’s economy, democracy and way of life.
Yet this inversion of threat did not happen overnight. After Chiang’s death in 1975, his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, became Taiwan’s next leader. Under the younger Chiang’s rule, the country began to slowly democratize—legalizing opposition political parties and realizing the promises of the Republic of China Constitution, whose guarantees of freedom of speech and expression had been ignored by the elder Chiang’s government. In 2000, Taiwan experienced its first transition of power to another political party. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)—long the nemesis of the Nationalists (KMT)—took power with the election of President Chen Shui-bian.
The ideological conflict between the KMT and DPP revolves around the very identity of the Republic of China. The KMT, whose founding predates the Chinese Civil War, believes in maintaining the Republic of China government, whereas the DPP’s party platform calls for the establishment of a new nation divorced from a Chinese identity—an oft-floated name is the “Republic of Taiwan.”
But this proposal is not nearly as innocuous as it sounds. More than 30 years ago, KMT leaders and PRC counterparts met to establish the “1992 Consensus,” the cross-strait agreement that there was one China and that Taiwan belonged to China, but that each side maintained its own interpretation of which China was legitimate. Consequently, the PRC has vowed to invade Taiwan if it declares its independence as a nation separate from the Republic of China, creating tricky political territory for the DPP.
On the other hand, the KMT’s longstanding grip on power in Taiwan is at serious risk. Polls show that fewer people than ever in Taiwan consider themselves to be only Chinese or both Taiwanese and Chinese. Nearly eight decades after Chiang’s retreat to Taiwan, many younger Taiwanese no longer feel connected to their Chinese roots, instead articulating a new national identity that threatens the relevancy of the “Republic of China” name on Taiwan.
Many of these questions defined the debates leading up to Taiwan’s presidential election in January. KMT candidate, New Taipei Mayor Hou Yu-ih, accused Lai, and the DPP, of destabilizing cross-strait relations with empty talk of “Taiwan independence.” Instead, Hou asserted that the Republic of China already was an independent country, with its own parliament, currency and—most importantly—way of life. A third candidate from the newly-created Taiwan People’s Party, former Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je, promised to seek a middle ground between the KMT and DPP but failed to gain enough support from moderates. With anti-DPP votes fractured between Hou and Ko, Lai won an unprecedented third consecutive term for the DPP.
Now, his—and Taiwan’s—task is far more difficult, and much less straightforward, than winning an election. It is now incumbent upon Taiwan to ensure that the Republic of China can continue to thrive in a volatile geopolitical landscape. Taiwan has bid farewell to most members of the generation that fought the Communists in the Chinese Civil War, and, unsurprisingly, its identity has evolved.
While celebrations rang out across public boulevards and private homes in Taiwan on October 10, an uneasy tug-of-war with its much larger neighbor looms on the horizon. Sun Yat-sen’s 20th-century confidence in democracy is worthy of admiration and promulgation, but those ideas are best used in practice, when Taiwan’s leadership defends the sovereignty of the Republic of China, the only Chinese-speaking democracy in the entire world.
