At the heart of Chiang Kai-shek’s vast memorial in Taipei, a giant bronze statue of the leader sits facing China. For the exiled Chinese Nationalist Party and its faithful who fled China’s civil war, Taiwan was a temporary home and China was the motherland.
Decades later, only 3% of people in Taiwan consider themselves primarily Chinese. But plenty of people don’t think of themselves as being fully Taiwanese, either. That ambiguity is being exploited by China’s Communist Party, which insists the island is part of China, and has threatened to take it by force. Without a concrete sense of what it means to be Taiwanese, how will people resist?
In a report that first aired on The Weekend Intelligence, Alice Su, The Economist’s senior China correspondent, visits the island’s tombs, memorials and streets in search of Taiwanese identity.
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