The Invisible Armada

2024/11/24

The separatist escalation of the current Taiwanese leaders converges with the marked shift of the Western powers and their allies and subordinates in the region, which now designate China as an adversary and systemic competitor, and against which they are lining up in battle order. In the same way that the DPP leaders have openly and demonstratively rejected the doctrine according to which, from the Taiwanese point of view, the modus vivendi with China was founded (a doctrine whose terms had been set notably under the successive presidencies of Ma Ying-jiu - 2008-2016), in the same way, the powers aligned with the United States have distinctly inflected their Taiwanese policy – not only are they multiplying incursions in the China Sea by invoking, in the purest colonial and imperial style, “freedom of the seas”, but they are increasingly openly supporting, diplomatically and militarily, the efforts of Taiwanese leaders to promote the independence-sovereignty of the island. They spare no effort to make nebulous the very notion of “one China” to which they have never ceased to adhere in principle, including when they established diplomatic relations with the PRC – but without openly rejecting this dogma. They are playing a double game here, which is increasingly evident as they reassess the importance of the Taiwan issue, not in itself, but always from the point of view of relations between the West and China, in the perspective of a now strategic antagonism with China. The notion of “one China” was the compass on which relations between the Western powers in China and, consequently, with Taiwan were regulated. These same powers, today, are sparing no effort to disrupt this compass and Taiwan is one of the key players in the undermining of what constituted the foundation of the consensus and the status quo that has been perpetuated, year after year, since China entered the international community.

By contrast, it should be noted that mainland China has never varied in its fundamental doctrine with regard to Taiwan - an integral part of Chinese sovereignty - while respecting the rules governing the status quo regarding Taiwan - each time tensions or crises have arisen, it is because a red line had been crossed, at the initiative of the Taiwanese or US leaders - or rather both together - the latest major incident being Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022.

It will be recalled here that, on a doctrinal and principled level, the notion of one China is what the leaders of the PRC and those of the ROC had in common as long as the KMT was in power in Taiwan. Each gave different interpretations of it, but, both parties acknowledging these differences, remained in agreement on the substance – one China.

Since the pro-independence leaders currently in power in Taiwan do not have the political means to make a clean break with this doctrine, a break that would expose them to retaliatory measures with unpredictable consequences from China, they merely raise clouds of dust by relentlessly incriminating the "Ma doctrine". But, in practice, they would be quite incapable of telling us how, in the future, the signifier "Taiwan" could or should be articulated on the signifier "China". What kind of China is Taiwan destined for, in their perspective - or, if not, nothing more that associates the signifier "Taiwan" with the signifier "China"?1These fundamental questions are resolutely beyond the reach of these opportunistic leaders whose only concern is, fundamentally, to see the island strengthened and confirmed in its status as a protectorate of the United States and a confetti of the West floating in the China Sea. For the rest, they know like everyone else that Taiwan, against all odds, is an integral part of the Chinese world .

A perfect clue for this fateful condition can be mentioned here: the most radical, die-hard, often fanatic wing of the independence movement, the "dark greens" remains resolutely in the minority. The made from scratch nationalism anti-Chinese (continental) chauvinism that drive this movement feed all sorts of phantasmagoria and escapes into the imagination: we have to resolutely cut the Gordian knot that firmly ties Taiwan, as a human, cultural, geographical, political entity, to the signifier "China", we must reject the ROC designation and we emancipate ourselves from the past that goes with it, we adopt the name "Taiwan" alone, equip ourselves with a brand new constitution, we reject all the emblems and other symbols that tie the island to the Chinese past, we ought to formally proclaim the independence of the island, we are no longer Chinese at all, we are Austronesian, we will no longer have anything to do with China, moreover we will all speak English fluently in a few years, we will become entirely an advanced base of the Western world in the China Sea, facing barbarian China, etc. …
In short, it's all a frenzy around the inconsistent reverie of an island entity as radically "de-sinicized" as possible, these dreamers see Taiwan as the Israel of East Asia, or else, in an equally martial version, a second Ukraine facing totalitarian expansionism, the fortress of the free world facing Chinese autocracy...

But all this agitation is fundamentally political cosmetics in search of effects: it is proclaimed in all tones that Taiwan is not subordinate to mainland China, everyone has, in the upper echelons, to adopt an American-style first name, to botch up a more or less plagiarized PhD in the US, an indispensable accessory of a path leading to positions of responsibility. The Taiwanese ruling cast invests without any reservation but in a very selective way in the latest societal cry in Western mode (marriage for all - but not abolition of the death penalty, God forbid... huge and colorful gay parades combined with the most conventional and hypocritical puritanism as far as family order ans disorder – adultery – is concerned...). But it would still take a little more for the cultural, linguistic, historical thresholds that separate the island from the West to be erased and for, with a wave of a magic wand, Taiwan to be transformed into a showcase (in truth a bastion) of the Western world at the maritime gates of China.

The more rigorous and eager the alignment of the Taiwanese ruling elites (in need of an Asian NATO) with the United States becomes, the more the Taiwanese elites are drawn into the spiral of unimaginative mimicry, and the more they are pathetic in their efforts to whiteface themselves . They resemble, in reverse, those white Hollywood actors who, until the 1960s and beyond, made themselves up rather grotesquely as Asian characters – as “yellow” East Asians of all brands.

The more things move towards the elevation of Taiwan to the rank of centerpiece of the Western strategy of rollback of Chinese power in East Asia and the Pacific, the more the Taiwanese leaders' bluster stricking up the powerful words of independence and sovereignty appears as the false nose of the island's alignment with the Western bloc's redoubled hegemonic ambitions. In this general configuration, Taiwan tends, rather than becoming a fully sovereign entity, to become again our China , the China of the West as Hong Kong was the China of the British, not only a Western base in the China Sea, but a bridgehead with a view to overthrowing the opposing regime, the heir against all odds to the Chinese Revolution, on the mainland.

This is one of the reasons why the current Taiwanese leaders, however determined they may be for independence, do not consider giving up the ROC designation in the current conditions - it is because, against all odds, something of the persistent phantasmagoria inherited from Chang still persists in a corner of their brains - that of a reconquest of the continent, either as a result of a major crisis of the regime established on the mainland, or as a consequence of a confrontation between China and the United States (and its allies) in which the latter would have gained the upper hand. In such conditions, failing to having ever been able to take revenge by their own forces on the victors of the Chinese civil war, the Taiwanese power elites would see themselves playing the qualified suppletives and subordinates (they speak Chinese) of the new masters of the game – the “native infantry” and the Indian scouts of the West, in a context where, after the long Maoist and post-Maoist parenthesis, China would once again be put under the thumb of the Western powers and Japan.

Taiwanese independentist leaders are careful not to follow through with the maximizer formula that Taiwan is in no way subordinate to China, which would logically lead them to draw the conclusion that Taiwan is not (or no longer) China at all, and to draw the necessary conclusions. This is because they remain absolutely captive to a general configuration in which Taiwan persists in being the China of the United States and the West, that is to say, historically, this Chinese confetti that survived the civil war, preserved by the West, from the consequences of a rather unpredictable chain of circumstances. Against all odds, Taiwan persists in being the West's replacement China, spare part China.

The opportunistic and hypocritical double game of the current leaders of the island consists of feeding simultaneously from two troughs: that of independence, that of the nationalist escalation fueled by the "anti-Chinese" agitation on the one hand, and, on the other, that of the China of replacement, just in case... you never know, the future is unpredictable...

These contortions inevitably cast their shadow on the past – the narratives of the island’s history, of that of modern China, of the power games that led to the current situation in Taiwan, which it is fashionable in the Western world to affirm that it is placed under the sign of the most extreme complexity, must constantly be readjusted - rewritten The emphasis placed on the complexities, paradoxes and entanglements of Taiwan’s history is mainly aimed today at spreading a smokescreen over elements of reality, particularly historical, which, until recently, appeared firmly established. It is first and foremost a question of making blurred, indistinct a whole set of facts from the past that contradict the “narrative” to which the Taiwanese independence leaders and their Western supporters are trying to give authority.

This rhetoric of “complexity” is familiar to us, in the West: it is the one that is constantly used when it comes to casting a veil of modesty over the violations of international law committed by the State of Israel when it colonized the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem, not to mention the destruction of Gaza. The invocation of the complexities of History, of the intertwining of cultures, of the short-circuits between past and present are the perpetual recourse of the supporters of an ever more uninhibited, more violent, more devouring colonization. The right of conquest put back in the saddle by Israeli supremacism is wrapped in the folds of archaeology, mobilizing the mythified past in the service of an openly predatory policy consisting of driving the Palestinians from their land, in making them a residual people. Now, if there is one thing that is not "complicated", it is this massive and brutal fact of colonization, the way in which the Israeli colonial state assumes an unlimited right of conquest over Palestinian land.

The same way, a whole Western sophistry deployed by the Taiwanese independence activists (unless it is the other way around) is being activated today with a view to establishing that Taiwan "is not China", has never been China, and especially not the China whose destiny changed in 1949. What needs to be erased from the magic slate of official history is the massive fact which constitutes the key to the intelligibility of the process leading to the dispute between the two parties in conflict over the status of Taiwan. Here, again, nothing complex, but a fact as massive as it is distinct: when defeated Japan left Taiwan, which had been its colony, torn from the Chinese empire for fifty years, explicitly renouncing the exercise of its sovereignty over the island, the United States, victors of the Pacific War, masters of the game in East and South Asia, quite naturally worked towards the reestablishment on the island of the sovereignty of the Republic of China, the legitimate successor of the Qing Empire. It was indeed the United States military authorities who, under the control of the political authority of their country, brought about the installation on the island of the Chinese administration from the continent and which, without transition, took over from the Japanese colonial administration 2.

This massive, indisputable fact, notably attested by Western witnesses present on the island at that time, is obviously worth all the treaties and diplomatic documents 3: it is that, for the United States administration of the time, the return of Taiwan to China was self-evident, which also amounted to describing the colonization of the island by Japan as abusive, devoid of legal basis – colonization as occupation. The "complications", palinodes and quibbling that surfaced later do not weigh against this massive fact, especially since the restitution of Taiwan to China was in line with subsequent commitments made by the Allies during the Second World War - notably the Cairo Conference (November 1943)4.

This is what is primarily being erased from the records, in the context of the war of narratives that is becoming more acute between Taiwanese independence fighters relayed by Western communication devices on the one hand, and China on the other. In this configuration, it is confirmed that the remodeling or erasure of the most massive facts of the past, far from being the monopoly of totalitarian powers, is a recourse that "democratic" propaganda makes the most uninhibited use of. Historical revisionism in its most expeditious form is here at the helm when it comes to asserting the now strategic statement - Taiwan is not China.

But then, how is it that the island was returned to China by the United States, in the position of executor of the verdicts of History, without discussion and even before the last Japanese soldier had turned on his heels? As always in matters of sovereignty, the facts of recognition play a crucial role here: the restitution of the island to China under the control of the United States constitutes full recognition of the fact that it fell under Chinese sovereignty – the Republic of China at the time; but today, Chinese sovereignty recognized by the international community is embodied by the People's Republic of China. It is on this reasoning of elementary simplicity that the assertion is based, from the point of view of historical continuity, that Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese sovereignty. The argument that it was for the benefit of the Republic of China proclaimed in 1911 and not of the People's Republic of China founded in 1949 that this restitution was carried out is of no weight here: sovereignties, in their continuity, are not soluble in political regimes 5. In the eyes of the international community, it is the People's Republic of China that embodies the continuity of Chinese sovereignty in its legitimate form. Sovereignty is the continuity of a power – and the Chinese civil war has decided that the continuity of the power associated with the signifier “China” is embodied by the Chinese Communist Party, with the “nationalists” of the KMT falling on the side of the defeated power. Moreover, the Taiwanese independence activists, in their naive inconsistency, are the first to recognize the validity of this reasoning when they persist in claiming the sovereignty of the ROC over the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands and islets located in the South China Sea, invoking historical rights, even though the ROC has never exercised its sovereignty over these micro-territories... When they put forward their historical rights over the Diaoyu, they reason exactly as the Chinese leaders do about Taiwan without being even aware of that...

The (narrative, rhetorical) passage in force by which Taiwanese independence leaders are trying to pass off the island's de facto independence as full and complete sovereignty is of the same kind as the incessant efforts deployed by Israeli supremacist leaders to erase this massive and incontestable fact: the occupied territories are occupied territories, neither the West Bank nor Gaza are Israel, they are Palestinian territories. In both cases, the step to be taken is distinct: the one that allows the transformation of the fait accompli, the state of affairs (the occupation of the West Bank in one case, the de facto independence of Taiwan in the other) into a state of law. But, precisely, this is the Achilles heel of the fait accompli – it remains a pure state of affairs in the absence of its recognition by the international community, that is to say, in truth, the peoples of the world.

This is also the constitutive illusion on which the fait accompli is based, that is to say a policy based exclusively on force – the balance of power on the ground is not enough to transform the fact into law – the law implies the intervention of a third party – the one who recognizes it or, on the contrary, challenges or denies its legitimacy. This is what distinguishes a simple fait accompli from a foundation : the foundation (or rather what will result not only from a proclamation or a declaration but from the recognition (validation) of it by third parties) is the condition for the existence of full and complete sovereignty.

It should be noted in this regard that the creation of the Taiwanese state entity is a trompe-l'oeil foundation - in fact, it is not a new sovereignty that was declared and created ex nihilo, in a gesture of pure creation; it is on the contrary a fiction (in the contentious sense of the term) that took shape: that of Chinese sovereignty in exile but continuing to embody the institutional legitimacy of this sovereignty - the Republic of China outside the walls of mainland China. The Taiwanese independence activists, whatever they may say, are above all the heirs of this ambiguous foundation - they are indeed the vicars of the de facto state entity created by Chang Kai.shek and long governed by the KMT, and which lost, in the 1970s-80s, the capacity to pass itself off as "China" in the eyes of the world.

But this legacy is and remains marked by lack, more than ever: these leaders can hope less than ever to regain their lost position – coinciding with the signifier "China" -, but on the other hand, they cannot separate themselves from it entirely - they must maintain themselves between two waters as both a green island separated from the continent and constantly opposed to it, but China nonetheless , at the same time. To do this, they must maintain a permanent confusion between fait accompli and the rule of law, contrary to everything they never cease to put forward, in unison with their Western mentors, when it comes to Ukraine - in a world undergoing democratic globalization, fait accomplis (Putin's war against Ukraine) would be more than ever to be proscribed.

In the case of Taiwan, it is not the right of conquest that is at issue, but a fundamentally Chinese configuration (but which the Western bloc, its allies and the Taiwanese leaders are keen to internationalize to the extreme) blocked for more than three quarters of a century on a fait accompli. It is a pure illusion to imagine that with time, the fait accompli that drags on naturally becomes a state of law. This is not the case and, here too, the comparison with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is illuminating: seven decades later, the wrong suffered by the Palestinians during the creation of the State of Israel, wrong today redoubled by the occupation of the West Bank and the destruction of Gaza remains more contentious and scandalous than ever . Both the political separation of Taiwan from the mainland (the "secession") and the colonization of the West Bank are part of these historical disputes that are not soluble on the long run, in the passage of time. This is, in terms of the philosophy of History, of philosophy of the present, the first of the considerations from which we must start in order to take the full measure of what is at stake in the current tensions (both global and local) that are currently being tied around Taiwan.

The tall tales that are being spread in high doses and in a continuous stream around what Taiwan would be, an isolated, decontextualized entity, in truth have precisely this function: to erase or to make elusive the wrong suffered that the secession of Taiwan represents for China, as a power and collective human entity. To obstruct the problematization of the dispute (différend) that results from it and which cannot be the subject of any arrangement.

It would be exhausting to try to draw up an inventory of all the historical and cultural phantasmagoria that feed the perpetual effort produced by the independence movement to make the new clothes of the island, its recent and ancient past – to manufacture its true identity. Here, imagination is at its wit's end, sophisms and paralogisms are at the helm. Thus, pell-mell: Taiwan is not the Chinese world, it is the vast Austronesian archipelago that extends to New Zealand and Madagascar - if you look hard enough, every Taiwanese 100% Han has an aboriginal ancestor, even if only symbolic. The religions practiced on the island are 100% Taiwanese, nothing in common with China, as is the vernacular language. In this context, the reinvention of the cultural foundations of the island does not simply come, as in the production of the symbolic imaginary of a nation and the consensual narratives that accompany it, from the aggregation of facts and myths (Benedict Anderson). It passes through the flight into the imaginary and the massive denial of the most solidly established elements of reality. Or, in another register, that of historical paralogisms: in truth, we are told, the Manchu Qing dynasty which reigned over the Chinese Empire from the 17th to the 20th century being foreign to the Han ethnic group , its reign was an endless imposture. Therefore, Taiwan, although under Qing rule for centuries, was never really an integral part of China... A poor sophism that is not even worth the shrug of the shoulders that greets it - when in the 19th century the Western powers undertook to impose all sorts of leonine treaties on China, it was indeed on the Qing dynasty that they imposed their conditions, without worrying in the least about the Manchu "imposture" - as long as they signed the treaties, that concessions and financial "reparations" multiplied, that plundering flourished, what mattered then the old quarrel of legitimacy opposing the Qing to the Ming...

Let us not return here to the null and void arguments according to which, on the one hand, Japan never formally ceded Taiwan to China (as if, as a former colonial power, moreover defeated at the end of the Second World War, it had any right to do so6) or again, Taiwan was never an integral part of the People's Republic of China (an argument based on the confusion between sovereign entity and political regime).

But now, in the storytelling promoted by the new independence leader, a new motive emerges: why is the Chinese regime so obstinately demanding the return of Taiwan (ceded to Japan in 1895) and not the Far Eastern territories ceded a few decades earlier to Russia under treaties as dubious as that of Shimonoseki? A big effort here by the brain trust that is active around the new presidency with a view to renewing the inventory of historical arguments intended to argue in favor of the destiny of Taiwan's independence... Failing to hit home, the argument stinks of sweat: the cession by a weakened Chinese empire of the territories invoked is part of a immemorial history - that of the endless disputes around the uncertain delimitation of the Russian and Chinese empires in this immense geographical area that extends from Mongolia to Korea and Manchuria. The long duration history of empires and their difficult demarcations in this part of Asia 7.

The treaty imposed by Japan on China after a lost war and from which the cession of Taiwan resulted is part of another historical sequence – that of a colonial history for which the declining Chinese empire has paid the price. The Treaty of Shimonoseki was of the same kind as those that the Western powers imposed on China at the same time, in the context of the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion – a treaty of imperialist brigandage. From the point of view of human geography, there is no connection between Taiwan, a Chinese land, and the territories ceded to Russia by China in the mid-19th century, which are themselves spaces populated by a mosaic of very diverse peoples.

The attempt to amalgamate two deeply heterogeneous historical sequences operates here against this backdrop: the stubborn and systematic denial of the colonial fact (Taiwan's post-colonial status, the colonial dimension of its history) in favor of the opportunistic alliance with the neo-nationalist Japanese governing elites, openly revisionist and still so closely subordinate to the United States. From a decolonial point of view, the war of narratives raging between the Chinese Communist Party and Taiwanese independence activists is shed new light here: Taiwanese independence storytelling has as its absolute and primary condition the most radical denial possible of the way in which Japanese colonization shaped the destiny of the island during the first half of the 20th century. Now, this colonial dimension is fundamental in all respects, it was the crucible in particular in which was formed in Taiwan this spirit of subalternity which, even today, governs the relationship of the elites and for a part of the population to the "powerful master" of the moment. In the general context of the history of modern colonization and decolonization, Taiwan presents this characteristic: on the one hand, the island was colonized durably not by a European or white power but by Japan, a neighboring expansionist power whose ambition was to annex the island and include it in Japanese space and not only to exploit its resource.

On the other hand, Taiwan has completely missed the general history of decolonization - given the historical conditions in which it passed from one guardianship to another - from that of Japan to that of mainland China - no decolonization movements, no popular struggles for independence against the colonial master, the destiny of the island, during this crucial moment which, for all the neighboring countries of Southeast Asia was that of the struggle for independence often obtained by force. Taiwan has completely missed this general movement which, from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s or even 80s led to the dismantling of the great colonial empires and the independence of the former colonies.

The Sonderweg of the former Japanese colony is quite impressive here and it explains this massive fact: that, of all the former colonies not only in the region but on all the continents where modern colonies have existed, Taiwan is undoubtedly the country where the anti-colonial sentiment, the consciousness of the Colony, the collective memory (the collective memory of the Colony) of having been a colony, the transmission from generation to generation of the sensitivity to the colonial condition, the post-colonial, anti-colonial, decolonial sentiment... are so evanescent. In the last decades, the retrospective anti-KMT dictatorship is what has replaced and taken the place of a shared anticolonial “consciousness” or collective memory.

It is certainly the conditions in which the colonization or quasi-colonization of the island by the (not very enlightened, to say the least) administration from the mainland took over from Japanese colonization that contributed not a little to sending the memory of the latter back into limbo. But it is also and probably first and foremost the effect of the capture (kidnapping) of Taiwan by the West embarked in East Asia in its campaign against international communism, during the Cold War - Taiwan was torn from its colonial history to become a Western base, an advanced post of the global anti-communist police in the most hostile of environments (in the immediate vicinity of China, then of the former French Indochina, both of which passed into the hands of local communist parties). The direct and solid link that connected Taiwan to its colonial history (to the Japanese colonization which was very systematic and, in more than one way, contributed to providing the island with a modern administration and infrastructure) was broken twice: with the sudden departure of the Japanese colonizer and its replacement by the continental quasi-colonizer, first, with the mobilization and seizure of Taiwan for the successive anti-communist crusades led by the United States in this region of the world.

In more ways than one, these ruptures and bifurcations have created an amnesiac country, or at least in a state of lasting mental confusion regarding everything concerning its relationship to the past, not immemorial, but modern and contemporary. Taiwan is a former colony whose identity was forged in the crucible of colonization and which is amputated from any colonial, anti-colonial, post-colonial consciousness – to say nothing of decolonial. What is radically absent from the heads and hearts of Taiwan is the evidence of the dispute inherited from colonization and which never fades, which feeds, whatever the meanders of subsequent history, an infinite, inexhaustible dispute, sometimes dormant, sometimes revived according to the variable state of relations between the former colonizer and the former colony – the Franco-Algerian case is exemplary here 8.

There is no need to even talk about the "trauma" of colonization for the relationship between the former colonizer and the former colonized to appear to be placed under this sign of subalternity - it is the characteristic and so to speak universal feature of modern colonization - it is placed interminably under the regime of the past-present, it is par excellence spectral, it returns incessantly, on whatever occasion, in the present. No need to go looking for Algeria, here - the relationship between mainland China and Japan remains, today, still and placed under this regime - the wrong suffered is never extinguished, the accounts never settled, the embers of the dispute (différend) smoulder under the ashes of the passing of time.

But in Taiwan, it is as if this highly flammable product of modern history, in its most contentious dimension - colonization - had evaporated. Japan, for the average Taiwanese conscience today, is par excellence the friendly neighbor, the safest protector after the United States, a cultural model, an economic partner, the country in the region where people love to go on vacation. It is not that the colonial period is ignored, it is worse than that: it is folklorized and made patrimony in the most positive sense of the word, it becomes an element of heritage, the opportunity for tourist dives into the past - once the poison of colonization and the colonial institution has evaporated.

It is in absolute contrast that the question of Taiwan is, for the continental regime, in unison here with the greater part of the population of China, inseparable from the redress of the wrong inflicted by the century of colonial humiliations and massacres of violence, inflicted on China by both the Western powers and Japan. The claim of Taiwan as an integral part of Chinese sovereignty is not separate, in this perspective, from the reparation due to China for the sum of the predatory enterprises of which it was the object for a century - that of the agony of the Empire, of the expeditions and the pillages, of the abandonments of sovereignty imposed by the West, that of the Japanese invasion and the horrors which accompanied it.

From the perspective of Chinese leaders, Taiwan's return to the fold of Chinese sovereignty is not only the logical conclusion of the Chinese civil war, it is also the end point of a colonial history that has inflicted so much damage on it - an end point without which this sequence remains unfinished. The rhetorical escalation that is given free rein both in the discourse of Taiwanese elites and in Western propaganda about Chinese expansionism aims to make this dimension of the war present in the narratives (and the announced tests of strength) about Taiwan undetectable: what is at stake regarding the status of the island is also the end of colonial history, before the rise of China today - the settlement of accounts, of all accounts of this period when the West exercised without measure, in East Asia, what it considered to be its right of conquest.

The comparison with Hong Kong is indeed necessary here, but not at all in the way that pro-independence propaganda would have it – after Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Chinese ogre being insatiable, etc. It is not a question of the will to power, of the appetite for conquest that is at stake here, but rather of the rightdoing of a history distorted and ravaged by colonization. The annexation and then colonization of Taiwan does not constitute a historical fact that can be separated from colonial violence as it was exercised to the detriment of China. The wrongs caused by colonization are doomed to be repaired to the end and if this is not the case, it is colonial history that continues endlessly.

(to be continued)

1 “Returning the Chineseness to China”, as a Taipei Times reader recently suggested (19/10/2024)

2 On the denial of this firmly established fact and the pathetic rhetorical contortions to which it gives rise, see for example: “Retrocession Say, reflection day”, Taipei Times editorial , 10/26/2024.

3 See George Kerr's memoir, Formosa Betrayed , Camphor Press, 2018.

4 The constant game of the “rewritters” of the past consists here in maintaining confusion between the inconsistencies and intricacies of US foreign policy in East Asia and in particular towards China and alleged “complexities” of history. This is why restoring the intelligibility of historial processes is, in this context, a vital matter.

5 As Gérard Bras usefully reminds us: "The temporary holder of sovereignty is distinguished from its permanent holder" - hence the classical doctrine of the two bodies of the king - the physical body of a king, which is mortal, is distinguished from the mystical body of the king, which is perpetual. This fundamental distinction is maintained in post-monarchical constitutions. Chinese sovereignty is not soluble in the variability of the regimes that govern China. Sovereignty is placed under the regime of continuity, unaffected by the discontinuity of regimes (constitutions) - Gérard Bras: Faire peuples , Kimé, 2024.

6 Japan was not a sovereign state after the defeat, it sovereignty having been restored in 1952, this in a more than ambiguous way – as long as US military bases will exist on Japan's territory (Okinawa...), it will remain, in some regard, an occupied country), the existence of these bases being the legacy of the defeat – not resulting, as such, of a free agreement between two sovereign powers.

7 See for example on this point; Jan Potocki, Dans le Caucase et en Chine 1791-1808 , Phébus, 1991.

8 I would like to mention here the exception that constitutes, in this newspaper devoted body and soul to independentist recantations that is Taipei Times, the weekly historical column written by Han Cheung who, regularly, provides irrefutable examples of the discrimination suffered by the islanders during the Japanese colonization. In general as in detail, their status is different and inferior to that of the Japanese living on the island. Colonial “order” then reigns in Taiwan, as in Western colonies of the region.