The Invisible Armada

2024/11/25

The Sonderweg of Taiwan must be considered from the point of view of the Chinese Revolution. This Sonderweg is itself entirely included, enveloped in the vagaries of this revolution, it is, under the status of exception, one of its facets or one of its chapters. We must start from the idea that the Chinese Revolution is a universal, in the sense that, through it and through it alone, the Chinese peasant accesses the human condition, just as the Russian Revolution had made the proletarian a universal subject of modern History 1. Conversely, the Chinese Revolution is a universal in the sense that it abolishes the time of landlords and warlords, improperly defined as "feudalism" by Marxists - the comparison with European feudalism is here much too approximate for the exportation of the concept to the Chinese world to really support the journey.

The history of Taiwan is included in that of the Chinese Revolution, deployed in its horizon of universality, precisely insofar as it occupies the place of exception – as “included exclusion”. Taiwan freezes, after the retreat to the island of Chiang Kai- shek, in a posture which is that of the conservatory of what the Chinese Revolution has abolished – immemorial China understood less as that of the emperors than as that of the ruling elites prospering as parasites on the body of the people – peasants in their overwhelming majority. Taiwan becomes the conservatory of the Chinese counter-revolution, Chiang being the last of the warlords, promptly recycled by the Americans in the fight against international communism. It is not only the bigwigs of the KMT state, Chiang's successors, who become the legatees of this cumbersome heritage, it is just as much the current independence leaders of the island - what formats them is not so much the codex of liberal democracy as the spirit of the Chinese counter-revolution whose lasting mode of institution on the island was dictatorship and bureaucracy - democracy is their gala dress, basically, they are oligarchs, just like their predecessors.

These exemplary proxies of the United States (the island's independentists leaders) are the heirs, in this sense, of those warlords who, at the time of the civil war and the Japanese invasion of China, owed everything to their various foreign protectors - in terms of weapons and military equipment, in particular. They are at the forefront of the contemporary "conservative revolution", Trump version or Biden version, it makes little difference, as it follows on from the counter-revolution and the anti-communist crusade (from the 1930s to the 1960s) and then Reagan's Restoration.

The storytelling promoted today by both Taiwanese independence activists and their Western supporters is based on a frenzied decontextualization of the Taiwanese question. The mantras around the "Chinese threat" are intended to focus the attention of opinions, Taiwanese and Western, on a fallacious freeze frame - the supposed imminent threat of an invasion of the island by the Chinese armed forces – in the absence of any contextual analysis replacing the conflict in a historical perspective. The excessive presentism practiced here serves the purpose of creating a feeling of perpetual state of siege, hostile to any effort of critical reflection on what this conflict is the point of condensation - the part of a whole.

However, the dispute over Taiwan is located at the meeting point of two historical sequences or sets whose scope is not only decisive on a regional scale (Asia-Pacific), but globally : the decolonization that began after the Second World War on the one hand, and the Chinese Revolution on the other – two global sets or events that are of universal scope, in their singular forms. Taiwan is the textbook case of failed decolonization, a country (and a population) on which the full burden of absent decolonization still weighs heavily today – the island passed from one regime of subordination to another, without transition, after the defeat of Japan. It is in this sense, in a completely negative way, that the history of Taiwan, after the departure of the Japanese, fully belongs to that of decolonization.

In the same way, the history of Taiwan, after 1949, continues to belong to that of the Chinese Revolution of which it is the reverse side, the new status of the island is indeed an effect of the destiny of the Chinese Revolution, in a negative form once again. The history of Taiwan since the end of Japanese colonization is, in this sense, the microcosm of two missed appointments with History – the island, its population, its elites, its political and economic leaders missed two major sequences that shaped world History after 1945. Taiwan remained on the margins (or worse: opposed, adverse) to these major events; hence the self-centered provincialism of its recent political history (a perpetual 2Clochemerle ) and the low density of the historical experience shared by its inhabitants and its elites – among other things, the absence of any common reference to a founding event, a revolution, a constituent moment. Taiwan has remained on the sidelines of the great emancipatory currents of post-World War II history, in the position of a mental colony of the United States and, more generally, of the West. The void (as emphatic as pathetic) cult of "democracy" is what has replaced, in a country where a strong colonial mark persists, the movements turned towards emancipation. Hence this paradox: when people speak today of independence in Taiwan, they do not have in their sights the past and present dependence on the former colonial powers that is maintained more than ever, but mainland China.

Now, the characteristic of both decolonization and the Chinese Revolution, as of any event of universal scope3 is to continue in the present, well beyond what is confined in the dimension of chronologies. These two sequences are not finished, the destiny of the Chinese Revolution persists in being realized in the present confrontation between the new Chinese power and the Western hegemonic bloc that was established after the defeat of the Axis. Similarly, the legacy of colonization continues to be felt throughout the region - the Philippines, for example, is a country that has never strictly speaking emerged from colonialism, the long crisis in Hong Kong is essentially the result of a last gasp of British (Western) imperial power in China, Okinawa indefinitely prolongs colonial history fact in East Asia, etc.

The dispute over Taiwan today is the most exposed manifestation of the permanence or rather “becoming” of these two great historical sequences. Around the Taiwan issue, the imperial ambitions of the United States and the West in East Asia are awakening and relaunching. Taiwan is not a neo-colony, but it is indeed, and more and more openly, a US and Western protectorate in the region. By the same token, it is the fate of the Chinese Revolution that is returning to the center of the game - more and more voices are being heard, among Western ruling circles, in favor of an offensive attitude against China, the fall of the communist regime (resulting from the Chinese Revolution) being perceived as the ultimate end of the confrontations in sight. However, the expected collapse of the Chinese regime is, in this perspective, equal to the cancellation, the erasure from the records of History of the Chinese Revolution - in the same way that the fall of the Soviet regime sounded the death knell for the Russian Revolution.

The United States and the West kept Taiwan as an umbrella for a rainy day at a time when the Chinese leaders were busy with the negotiations for their recognition by the international community, their entry into the UN and the Security Council. Compared to these global issues, in a context where they were facing vital problems in domestic politics, and in view of the balance of power at the time with their Western partners, the question of Taiwan then appeared relatively subsidiary in the eyes of Mao and Chou En-lai (who was the main architect of the normalization of relations with the Western powers4). It is in the context of the new Cold War, in a configuration where China is more and more openly designated as the number 1 enemy, that Taiwan turns out to be no longer a subsidiary question but a time bomb. It is as if, during German reunification, the West and the leaders of the FRG had agreed to grant Gorbachev and the leaders of the SED, as a consolation prize, that little Thuringia would remain an independent entity, East oriented, a living museum of the defunct GDR... This was not the case, of course, Reagan and his allies swept away everything, triumphant, vengeful, and the GDR was annexed to the FRG, without scruple and without further ado - a proper annexation , on the conditions of which the population of the GDR, a sovereign state, member of the UN, recognized by the international community, in marked contrast to Taiwan, was carefully not consulted. Those who, both in Taiwan and in the Western world, are shouting themselves hoarse denouncing Beijing's annexationist tendencies regarding Taiwan, have forgotten all about the expeditious absorption of the GDR by the FRG, this exemplary Anschluss conducted at a brisk pace. But, of course, the FRG is part of the camp of freedom and liberal democracy, which makes all the difference...

In the context of the exacerbation of tensions between the United States, supported by the entire Western bloc, and China, the former are now striving to transform the fait accompli or the Taiwanese state of affairs into a state of law, a fact of law, in a surreptitious and oblique manner, without having to go through the stage of a formal, public and declared recognition, which would constitute a casus belli with China. But the accumulation of facts and gestures of recognition, both practical and symbolic, cannot suffice to bridge the gap between the factual and the legitimate 5. The very notion of a gradual and progressive recognition, as irresistible as it is imperceptible, until the tipping point between the de facto and de jure , this notion is as unrealistic and inconsistent as that of the progressive conquest of power by the worker's movement, as endlessly cherished by the theorists of classical, social-democratic reformism in a certain 20th century that is now completely over.

The formal, solemn, public character of the recognition of sovereignty is not, here, a cosmetic element but an integral part of it. It is precisely in this that the interactions and games of recognition, in international relations, are radically distinguished from faits accomplis. This is because the recognition that leads to legitimacy introduces contractual elements into the relationship between the parties involved. However, the games of recognition have their grammar and they create all sorts of commitments and constraints. The most massive and obvious of these commitments and the impediments that they entail is that the recognition of the Chinese sovereignty excludes that of any Taiwanese sovereignty . This obstacle is inescapable. Western leaders, led by the United States, have indeed changed their doctrine, while tirelessly repeating the opposite: the unreserved support they give to the island's independentist leaders who have been in power for more than eight years has the obvious objective of imposing on the international scene the existence of a second China or a China-not-China-but-nevertheless-China rallied to the West and constituting an advanced base facing mainland China, which has become a systemic adversary and main enemy. The entire strategy of gradually increasing the support that Westerners provide to Taiwan, in all areas, from ever more massive military aid to soft power in all its ranges, tends towards this goal. This is indeed a war of attrition being waged against China, rather than a direct confrontation, a major crisis with unpredictable outcomes, the prelude of which would be a formal recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty6.

This is an elastic strategy, all hypotheses are on the table, including that of a military incident leading to a direct confrontation, punctual or lasting, growing crescendo ; but rather, if it proves possible, a war of attrition which they hope will in the long run lead Beijing to give up its ambitions over Taiwan.

It should be noted, however, that in the strategy of the United States, this is less a volte-face than a bifurcation, a partial turn: Taiwan has always been kept in reserve, in the event that relations with Beijing deteriorated, even at a time when the young Chinese market was seen as an El Dorado by the United States and the big firms of all Western countries; at a time, too, when Taiwanese businessmen, small and large, rushed in tight ranks to do lucrative business on the continent before repatriating the capital thus amassed on the backs of the Chinese proletariat. It is not strictly speaking a volte-face, but the hypothesis of a complementarity, even if sometimes conflicting, of the respective interests of a China that had entered the path of capitalist-type development and of Western economies in want for new markets, has gradually faded before that of a coming confrontation.

It is in the context of this change of perspective, not openly declared but increasingly evident, that the question of Taiwan must be understood. From now on, the United States and the Western powers support the independence bluster of the Taiwanese leaders as they support the de facto annexation of the West Bank by the State of Israel – in a rather implicit manner, by trying to save appearances, but with growing insistence – by actively endorsing the policy of fait accompli.

We can clearly see here that Taiwan, its status, its destiny, has never been a question in itself. The only question around which the picture of "the coming war" in East Asia and the Pacific takes shape is that of China and the challenges that its rise poses to the hegemonic structure in place in the region. Taiwan can be a detonator in the event of a generalized crisis breaking out in the region, as was the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo at the beginning of the First World War, in a context where the "Balkan crisis" was ultimately only a false front: the real matrix of the conflict was elsewhere - the multiplication of disputes between the main European powers, the crisis of the European Empires.

The reorientation of the Western powers' strategic perspective towards China has as its correlate the rewriting of the past and, even more, the destruction of historical intelligibility - the knowledge and understanding of the chains of circumstances, decisions and actions that led to the present situation. When it signed the Treaty of San Francisco (1951), Japan confirmed that it renounced its sovereignty over Taiwan and the Pescadores. This treaty thus ratified the restitution of Taiwan to China, as it took place upon the withdrawal of Japanese troops and administration following its capitulation to the United States. The argument that Japan, in San Francisco, did not explicitly stipulate that it was returning Taiwan to China is a pure quibble that Taiwanese independence activists never cease to put forward - this restitution did indeed take place in practice and the Treaty of San Francisco merely gave it a legal form. Moreover, Japan, as a defeated power and a fallen colonial power, a sovereignty not yet reestablished, that is placed under the tutorship of the US was in no position, in the circumstances of the San Francisco Conference, to decide who should have sovereignty over Taiwan.

There is therefore an irrevocable chain of events, from Japan's withdrawal from Taiwan to the island's return to Chinese sovereignty; this chain of events took place, the day after Japan's surrender, under the tutorship of the victorious power, the United States, and no voice was raised in the international community to challenge its validity. On the occasion of the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco, in which some fifty States participated, constituting the "international community", this restitution process was validated and thus became, as such, de jure . What weakens the legitimacy of this treaty is not the fact that Japan's abandonment of its claims to Taiwan and its dependencies did not explicitly take the form of restitution to China (but this had already taken place), but rather that certain powers were not represented when it was signed, notably the USSR and China.

Actually, the ROC has signed in Taipei, on 28/04/1952, a separate treaty with Japan by which the latter confirms the restitution of Taiwan and the Pescadores to China. The signing of this treaty completes and consolidates the previous chains of events, the Cairo conference at which the leaders of the allied powers gathered in the Egyptian capital in November 1943 guaranteed to Chang Kai-shek, present at this conference, that the Chinese territories annexed by Japan would be returned to China first; then the San Francisco Conference (April-June 1945), at which the Charter of the United Nations was signed and China was guaranteed a seat on the Security Council. But curiously, the Treaty of Taipei is constantly erased from the records in the narrative of the past leading to the current disputed situation of Taiwan, as it is promoted by the independentist party. This is not without reason: it attests that the process of Japan's recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan and its dependencies has indeed been fully completed. However, for the international community, Chinese sovereignty today coincides with the PRC. And it is precisely on this reef that the stubborn efforts of the United States and its allies and clients to give legal force to the de facto independence of Taiwan have just stricken - hence the recent visit, in all respects spectral, of the outgoing Taiwanese president to Europe. This is because, according to the newspapers, it is a question of not "angering China" - but this eclectic turn of phrase conceals a much more massive reality - in the eyes of the main European powers, Taiwan is not a sovereignty, a sovereign state.

Since the situation changed in relations between China and the bloc welded to the United States, Western storytelling has deployed an excessive effort to make these chains of intelligibility (which are nevertheless very solid and riveted to the ground of perfectly attested historical facts) evanescent. Here the most uninhibited revisionism is given free rein, entirely arranged around the key statement "Taiwan has never belonged to the People's Republic of China" or, in short, "Taiwan has never belonged to China". And it is here that the substitutions of words play a primary role - independence for sovereignty, in order to erase this massive fact: historically, Taiwan is and remains attached to Chinese sovereignty, a fact recognized as obvious by the international community including the Western powers and resulting from this other equally massively shared obviousness: there can be only one Chinese sovereignty.

Until recently, a clear line of separation was drawn between, on the one hand, what is established in principle and stated in simple terms - there is only one Chinese sovereignty and this includes Taiwan - and, on the other, the complexities relating to the state of affairs on the ground, resulting from the aftermath of the Chinese civil war, hardened by the Cold War, etc. Until recently, it was a matter of combining the ritually reaffirmed attachment to the principles defining Chinese sovereignty with the political realism dictating the perpetuation of the status quo according to which Taiwan remained an entity practically independent of the mainland on condition that it avoided any separatist proclamations. It is this rule of the game on which the perpetuation of the status quo in the Taiwan Strait was based that must now be revoked by resorting to of all sorts of quibbles, sophisms, by a constant effort to rewrite and erase the past. We can clearly see here that the commonplace according to which it is totalitarian regimes that persist in rewriting the past as they please in application of the rule "you never know what yesterday will bring (be made of)" is fallacious. We have here the perfect example of a situation in which the realism of power, the affirmation of the absolute preeminence of the strategic interests of the moment - to block the rise of Chinese power in the region - open up unlimited credit in terms of rewriting the past and substituting tailor-made storytelling for the best-attested facts. Therefore: Treaty of Taipei (April 8, 1952) - which Treaty of Taipei ?

If we approach questions of sovereignty from a decolonial perspective, things become more complicated. On the one hand, in the former colonized countries, independence was heavily burdened by the colonial legacy – that of empires and often arbitrary divisions of colonized spaces, giving rise to the formation of states whose configuration often did violence to local populations and cultures. On the other hand, the post-colonial sovereignties that were established then often remained under neo-colonial tutelage exercised over them by the former colonial powers – for example, in the era of French colonization, Françafrique. In this general context, the battle for the sovereignty of the former colonies is not limited to obtaining independence and having it recognized by the former colonial powers and the international community. It is a permanent fight against the false pretenses of independence, for the affirmation of a true sovereignty against everything which, in the post-colonial world, contributes to the formation of new links of dependency – of the neo-colonial kind, precisely.

In this general context, China's sovereignty constitutes a global issue and not just a regional one. Insofar as it follows on from the Chinese revolution and civil war, it has the value of attesting to the change of era (epoch) that occurred after the Second World War - not the triumph of democracies and the free world, but the irreversibility of decolonization, of the end of the colonial era, of the Colony as a general entity, of the colonial relationship between the West and the countries of the "Third World". The recognition of China's sovereignty by the former colonial and imperial powers is, in its time, worth their recognition of the irrevocable end of the colonial era and of the Colony as a token and symbol of the supremacy of Western, white, civilization. Taiwan, in this perspective, is a witness mound, a vestige of the era whose recognition of Chinese sovereignty sanctions the revocation, in principle irreversible as well as irrevocable.

But actually what the episode of the "democratic" convulsions in and about Hong Kong shows (against all expectations) is that in this matter, for the West, the irreversible of that which, in one way or another, upsets it or opposes it, does not exist . Since the fall of the USSR, symbolically bringing with it the historical dismissal of the Russian Revolution, all hopes of rewriting and rearranging the past are permitted. But this is more than a correction or rewriting of narratives - it is a re-scripting of the past consisting here of erasing a major event of History in its very quality as an event - a revolution as a universal event, a revolution inseparable from its pact with emancipation, against all odds. It is like in Hollywood, but in a retroactive mode: the end of the film does not please the producer, so another one is remade, less pessimistic, more cheerful, with a happy ending ; Here, it would rather be the beginning that needs to be erased: the Chinese revolution as the beginning of a new, indelible decolonial history. In a world where decolonization is woven from so many pretenses, tragedies, misunderstandings and tricks, the linking of civil war on the Chinese revolution and then on the proclamation of a sovereignty directly drawing its legitimacy from this revolution have a value of universal exemplarity. In the perspective of a confrontation between the Western bloc and China, leading by a spiral of circumstances to the fall of the Chinese regime, it is this whole section of History that would collapse and could be rewritten on the conditions of the victors: the teratological reading of the Chinese Revolution would become the gospel truth, Chinese history on the continent since 1949 a series of crimes and monstrosities placed under the sign of totalitarianism, XXL crimes, genocide, megalomania, tyranny, autocracy, etc.

The reorientation of Western strategy towards China has become quite evident since the long democratic "emotion" (commotion, agitation) in Hong Kong. The irreversibility of the political institution resulting from the Chinese Revolution is no longer a dogma - on the contrary, anything that is likely to undermine the legitimacy and solidity of this historical construction is a godsent opportunity for questioning the legitimacy of the Chinese regime and the CCP. We saw clearly, during the Hong Kong crisis, how the signifier "democracy" could be deployed in order to make illegible the current relevance, in the present, of the colonial wrong inflicted by the Western powers on China7. The "democratic" agitation (pro-Western, anti-Chinese) in Hong Kong was then, throughout this crisis fanned, both by Western chancelleries and by the media, the veil cast on what persists, in the present, of the colonial différend - this in disregard of the retrocession agreements signed by Great Britain in 1996, agreements endorsed by the international community.

Taiwan is another pawn in this same chess game: what is at stake in the ongoing confrontation over the status of the island fundamentally concerns Chinese sovereignty and the legitimacy of the continental regime, much more than the island itself. With regard to Taiwan, both of them are insidiously but insistently called into question by the Western powers. The name of democracy is fully involved in this long-term, large-scale attempt at destabilization. This is what is at stake and in no way the dispositions and aspirations of the island's inhabitants. All the polls conducted today among the Taiwanese population concerning the status of the island and therefore their own status are biased by the fact that they are placed under the sign of emergency, of the "Chinese threat" and formulated in terms which imply that independence in the form of a United States protectorate is the only desirable option.

From a decolonial perspective, things are clear: if there was a time when the question of self-determination could have been imposed, it was at the immediate end of the half-century of Japanese colonization – after all, the previous administration of the island by the Qing had colonial traits too. It was in 1945-46, when the same question was being asked of peoples throughout the region, in Southeast Asia (that of their right to self-determination) that the inhabitants of the island had to be questioned – what do you want? To fly on your own wings or to return to the fold of China? In this context, Taiwan could have joined the great current of decolonization that swept away, in the region, entire sections of the European empires, French, English, Dutch, Portuguese... But everything happened the other way around: Taiwan, instead of converging towards the great current of decolonization, was immediately drawn into the strategic games of the post-war period and, after being reassigned by authority to China, became a choice piece in the apparatus of the fight against communism in East and South Asia, a US platform during the Korean and then Vietnam wars, an advanced base against communist China. The Kuomintang and the authoritarian regime of Chang subservient to the United States ruined all the chances for Taiwan to engage in the vast decolonial movement, to link up with the non-aligned movement and, as such, to experience autonomy. What establishes the continuity between Chang's authoritarian regime and the American-style democratic regime that succeeded it, today under the leadership of the independence movement, is subalternity. The DPP in power, despite all its bluster and anti-KMT agitation, has only dug this furrow of subordination deeper, irreversibly.

During the Cold War, Taiwan not only aligned itself with the "free world", it gave itself a "Western" destiny and locked itself into the role of protectorate and second fiddle of the United States. The fact that this process has accelerated considerably since the DPP came to power has created the retrospective illusion that the KMT, after having long tried to maintain the equal balance between Beijing and Washington, had become the hostage, even more - the fifth column - of the Chinese Communist Party on the island. But, with all these excesses and phantasmagoria aroused by the anti-Chinese hysteria and the climate of witch hunts today fanned by the independentist party, it remains nonetheless firmly established that it was under Chang and his successors that this "Western" destiny of Taiwan was forged, which currently locks the power elites ever more tightly into forms of mimicry and clientelism that are ever more predictable.

Taiwan is less than ever an ally of the United States, but rather its tributary and client. The protection that the United States grants to the island is a noose around the necks of its ruling elites and its population – hence the wind of moral panic that blew across the island when Trump, incidentally, declared that this protection could not be unconditional and that, in any case, it should have its price – the more you are “protected”, the more dependent you are and, when your “protectors” are as unpredictable as a Trump, at the mercy of their whims and about-faces. Every morning, the Taipei Times runs its front page on the arms deliveries and diplomatic support that the United States grants to government separatists, as if this daily manna would purely and simply rely on divine Providence. But a fit of temper from Trump is enough to expose the fragility of this construction in full light.

On the other hand, what Taiwan's growing and almost exclusive dependence on military equipment supplied by the United States (with all that goes with it in terms of logistics, military intelligence, etc.) reminds us of how indistinct the border that separates a protectorate from a neo-colony can be. In the event of a sudden rise in tensions between China and the United States, Taiwan will be exposed to the direct risk of its open Okinawaization - US military bases, storage of nuclear weapons on the island, nuclear submarines in its real territorial waters, etc.

The flight into the imagination of the island's ruling elites is obvious here: the more the forms of dependence on the American "big brother" increase, the more the motif of sovereignty becomes the master signifier of the power's propaganda. Pure auto-suggestion, pure magical conduct8.

It is in these troubled circumstances that we are witnessing the emergence, in Taiwan and in circles focused on the destiny of the island, of a thoroughly entertaining character of the time: the decolonial clown . What characterizes this motley character is the combination of the most rigorous alignment with the policy of the United States, the most unconditional support for the most extreme independentist positions, the most rabid Sinophobia on the one hand and, on the other, the mobilization of the decolonial rhetoric in force – the highlighting of the discrimination suffered by migrant workers, the promotion of “minor” (aboriginal) cultures, the plea for diversity in a context where the aging Taiwanese society is in growing need of new fresh blood, etc.

The decolonial clown is on all fronts: he flies to the rescue of migrants, he does not hesitate to raise his voice to point out the racist (supremacist) prejudices of the governing elites in Taiwan towards the subalterns, he denounces the prejudices and abuses suffered by subordinates from Southeast Asia, he campaigns for the "green" economy - and, at the same time, he is the most stubborn and fervent supporter of Taiwan's subalternity vis-à-vis the United States, he speaks out categorically as a white master (of Anglo-Saxon origin, generally) on the destiny of the island, he rules imperiously - Never again Kuomintang in power! The decolonial clown then feels himself to have the soul of a proconsul, a neo-imperial soul when it comes to deciding what should become of the island. He is as well the master of narratives: his imagination is limitless when it comes to rewriting the island's past, its relationship to the continent, and to the Chinese world in general. The decolonial clown who likes to highlight his academic qualities and qualifications here ranks alongside the most intransigent realpolitikers like John Foster Dulles - the truth about the past is what serves political interests in the present. The decolonial clown, in Taiwan today, is the most agile and noisy promoter of the new US-sponsored Co-Prosperity Sphere in East Asia and the China Sea. He stands guard on the lookout path of the western Fort Apache, the advanced post of civilization facing China's immomorial barbarism. One of his aliases: Michael Turton, to be read every Monday morning in Taipei Times, full page.

We must work tirelessly to recontextualize the Taiwanese issue in this new configuration where the West today makes the confrontation with China a vital issue, that is to say a question of survival for the regional and global hegemony system that was put in place after the Second World War. Recontextualization is what aims to reestablish the rights of the real in the face of the mantras on "the Chinese threat", such as they have replaced, in the independence discourse and Western propaganda, any critical, genealogical and analytical approach, taking into account the irreducibility of the perspectives that confront each other on the question of Taiwan. Decontextualization calls for the nagging repetition of the same refrains and the same slogans, in the hope that in the long run they will gain the status of reality. But on the contrary, what constantly tends to "complicate" the Taiwanese issue is precisely the fact that the island happens to be a point of condensation and a hotspot of the confrontation between the worlds, where the factors of friction are the densest. If there is an issue that requires a perspectivist approach, as opposed to a unilateralist approach, it is that of Taiwan. The adoption of a resolutely perspectivist approach is the first condition for a decolonization of the narratives on Taiwan - so that the full measure of the intertwining of conflicting interests can be taken, which requires that the historical, geopolitical and cultural depth of field on these factors of division and discord be restored.

But the perspectivist approach is above all summoned by the very form of the conflict - it is this which must be the subject of in-depth elaboration. The first feature of the quarrel, as it is currently frozen, is that it is located beyond the classic form of the dispute – in the dispute, there is an exchange of arguments, the dispute is a lively conversation placed under the sign of agonism. From now on, concerning Taiwan, there is no more dispute, no more conversation, therefore no more space for negotiations, no more room for diplomacy, in its current sense – nothing but speeches hardened into propaganda and which bounce off each other. The conflicting protagonists agree on nothing, and in particular not on the terms of the dispute, it is the time of the différend (Jean-François Lyotard) in its most classic form ; no authority is able to intervene with a view to arbitrating or moderating this conflict where it is no longer interpretations which collide but closed speeches, withdrawn into themselves. The time of the différend is when there is “nothing left to discuss”.

It is as if only force could now decide.

And it will.

1 But the gendered dimension of this universal must also be underlined – the Chinese Revolution certainly does not "liberate" women, but at least it undermines the foundations of their condition as an immemorial oppressed condition as eternal “minors”.

2 Clochemerle : a novel by Gabriel Chevalier (1934), a colourful picture of a village in Beaujolais and its divisions. The word has entered everyday language, in French, evoking a closed world undermined by its quarrels, its rumours, its "little stories"...

3 The Chinese Revolution can be considered as an exemplum par excellence, that is, an event in which the universality of a singularity is exposed – the Chinese peasant gains access to humanity in a way that makes him an example for the colonized, post-colonized, and neo-colonized on all continents. In this condition, he is the substitute for the damned of the earth, the peasant masses for the most part. He is this universal singularity much more than the Parisian sans-culotte or the Russian proletarian who remain separated from the mass of the damned of the earth by the dividing line between human species (races). In this respect, in the general picture of modern revolutions, he is closer to the Haitian rebel slave than to the European revolutionaries.

4 Chen Jian: Zhou En-lai, a Life, Harvard University Press, 2024.

5 Proof of this was provided again very recently with the European tour undertaken by former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen (October 2024), during which she just met underlings in Prague and Brussels – not a word in Le Monde about her brief spell in Paris...

6 One could argue that de facto independance is set exactly half-way between, on the one hand, sovereignty based not only on actual power but as well on its recognition (legitimization) by third parts and, on the other, authority exercized illegally on a given territory by an armed body as a consequence of a secession, a civil war, a guerrilla warfare, etc. As a consequence of a lost war against the PRC, the ROC might, in the eyes of vast segments of the international community, become something like that: its governement of the ROC in exile (in the US) having become and illegal entity, “representing” nothing but themselves and its “freedom fighters” hunted in the mountains and forests of the island being partisans in the sense of Carl Schmitt - “bandits” devoid of any legal protection according to the jus belli – outlaws, stricly speaking.

7 The nonsensical show par excellence, a neo-colonial version of Monty Python: Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, the pallid ghost of the Empire's lost grandeur teaching lessons of/in democracy to the world on the occasion of Hog Kong's convulsions...

8 As a rule and in all its extension, in time as in diversity, Taiwanese institutional politics have a strong affinity with fantasy, they are swathed in fantasmagorias. Until recently, the official map of the ROC included Tibet, Mongolia (inner and outer), Xinjiang – the lost Empire in all its extension. Presently, the deep Greens see themselves as an integral part of an imaginary maritime people whose outlandish kingdom extends from Taiwan to Madagascar. Sleepwalkers staggering along the Holzwege of contemporary history...