A dear friend we had not seen for some time invited us to attend a viewing of Invisible Nation at Stanford University on Thursday evening. It was a chance to visit with an old friend and pick up a light dinner promised by the organizers. By the time we got there, all the lunchboxes were taken. It was the first on a list of disappointments.
Invisible Nation is billed as a documentary on Taiwan and is beginning to be shown around the US. By traditional standards of journalism, a documentary film is supposed to inform and educate by presenting unadulterated facts and let the viewers come to their own conclusion. Invisible Nation makes a mockery of the term documentary. It is an unabashed adulation of Tsai Ing-wen and blanket endorsement of Taiwan as a model democracy.
The flaws of Invisible Nation are many, mostly through calculated omissions of history and personal information.
The film portrays Taiwan’s history beginning with the Dutch colonization of the island and claims that the only time one government controlled both mainland China and Taiwan was from 1945 to 1949. That government was the short reign of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) that reclaimed Taiwan after the end of World War II, and ended when he had to flee from the mainland to Taiwan.
This is misleading at best and n outright lie at worst.
Koxinga, liberator of Taiwan, not in the narrative
The film fails to mention Koxinga, aka Zheng Chenggong, the late Ming Dynasty leader who resisted the takeover of mainland China by the Manchus and retreated to Taiwan by evicting the Dutch from the island. Zheng’s grandson eventually surrendered to the Qing imperial court in Beijing. For centuries thereafter, Taiwan was part of China, until the Beijing government lost a sea war to Japan and Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895.
Invisible Nation also does not mention the Potsdam Declaration that stipulated the terms of Japan’s unconditional surrender in World War II, drafted by the Allies, in which Japan was to hand Taiwan back to China.
Throughout the war, United States was insistent on recognizing Taiwan as part of China. This recognition persisted when president Richard Nixon went to China in 1972 and was reaffirmed by Jimmy Carter and by every American president ever since.
The mockumentary did correctly attribute the actions of Lee Teng-hui for the political turn away from the heavy-handed rule of the Nationalist government. In 1988, Lee succeeded Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek who led the retreat from the mainland to Taiwan in 1949. The son took over in 1978 and began to liberalize and loosen the control of the island. He selected Lee to be his vice-president because Lee was a Taiwan native.
Chiang was probably unaware that Lee also went by his Japanese name, Iwasato Masao. In fact, Lee/Iwasato, a native speaker of Japanese, was known to confide to visiting dignitaries from Japan that his allegiance leaned more to Japan than to China.
In fact, his older brother was killed in action during World War II as a member of the Imperial Japanese Army, and his name is enshrined in the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo among other war dead, including some convicted war criminals.
After World War II, many Japanese remained in Taiwan. They took on Chinese surnames and merged into the local society. The question of divided loyalty and the influence of an estimated hundred thousand Japanese who stayed along with their descendants on Taiwan’s politics has not been studied.
Chen also overlooked
In the case of Lee, after he assumed the leadership of the Taiwan government, he gradually undermined and weakened the KMT organization, which that paved the way for Taiwan to elect its first president from the opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party, thus ending the KMT’s 55 years of continuous rule.
Yet somehow, the name of Chen Shui-bian that should have figured prominently in the documentary was not mentioned even once in Invisible Nation.
Chen not only became the first president from the DPP, he cleverly manipulated and divided the opposition and became the only president to win with less than 40% of the vote. He also became the first Taiwanese president to be immediately imprisoned for wanton corruption at the end of his term of office.
He was the kind of president who would give any democracy a bad name, and one can hardly blame the director of the documentary, Vanessa Hope, for leaving Chen out of her story.
Aside from being a blot on Taiwan’s modern history, Chen ordered a rewrite of schoolchildren’s history textbooks. Obliterated in the revised textbooks was any reference of Taiwan’s linkage to China’s history, culture and ethnic origin.
A generation of young Taiwanese grew up not knowing that their ancestors did not spring out of the ground but came across the Taiwan Strait from southern Fujian for many generations.
They had no knowledge that the Taiwan dialect sounds almost exactly the same as the Minnan dialect of southern Fujian. That if they had a chance to study Chinese history, they would know that as early as the Han Dynasty around 200 BCE, the mainland already knew about the island offshore.
Small wonder that the generation of young hotheads that spearheaded the Sunflower protest in 2014 screamed for freedom but did not appreciate Taiwan’s economic dependence on trade with the mainland. Every year, Taiwan’s trade surplus with the mainland more than offsets its entire trade deficit with the rest of the world. That is a consequence of Beijing’s deliberate policy to give Taiwan special preference.
The Sunflower protesters were not as violent as the Hong Kong protesters of 2019 but they nevertheless destroyed public property, invaded the parliament, and insulted publicly elected officials. All of which was recorded in the mockumentary. But since it was in the name of fighting for democracy, what’s the big deal of breaking a few laws along the way?
Of course, not all of Taiwan’s youth are lunkheads. The intelligent high achievers understand that their future lies with the fast-growing mainland economy. Many live on the mainland and are working for Taiwanese companies located in China. Some are even working for locally owned companies in China.
The Sunflower children may not care about the economy, jobs or a career. But the serious-minded young people do.
A progressive image of DPP
The film naturally features many remarks and speeches by Tsai Ing-wen, the current president of Taiwan. Other talking heads include her admirers and followers, even transgender cabinet ministers. The film brags that Taiwan was the first in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage and protect the rights of the LGBTQ – certainly, a progressive mindset that is even steps ahead of the US.
The film also includes a clip of former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s drop-in visit to Taiwan, against all advice but to the thrill of Tsai and the DPP. The most powerful woman in Washington meeting with Taiwan’s first female president – it could not have gotten any better than this.
Thank goodness, Invisible Nation did not include the video of Tsai bestowing a beauty-pageant sash on Pelosi. Also not included was any discussion on how Pelosi, having stepped on Beijing’s red line, greatly raised cross-Strait tensions and prompted threats of a hostile reaction from the People’s Liberation Army.
But there were a lot of folks the filmmakers could have interviewed but did not. They could have interviewed Taiwanese living and working on the mainland on their perspective of cross-Strait relations. They could have interviewed the vast majority of the people on Taiwan who prefer the status quo, neither for unification nor independence.
They could have asked people on the street what they thought of relations with Uncle Sam: Will the US really come to fight alongside the troops of Taiwan? How do they feel about Washington forcing the Tsai government to buy old outdated weapons?
How do they feel about being forced to buy tainted pork from American farmers? What do they think of President Joe Biden’s strong-arming Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company into moving its advanced chip fabs to Arizona, and then run into unforeseen labor problems, cost overruns, and construction delays? Has Biden shown any respect for Taiwan’s “sovereignty”?
Taiwan is an “invisible nation” for a simple reason. Taiwan is not a nation at all, but a province of China. Simple as that.
George Koo retired from a global advisory services firm where he advised clients on their China strategies and business operations. Educated at MIT, Stevens Institute and Santa Clara University, he is the founder and former managing director of International Strategic Alliances. He is currently a board member of Freschfield’s, a novel green building platform.