The political left is (potentially) a force to counter right-wing politics, resist nationalist tendencies, and help coordinate social movements that fight against capitalism. But recently, it has proven too weak or too divided to do so successfully. The left has been unable to use the last few years’ continuous social eruptions—strike waves, mass demonstrations, or, more generally, movements against the effects of the multiple crises on working and living conditions—to its advantage.
In particular, the wars in Ukraine/Russia as well as Palestine/Israel have exposed this weakness within the political left, which could not combine a consistent antiwar position with a strictly antinationalist and anti-imperialist stand against the capitalist, nationalist, and racist forces pushing these wars.
Just off the east coast of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with a population of 23.5 million, Taiwan could pose the next challenge to the left. This challenge might prove all the sharper because of the possible military escalation around the island, which would likely involve the direct confrontation between two competing world powers: the United States and the PRC. Is the left up to this challenge? Given the predominant analysis of the situation in Taiwan, it seems unlikely. As in the cases of Ukraine/Russia and Palestine/Israel, the left has not formulated a consistent attack on the reactionary, capitalist, and imperialist forces involved.
While many leftists have not taken a clear position on the Taiwan conflict, the predominant debate on this issue is divided between two positions that support one of two capitalist-imperialist sides (some of them because they consider it the lesser evil). Leftists holding an orthodox position support the regime of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which sees Taiwan as a renegade province of the PRC and threatens to take Taiwan by force. Other leftists adopting a reformist perspective argue for saving Taiwan’s “model democracy” from the PRC’s threat—if necessary, with the support of the US military. The latter has threatened to intervene in case of an attack because it fears losing its strategic domination in the Western Pacific.1How different parts of the global left discuss Taiwan also depends on the locally dominant positions in the left on the PRC. These are, again, shaped by ideological differences as well as personal and organizational (or even financial) connections to the CCP and its allies. A detailed discussion of these differences and how they shape leftist positioning towards the conflict around Taiwan exceeds the scope of this article. Thus, this reformist leftism, like positions further to the political center and right, supports US imperial interventionism.
This article questions these two prevalent leftist framings. Both are based on different interpretations of the geopolitical conflict between the ruling classes in the United States and in the PRC. Ultimately, they both end up supporting conflicting bourgeois nationalisms that increase the risk of war. In contrast to this implicit nationalism, the article proposes to integrate analysis of the history of anticolonialism and anticapitalist struggle in Taiwan. This enables us to overcome the nationalist and geopolitical framings. Doing so allows us to refocus left-wing attention on social struggles in Taiwan, support social movements attempting to push for a profound transformation from below, and hopefully prevent military escalation in the geopolitical conflict.2The author of this article is not from Taiwan but has investigated the social, political, and economic situation in the PRC for more than twenty years and recently spent more than two years in Taiwan participating in research on the situation and struggles of Indonesian migrant workers and engaging in discussions with Taiwanese activists and leftists from different political currents. Some of the author’s articles on the situation in Taiwan are listed at https://nqch.org/tag/taiwan.
In order to refocus left-wing attention in this way, the article includes information about the major historical processes that shaped Taiwan’s racialized capitalism, providing a primer that everyone on the left concerned with Taiwan should know (at the minimum). It starts with the history of colonialisms in Taiwan that began with an orchestrated settler colonialism, the expropriation of land, and the suppression on the Indigenous people; it continues with looking at the establishment of capitalist relations and different models of accumulation that have shaped the interests of Taiwan’s capital class; it describes the history of racialization and the current racist migration regime as a major column of Taiwan’s capitalism today; and it then follows the shaping of conflicting political factions of the ruling class that represent Taiwan’s capitalist interests. The last section discusses the geopolitical conflict around Taiwan, the changing ways the governments in the United States and the PRC have dealt with the island in the past decades, and aspects that speak for and against a possible military escalation.3These are central issues for an understanding of Taiwan’s history. Other topics deserve similar scrutiny, though, such as the continued patriarchal rule in Taiwan and the ecological devastation produced by capitalism on the island. This prepares the concluding part that argues for a reframing of the geopolitical focus towards an antinationalist and antiwar position as well as the support of social struggles and left-wing movements against the capitalisms on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
The Series of Colonizations
Taiwan’s legacies of colonization, racialization, and exploitation reach as far back as the seventeenth century. The island’s colonial history debunks the CCP’s claim (supported by the orthodox leftist camp) that “Taiwan has been an inalienable part of China’s sacred territory since ancient times.” It shows the dark roots of the forms of racialization that have characterized Taiwan’s different colonial and capitalist regimes until today (which is, in turn, mostly ignored by the reformist leftist camp). This colonial history exposes the violence toward Taiwan’s Indigenous population and its anticolonial struggles that still resonate today. In other words, the European colonizations starting in the seventeenth century set off the development of enclosures, land theft, plantation economies, and racialized labor that laid the ground for successive Chinese and Japanese colonizations and, eventually, the formation of industrial capitalism.
First Colonial Enclosures
Taiwan was almost exclusively inhabited by an Austronesian population until the early seventeenth century. By that time, colonial powers began seeing the island as a useful post on global trade routes. Dutch colonizers set up a trade post in 1624 and subsequently brought rural workers from Southern China to the island to work on farms and serve as soldiers.4On the course of the Dutch, the Spanish, and the first Chinese colonization in Taiwan, see Andrade’s How Taiwan Became Chinese. Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese. Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Under Dutch colonial rule and against frequent Indigenous resistance, these Chinese farmers and rural workers took a role as settler colonists and helped to displace the Indigenous and use their land for the production of rice, sugarcane, and other export crops5Hirano et al., “Vanishing natives and Taiwan’s settler-colonial unconsciousness,” Critical Asian Studies 50, no. 2 (2018): 198, https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1443019.
The following decades saw several changes of power on the island. In 1642, Dutch troops pushed out Spanish colonial forces, who had operated their own trade post since 1626. In the 1660s, the Dutch colonizers were themselves pushed out by Chinese troops aligned to the Ming dynasty, and, in 1683, these Ming forces lost against Qing troops. China’s Qing dynasty formally annexed Taiwan a year later.
In the late seventeenth and during the eighteenth century, the Qing colonizers brought in more Chinese and Hakka farmers from China’s south. Others came illegally, escaping poor conditions back home. The Chinese settlers became the majority population on the island and claimed ever more land from the Indigenous for agricultural use in the western plains. Some Indigenous groups were assimilated and Sinicized in the process, others were pushed further into the mountain range on the island’s east.6Hirano et al., “Vanishing natives,” 199–200. Like under Dutch colonizers, Chinese rural workers toiled on the farms and plantations and produced crops for export, now mainly to the Chinese mainland.
Japanese Colonial Industrialization
In 1895, Qing troops lost the Sino-Japanese war, which was mainly about rule over the Korean peninsula, and Taiwan was handed to Japan. In the first decades of their rule, the Japanese colonizers invested in the expansion and modernization of Taiwan’s agriculture, mining, and transport infrastructure for the export of goods to Japan. At the same time, the Japanese colonial troops gained control over the whole island by suppressing the persistent Indigenous resistance and upheavals, and establishing a separate administrative rule over Indigenous areas.7On Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan’s Indigenous people see Barclay’s Outcasts of Empire. Paul D. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).
In the 1930s and 1940s, efforts of industrialization and the expansion of infrastructure such as ports, railways, and power stations were intensified. These efforts served the preparation and waging of Japan’s expansionist military campaigns in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. From 1937 to 1945, Taiwan’s Japanese colonizers started a Japanization program—the so-called kominkan movement—that included cultural assimilation by imposing Japanese religion, language, and names as well as the recruitment of Chinese and Indigenous men for the Japanese Imperial Army.8Chou Wan-yao, “The Kominka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interpretations,” in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, ed. by Peter Duus, Ramon A. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 40–68.
Second Chinese Colonial Rule
During the Cairo Conference in 1943, the alliance against Germany and Japan in World War II (represented by US resident Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Churchill) decided to hand control over Taiwan to the rulers of the Republic of China (the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek) after the war ended. Based on this decision, in 1945, the Kuomintang (KMT) took over administration of the island. On the Chinese mainland, the KMT’s civil war against the CCP and its Red Army began to escalate.
The people in Taiwan were not asked whether they wanted to be part of the Republic of China or ruled by the KMT. Many Taiwanese, having just been liberated from Japan’s colonial rule, sensed cultural differences with KMT administrators and troops and detested the KMT’s racist paternalism. They felt that they were again ruled by an outside colonial power.
Taiwanese nationalism and demands for Taiwan’s self-determination had already emerged in the 1920s in the face of Japanese colonial rule and the later attempts of assimilation or Japanization. This nationalism included left-wing and anti-imperialist stances.9This will be further discussed below in the section “Democratization and Division.” For an extended discussion see Belogurova’s “The Civic World of International Communism.” Anna Belogurova, “The Civic World of International Communism: Taiwanese communists and the Comintern (1921–1931),” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (2012):1602–1632, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41683039. Suppressed by the Japanese rulers at the time, it resurfaced after 1945 and culminated in the anticolonial uprising in late February 1947. Thousands of Taiwanese took to the streets, some arming themselves and fighting against KMT troops. Their demands included an end to the KMT’s corruption, theft, and violence and the participation of Taiwanese in the administration.10Uprising and crackdown are called 228 in Taiwan, hinting at their beginning on February 28. On the uprising see chapter X, section F of Su’s Taiwan’s 400 Year History. Su Beng, Taiwan’s 400 Year History, Anniversary Edition (Taipei: SMC Publishing, 2023 [1986]). The KMT leadership brought in military enforcements to violently suppress the uprising and secure its control over the island.
Taiwanese investments in the PRC, welcomed by the CCP regime, are part of the close economic ties across the Taiwan Strait and show the connection of both the exploitation of workers and of workers’ struggles in Taiwan and the PRC against capitalist conditions. Both leftist camps, the reformist and the orthodox, mostly dismiss that connection.
In 1949, the KMT lost the civil war on the Chinese mainland against the CCP which subsequently declared the foundation of the PRC in October that year. The government of what was the Republic of China, KMT-leader Chiang Kai-shek, and around 1.2 million soldiers, administrative staff, and their families fled to Taiwan that had a population of seven million at that time. In the same year, the KMT declared a state of emergency in Taiwan that would not be lifted until 1987. It governed with authoritarian means and suppressed social and political opposition brutally in this period, called the white terror. During this time, the KMT maintained its goal of one day regaining power over the whole of China.
Capitalism and Crisis
Taiwan’s capitalist rise after World War II was based on the successful accumulation model of contract manufacturing for the global market. Workers’ demands and rising wages plunged the model into crisis in the 1980s.Taiwan’s capital reacted with the relocation of production to the PRC and Southeast Asia. This marked Taiwan’s transition into a subimperial player—a fact largely ignored by the leftist reformist camp, which supports Taiwan’s “model democracy.” Meanwhile, Taiwanese investments in the PRC, welcomed by the CCP regime, are part of the close economic ties across the Taiwan Strait and show the connection of both the exploitation of workers and of workers’ struggles in Taiwan and the PRC against capitalist conditions. Both leftist camps, the reformist and the orthodox, mostly dismiss that connection.
From Import-substitution to Export Industries
After the Korean War had broken out in 1950, Taiwan became a front state in the Cold War between the capitalist “West” and the socialist “East.” The US government began to militarily and financially support the KMT in Taiwan, which used this support to increase its defense of the island and push further industrialization in the form of import substitution. It carried out a land reform that released labor power for the new and expanded factories. Many rural small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) and small businesses were set up that served as suppliers for the larger state-owned and private companies.11On Taiwan’s land reform and its effects, see Kim and Wang’s “Land Reform in Taiwan.” Oliver W. Kim, and Wang Jen-Kuan, “Land Reform in Taiwan, 1950–1961: Effects on Agriculture and Structural Change,” preprint, submitted October 16, 2024, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4951831.
In the 1960s, the KMT government set the groundwork for an export-oriented manufacturing sector. Foreign companies (from the United States, Japan, and other countries) and domestic firms invested in factories in special economic zones (SEZ) in Taiwan and engaged in the production and assembly of labor-intensive consumer goods, while Taiwanese SMEs formed industrial clusters around them. Alongside other developmental dictatorships with similar economic policies in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Taiwan became one of the four Asian Tiger states.
In the 1970s and into the 1980s, this accumulation model was further refined, with Taiwanese capital mainly engaging in contract manufacturing, producing consumer goods for “no-fab” brands of toys, shoes, or consumer electronics. SEZ factories as well as SME suppliers in suburbs and villages, which were often organized as “living-room” factories or home industries, largely employed women from the countryside whose labor was low-waged and devalued.12Lydia Kung, Factory Women in Taiwan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1978]); Hsiung Ping-Chun, Living Rooms as Factories: Class, Gender, and the Satellite Factory System in Taiwan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Lee Anru, In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity. Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004). Patriarchal family structures sustained the employment of women since women’s wage labor was just seen as temporary and supplemental to household income. Women were expected to combine their wage labor with unwaged reproductive labor, while men refused to do the demeaning jobs in factories or workshops. Men’s labor counted as permanent and the main source of household income.
The Accumulation Model in Crisis
In the 1980s, the reservoir of rural labor power and of women willing to work in factories was mostly exhausted. The increase of workers’ bargaining power had led to rising wages in manufacturing and weakened Taiwanese industry’s global competitiveness. At the end of the decade, a wave of labor organizing and strikes swept over the island when workers demanded further improvements and pushed forward the democratization process that opened more spaces for social activism.13See the next section for more on democratization. Under increasing pressure due to labor shortages and workers’ struggles, Taiwan’s capitalists prepared for another economic transformation:
First, many companies strived to upgrade technologically through mechanization, replacing labor power where possible. Second, some also attempted industrial upgrading—for instance, in shoe production or electronics—by taking over more parts of the production process and moving from mere contract manufacturing (OEM) to additional research and design (ODM).14ODM stands for Original Design Manufacturer, OEM for Original Equipment Manufacturer. The Taiwanese state supported the upgrading process by providing financial means or infrastructure and by setting up new production facilities. An example is the establishment of the semiconductor industry.15For instance, the company TSMC, today the globally leading foundry for high-end semiconductors, was founded in 1987 with support of the Taiwanese state. Third, starting in the mid-1980s, Taiwan capitalists began hiring low-waged migrants from South and Southeast Asia who first came on tourist visas and worked in factories or construction. In the early 1990s, the migration of temporary “guest workers” was legalized and regulated.16For more, see the section “Racism and Migration” below.
Relocation to Enemy Land
Fourth, Taiwan’s capitalists intensified their investments abroad in the second half of the 1980s, most of them in the PRC with others in Southeast Asia.17Chen Xiangming, “Taiwan Investments in China and Southeast Asia: ‘Go West, but Also Go South’” Asian Survey 36, no. 5 (1996): 447–67, https://doi.org/10.2307/2645493; Chen Chih-Jou Jay, “Taiwanese Business in China: Encountering and Coping with Risks,” Asian Studies 60 (2015): 31–47, available at https://www.ios.sinica.edu.tw/people/personal/ccj/Taiwanese_business_in_China.pdf. Because any contact with the “communist enemy” was still legally banned, investments in the PRC were initially not sanctioned by the Taiwanese state. But soon such investments were gradually permitted. Taiwanese SME, larger companies, foreign enterprises in special economic zones, and, later, even state-invested companies relocated production facilities to the PRC in search for lower wage costs. The CCP regime often provided them with state subsidies and tax exemptions.18Important to note that Taiwan’s (diaspora) capitalists played a major role in the industrialization, technological upgrading, capitalist integration, and economic rise of the PRC from the late 1980s until, at least, the early 2010s. See Rigger’s The Tiger Leading the Dragon. Shelley Rigger, The Tiger Leading the Dragon. How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Rise (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
Taiwan thus turned from a low-wage contract manufacturer for foreign brands between the 1960s and 1980s into a subimperial country whose capitalist enterprises tapped into the reservoir of low-wage labor in (semi-)peripheral countries and realized large profits through their exploitation from the 1990s on. With a GDP of 776 billion USD in late 2024, Taiwan’s economy ranks twenty-second in the world today, and its GDP per capita of 31,400 USD places it in the category of “advanced economies.”19In both cases using the GDP at current prices. “Download WEO Data: October Edition,” World Economic Outlook Database, accessed March 25, 2025, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/October. Taiwan’s enterprises not only exported their production but also their infamous despotic labor regime, which was forged during Japanese colonial rule and industrialization, and refined during the KMT’s authoritarian era.
Meanwhile, the strategy of relocation led to factory closures and lay-offs in Taiwan in the 1990s. Workers (mostly older and low-skilled) lost their jobs, among them many women. The late 1990s saw a temporary increase in labor conflicts when workers wanted to keep their jobs or demanded compensation. However, relocations and closures had weakened their bargaining power. Labor forces were further divided after Taiwan’s capitalists started recruiting migrant labor, and local workers failed to unite with their migrant colleagues. The loss of bargaining power is illustrated by the relative stagnation of workers’ wages from 2000 until 2020.20See the slow increase in average wages as recorded by National Statistics. “Monthly Regular Earnings of All Employees (Industry and Services),” National Statistics—Republic of China (Taiwan), accessed March 25, 2025, https://eng.stat.gov.tw/Point.aspx?sid=t.4&n=4203&sms=11713.
Racism and Migration
The racialization of Indigenous people and their subsequent assimilation, displacement, discrimination, exploitation, and annihilation has been a fundamental part of Taiwan’s history since the seventeenth century. Non-Indigenous parts of the population were also racialized, though in different forms. Such racialization manifested, for instance, in the fragmentation of workforces. Taiwan’s racialized authoritarian workplace regime is a pillar of Taiwan’s capitalism until today. It is a telling irony that the latest racist migration regime was implemented in the same historical moment as the political system was democratized. The reformist leftist camp ignores either the racialized exploitation in Taiwan, or its implications for Taiwan’s “model democracy.” Meanwhile, some in the orthodox leftist camp recognize racialized exploitation in Taiwan, but deny similar forms of racialization in PRC capitalism.
History of Racialized Labor Regimes
Racialization is the process by which people are defined as a social category (or “race”) on the basis of certain biological or social characteristics (such as skin color, religion, or place of origin). In the process, a category of people is often ascribed demeaning attributes, such as “unskilled” or “backward,” in order to justify discrimination. Forms of discrimination often include the allocation of racialized groups to low-wage, dirty, and dangerous jobs, or their exclusion from a particular residency status, work permits, or social services.
Under Japan’s colonial rule before 1945, Taiwanese workers were racialized.21On the history of racialized hierarchies in Taiwan’s workplaces, see chapter three of Ho’s Working Class Formation in Taiwan. Ho Ming-sho, Working Class Formation in Taiwan. Fractured Solidarity in State-Owned Enterprises, 1945–2012 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The management in larger companies was mostly Japanese and the section of Japanese workers had better jobs, better working conditions, and better accommodations. Taiwanese workers had lower-end jobs with demeaning tasks. They also received lower wages and had poorer housing. Under the rule of the KMT after 1945, mainland Chinese (or waishengren) close to the KMT took over the role of the Japanese. The situation was similar to that under the Japanese: management was mostly in the hands of mainland Chinese, and mainland Chinese workers got the better jobs. Taiwanese (or benshengren) workers in larger companies mostly kept the low-end jobs with poorer conditions.22The categories benshengren and waishengren still play a role in Taiwan’s social relations. Waishengren describes the part of the Han population whose families came to Taiwan after 1945. Today they count for about 15 percent of the population. Benshengren describes the part of the Han population whose families came to Taiwan before 1945. Most of them are of Hoklo descent, and they make up 70 to 80 percent of the population today. Sometimes counted as part of the benshengren is the Hakka population. Alone, it makes up more than 15 percent of the population. However, many people in Taiwan have roots in different groups, and the categories ignore the divisions within each group. The Indigenous population represents about two percent of the total population.
These two histories of racialization intersect with gendered forms of discrimination. For instance, during Taiwan’s industrialization in the 1960s, rural women were subjected to demeaning forms of employment on the assembly lines and workbenches. They also overlap with the continued racialization of Indigenous workers who were hired, for instance, for construction and fishing jobs when Taiwanese workers began looking for better alternatives elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s.
Finally, since the democratization process started at the end of the 1980s, management of larger companies as well as SME lies in the hands of both mainland Chinese and Taiwanese (or waishengren and benshengren) and the workers from these groups receive better positions in comparison to the growing group of migrant workers from Southeast Asia.23See the next section.
The “Guest Worker” Program
As mentioned, along with the change of Taiwan’s accumulation model in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the government introduced new regulations for temporary labor migration to ensure the supply of unskilled and low-wage labor power for the part of Taiwan’s capital that remained on the island.24As in other countries, Taiwan also opened migration channels for skilled employees such as technicians, IT specialists, or managers, among them many “white” people from industrialized countries, who enjoy a more secure and long-term residence status. Lan Pei-Chia, “White Privilege, Language Capital and Cultural Ghettoisation: Western High-Skilled Migrants in Taiwan,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37, no.10 (2011):1669–93, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2011.613337. The “guest worker” program was institutionalized in 1992 through the adoption of the Employment Service Act. Since then, it’s been repeatedly adapted.25For a timeline of Taiwan’s migration regime and migrants’ resistance since the late 1980s, see Dinkelaker and Ruckus’s “Taiwan’s Regime of Temporary Migrant Labor.” Samia Dinkelaker and Ralf Ruckus, “Taiwan’s Regime of Temporary Migrant Labor: Timeline of State Regulations, Migrant Protests, Local Support, and Other Important Events from the Mid-1980s to the Present,” Asian Labour Review, forthcoming (2025).
Following agreements with governments of Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand, migrants from these countries can apply through recruitment agencies for jobs in Taiwan. They are only allowed to work in certain sectors—that is, in factories or care institutions, or on construction sites, fishing vessels, or farms. In addition, a large number of migrant women work in private households and do care work for the elderly.26The migrant domestic care workers are not covered by Taiwan’s labor laws and do not receive the official minimum wage for workers in Taiwan. Taiwan’s government restricted migrant employment to these sectors in order to limit job competition with local workers. Under pressure from Taiwan’s unions, it also set maximum quotas between ten and forty percent for migrant workers in certain manufacturing sectors.
The mainstream, procapitalist version of Taiwanese nationalism builds on Taiwan’s status as an industrialized subimperial country and the ruling classes’ desire to stay in control of the island’s capitalist resources…Another version of Taiwanese nationalism (that includes a leftwing element) draws on the refusal to be taken over by the CCP-led PRC, an anticolonial motivation, and a notion of a “more democratic,” “more transparent” democratic system.
In general, the employment of migrant workers is limited to dirty, dangerous, and difficult work—so-called 3D jobs. These jobs are often demeaning and always on the low end of the wage scale. Migrant workers have no opportunity for advancement to higher positions. The agencies that hire them connect them with an employer, take part of their wage, and continue to control their lives in the workplaces and dormitories. Their employer gives them a work contract for up to three years. The migrant workers can sign several successive contracts but are only permitted to stay in Taiwan for up to twelve years.27Since 2015, migrant domestic care workers can, under certain conditions, stay for fourteen years. And, in 2022, the government introduced a new scheme that allows employers to apply for a more permanent status of their migrant employees. These need to be “medium skilled,” have to receive a wage well above the minimum level, and obtain government approval to move up to this status. During a contract, they cannot change their employer without the consent of the recruitment agency and the employer.28Another important form of (labor) migration that also began in the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s, peaked in the first half of the 2000s, and continued thereafter with lower numbers, is marriage migration. Mainly women from the PRC and Southeast Asia (and here mostly from Vietnam) migrated to Taiwan to marry men (primarily farmers or proletarians) who sought for wives and reproductive labor power. Marriage migration was mostly organized by commercial agencies but the assistance of government agencies was necessary to open this channel for migrants. In 2024, the number of marriage migrants in Taiwan stood at six hundred thousand. See Qian and Tsai’s “Relative Economic Position and Marriage Migration,” and Hsia’s “Internationalization of Capital and the Trade in Asian Women. Qian Zhenchao and Tsia Ming-Chang,“Relative Economic Position and Female Marriage Migration: Marrying Men in Taiwan Across Borders and Boundaries,” Population Research and Policy Review 4 (2022):1451–1470, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-021-09696-x; Hsia Hsiao-Chuan, “Internationalization of Capital and the Trade in Asian Women. The Case of ‘Foreign Brides’ in Taiwan” in Women and Globalization, ed. Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana (New York: Humanity Books, 2004), 181–229.
Workers’ Racialization as a Pillar of Capitalism
At the beginning of 2025, about 910, 000 migrant workers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand stayed in Taiwan as temporary workers, among them about 90, 000 undocumented.29According to official numbers of Taiwan’s Ministry of Labor. “Foreign Workers,” Ministry of Labor: Republic of China (Taiwan), updated March 20, 2025, accessed March 25, 2025, https://statdb.mol.gov.tw/html/mon/i0120020620e.htm. They amounted to over seven percent of the less than twelve million total labor force on the island. The number of these migrant workers has risen fast in the past years, and it is likely to increase further due to the looming labor shortages in Taiwan that are partially a result of very low birth rates. The government is discussing opening more sectors of employment to migrant workers and has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with India on the recruitment of workers from there.
The “guest worker” regime has shaped the development of Taiwan’s capitalism since the 1990s. Many jobs vital for the economy could only be filled through the recruitment of Southeast Asian migrants. Additionally, the recruitment of low-waged migrant women as live-in care workers for old or disabled people “freed” local women from a substantial part of their unwaged care labor. This enabled local women to engage in waged work necessary for most family’s income. The low-wage migrant care work obviated the need to establish a (most likely) much more expensive comprehensive institutional care sector in Taiwan.
Overall, the employment of racialized migrant workers allows Taiwan’s capital to keep the wage-level down, thereby lowering costs and lifting profit expectations. Capitalists can pay higher wages and grant better conditions to local workers in the same company, thereby adding another form of division among workers and preventing collective struggles. This general weakening of workers’ bargaining power also allows capital to press down wages and increase the precarity of jobs in other sectors where no migrants are employed. Like migrant workers, many young Taiwanese workers in the service sector earn wages at (or just above) the official minimum wage.
Democratization and Division
Taiwan becoming a subimperial player exploiting low-waged workers in other countries and the implementation of the racist migration regime regulating the exploitation of Southeast Asia workers coincided with the democratization process that changed the mechanics of capitalist rule on the island. Pressures for political reforms had increased in the 1980s and, after more than thirty years of authoritarian rule, the KMT eventually allowed a political opening. This process highlights the autonomous political development on the island, which the orthodox leftist camp supporting the PRC’s claim on Taiwan tends to ignore. At the same, it shows the complicity of capitalist exploitation and bourgeois democracy in this (sub)imperial context, a circumstance largely overlooked by the reformist leftist camp.
Reforms and Participation
Resistance to the KMT’s authoritarian rule increased in the late 1970s. In 1979, the US government both established diplomatic relations with the PRC’s CCP regime and cut its diplomatic ties to Taiwan, increasingly isolating the island. The domestic resistance was mostly represented by parts of the middle class that publicly demanded democratic reforms. The mobilization aimed at the KMT dictatorship and the systematic discrimination against the majority Taiwanese (Hoklo or benshengren) and Hakka population by the minority Chinese population (or waishengren).
In 1986, the KMT regime under Chiang Ching-kuo (who had taken over the leadership after his father Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975) allowed members of the democracy movement to found a bourgeois opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). In 1987, the regime ended the state of emergency that had been in place since 1949. Chiang Ching-kuo died in early 1988, and vice-president Lee Teng-hui took his post. In 1990, the so-called Wild Lily Student Movement staged mass demonstrations and pushed for free elections of parliament and presidency. Under Lee, the KMT finally gave in and oversaw the first democratic parliamentarian elections in 1992 and the first presidential elections in 1996 (which Lee himself won).
From the mid-1980s on, movements from below began to use and widen spaces the gradual reforms had opened: workers, women, LGBTIQ+ persons, environmental activists, and others. These movements pushed for the transformation of a society that had been tightly controlled by the KMT state.
Two-Party Division
Since the 1990s, the political sphere has been dominated by the rivalry between two bourgeois and procapitalist parties—the DPP and the KMT. Other parties have played subordinate and temporary roles.
The DPP is supported by many benshengren. It stands for Taiwanese nationalism and the demand for formal independence or, at least, the acknowledgement of Taiwan’s self-determination under the present status quo. The party tends to represent the interests of those capitalists who have invested in Taiwan itself, or who benefit from Taiwan’s autonomy. Meanwhile, the KMT has transformed itself into a bourgeois democratic party and is still supported by many waishengren. It incorporates a form of Chinese nationalism and, so far, insists on a perspective of a unified China. However, it does not want unification and the integration of Taiwan into the PRC under the rule of the CCP. The KMT tends to represent the interests of capitalists who have invested in the PRC and therefore promotes the improvement of PRC-Taiwan relations.
Since the 1990s, the presidency and government have changed several times between the two parties. The KMT’s Lee Teng-hui held the presidency from 1988 to 2000. He first normalized economic exchanges with the PRC, but later clashed with the CCP regime for promoting a form of Taiwanese nationalism. His Taiwanese nationalism also brought Lee into conflict with his own party.30On Lee Teng-hui’s political course, see Jacobs and Liu’s “Lee Teng-hui.” Bruce J. Jacobs and Liu I-hao Ben, “Lee Teng-hui and the Idea of ‘Taiwan,’” China Quarterly 190 (2007): 375–393, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741007001245. The DPP’s Chen Shui-bian with his own Taiwanese nationalist agenda was president from 2000 to 2008. He tried to improve Taiwan’s international connections and standing, but his government was weakened by the KMT opposition’s parliamentary majority and, later, by corruption scandals.
The KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou, president from 2008 to 2016, tried to improve relations with the CCP regime, negotiated a trade agreement with the PRC in 2010, and opened Taiwan to PRC tourists. However, with the change on the top of the CCP to Xi Jinping in 2012 and the PRC’s growing economic power, a large part of the Taiwanese population became increasingly concerned with the CCP’s growing political influence and the possibility of PRC capital taking over a big part of Taiwan’s economy. In 2014, shaped by these concerns, a popular uprising known as the Sunflower Movement prevented a second trade agreement Ma had negotiated with the CCP leadership.
The DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen won the presidential election in 2016 and stayed in power until 2024, with Vice-President Lai Ching-te taking over her post. Both have promoted a nationalist stance and emphasized Taiwan’s self-determination, while pushing Taiwan’s economic development as a subimperial country. After Tsai’s election win, the CCP regime stopped all contacts it had during Ma’s presidency with the Taiwanese government, and relations between the PRC and Taiwan have further deteriorated since.31More on this in the section “The Geopolitical Conflict.”
Strengthened Taiwanese Nationalism
Taiwanese nationalism—the notion that Taiwanese people are not Chinese, that they have their own particular culture, history, or “identity,” and that it was somehow natural that they constitute their own nation and “deserve” their independent nation state—has strengthened in the past two decades.32This argument is evident, for instance, in Chou and Harrison’s Revolutionary Taiwan. Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison, Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order (New York: Cambria Press, 2024).
As mentioned above, Taiwanese nationalism has rightwing and leftwing roots. In the 1920s, under Japanese colonization, various organizations formed by different political currents in Taiwan expressed anticolonial sentiments and demanded an end to the discrimination against Taiwanese people, or, minimally, the participation of Taiwanese in the colonial government. Leftwing activists formed their own groups at the time, including the small Taiwanese Communist Party, which promoted anticolonial struggle to liberate Taiwan.33Jacob Theodore Burger, “Cross-Strait Colonialism: Marxism and the Construction of Taiwanese Nationalism” (Master Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2020), https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/f0c201c8-acba-44d2-9bf3-222f7f50bed0/content; Belogurova, “The Civic World of International Communism.”
After the crackdown on the 1947 uprising, the authoritarian KMT regime, considering itself as the government of the whole of China, suppressed Taiwanese nationalism. It resurfaced in the 1980s during the democracy movement, and it grew in support and importance from the 1990s on, promoted by the ruling class—first under KMT President Lee Teng-hui and later under the DDP Presidents Chen, Tsai, and Lai.
The mainstream, procapitalist version of Taiwanese nationalism builds on Taiwan’s status as an industrialized subimperial country and the ruling classes’ desire to stay in control of the island’s capitalist resources. Since the 2000s, it has morphed into a kind of “civic” nationalism that includes benshengren and waishengren and has even appropriated Indigenous claims for recognition when arguing for Taiwan’s national distinctness from China.34Melissa Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 21; Robert Tierney, “The Class Context of Temporary Immigration, Racism and Civic Nationalism in Taiwan,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 41, no. 2 (2011): 289–314, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2011.553047.
Another version of Taiwanese nationalism (that includes a leftwing element) draws on the refusal to be taken over by the CCP-led PRC, an anticolonial motivation, and a notion of a “more democratic,” “more transparent” democratic system. Movements such as the Sunflower Movement have mobilized Taiwan’s youth and other parts of the population for the right to form and defend an independent Taiwanese nation state. These movements have included racist and anti-Chinese elements, and they largely failed to mobilize against the core problems in Taiwan such as capitalist exploitation, the persistence of patriarchy, or the racist migration regime.
The Geopolitical Conflict
The geopolitical clash over Taiwan is the result of the increasing rivalry between the world’s leading powers over control of global markets and resources: land, labor, raw materials, production facilities, transportation routes, and more. This rivalry has intensified in the past decades with the economic and political ascent of the PRC. At the center of this rivalry is a bloc of capitalist countries around the United States and another bloc forming around the PRC, with regional powers and their capitalist classes in the European Union, Russia, India, and other countries trying to defend their interests within and outside these blocs. The multiple global crises—in economy, ecology, social relations, and geopolitics—are aggravating the conditions that spur on these rivalries. All these crises are the result of the destructive forces of industrial capitalism and the contradictions within the capitalist world-system of nation-states.
The orthodox and the reformist leftist camps take opposite sides in this geopolitical rivalry. Despite their leftwing self-understanding, they, in essence, support the interests of one of the leading capitalist-imperialist blocs.
The CCP regime’s interest in controlling Taiwan is rooted in the island’s strategic position just off the east coast of the PRC, its population of largely Chinese descent, its history as the KMT’s refuge after the civil war, and Taiwan’s alliance with the United States (the PRC’s rival hegemonic power). For US governments, Taiwan has long been a strategic location for the control of the access to the Pacific Ocean and part of the line of containment, at first against “communism” in East Asia after WWII, and now as an ally of the US-aligned “West” in its strategic rivalry with the PRC. In addition, control over Taiwan is central to both sides because the Taiwan Strait is an important maritime route for global trade and because Taiwanese companies are important producers of high-end semiconductors (which are vital components of technologically advanced machinery, infrastructure, and military equipment).
The orthodox and the reformist leftist camps take opposite sides in this geopolitical rivalry. Despite their leftwing self-understanding, they, in essence, support the interests of one of the leading capitalist-imperialist blocs.
Taiwan in the Cold War
Taiwan’s history as a front state in the conflict between the socialist “East” and the capitalist “West” begins with the escape of the KMT to Taiwan in 1949. During the Korea War (1950–1953), the US government began to understand the strategic importance of the island. In 1954, it agreed on a military pact with the KMT regime. As part of its policy of containment, the US government established a line of military bases along the so-called “first island chain” that ranged from South Korea through Japan and Taiwan to the Philippines. In Taiwan, the United States ran several bases across the island including units of navy, air force, missile units (including nuclear warheads), and ground troops.35The number of troops varied from 1954 to 1974, mostly between four thousand and ten thousand. Tim Kane, “Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950–2005,” The Heritage Foundation, May 24, 2006, https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/global-us-troop-deployment-1950-2005. The bases in Taiwan also played a role in the US military’s campaign in Vietnam in the 1960s.
The US Government Changing Sides
In 1971, the US government under President Richard Nixon began approaching the CCP regime. It wanted to capitalize on the conflict between the CCP and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that had begun in the late 1950s and intensified in the late 1960s. The US government aimed to form an alliance with the CCP regime against the Soviet Union, thereby decisively changing the Cold War geopolitical landscape.
In October 1971, the PRC was granted the seat of the Republic of China (Taiwan) in the UN Security Council against the will of the US government. This was made possible by the change in the size and composition of the UN General Assembly after decolonization. In February 1972, Nixon was the first US President to visit the PRC. He and PRC prime minister Zhou Enlai signed a first “joint communiqué,” in which the US government acknowledged that the governments in Beijing and Taipei both held the position that there was only “one China.” In the same year, the US military began reducing its forces in Taiwan and withdrew all nuclear weapons.
In January 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, the US government used the second “joint communiqué” with the CCP regime to declare the establishment of diplomatic relations with the PRC and the severance of diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Subsequently, the US military completely withdrew from Taiwan. To compensate, the US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in the same year. A US law and intergovernmental treaty, it demands that US governments provide Taiwan with defensive weapons against a foreign military attack. In 1982, under President Ronald Reagan, the US government confirmed its cooperation with the CCP regime in their third “joint communiqué,” while also giving the KMT regime further assurances that it would continue to provide weapons.
This was the beginning of the US government’s “strategic ambiguity” regarding the Taiwan conflict. The ambiguity is supposed to secure the status quo by threatening the PRC government with a US military intervention if PRC forces attacked Taiwan, and by threatening the Taiwan government that it would lose US support if it declared formal independence. This has been the position of all US governments since the 1980s. But with the economic rise of the PRC and its geopolitical challenge to the US hegemonic position, all US governments since President Barack Obama have promoted a kind of containment policy towards the PRC. In the early 2020s, President Joe Biden even repeatedly hinted at a change of the “strategic ambiguity” policy and a return to open support of Taiwan’s self-governance in order to keep it as an asset in the containment of the PRC.
The PRC Government’s Changing Possibilities
The other side’s position on Taiwan has seen similarly dramatic changes. The CCP, founded in 1921 with the support of the Communist International (Comintern) led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, put no claim on Taiwan as part of China in its early years. Neither did the KMT, which was also supported by the Comintern. At the time, they saw Taiwan as a Japanese colony and the Comintern’s official aim was to support the anticolonial struggle of communist forces in Taiwan against the colonizing power.36Frank S. T Hsiao, and Lawrence R. Sullivan, “The Chinese Communist Party and the Status of Taiwan, 1928–1943,” Pacific Affairs 52, no. 3 (1979) 446–67, https://doi.org/10.2307/2757657.
It was only in the first half of the 1940s that the CCP and the KMT changed their positions and claimed Taiwan as part of China, just before the island became part of the Republic of China in 1945. After the KMT lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan in 1949, the CCP continued to claim Taiwan, now as part of the newly formed PRC. Some military confrontations between CCP and KMT troops continued at first, and tensions regularly flared during so-called Taiwan Crises (as in 1954 and 1958). It soon became clear that the CCP forces were not strong enough to invade Taiwan and that KMT forces had no chance to retake the mainland.
In the 1980s, after the US government had established diplomatic relations with the PRC, the CCP regime’s position strengthened while the KMT’s weakened. Starting with party leader Deng Xiaoping, the CCP regime has since advocated the concept of “one country, two systems” as a possible solution to the conflict—in effect, offering that Taiwan becomes part of the PRC while keeping its capitalist economic system and some form of autonomy.37See the official version of this on the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs: https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/zy/wjls/3604_665547/202405/t20240531_11367561.html. To this day, “one country, two systems” has not found widespread support in Taiwan among either its ruling class or other parts of the population.
Since the democratization process’s strengthening of Taiwanese nationalism in the 1990s, the CCP regime has protested against anything it interprets as an acknowledgement of Taiwan’s self-governance. However, it participated in semiofficial meetings with the KMT and negotiated a range of agreements on cross-strait travel and trade. In the 2000s, it even counted on convergence through economic integration, as Taiwanese investors played a big role in its industrialization process and the integration of the PRC into the capitalist world markets and as trade relations between Taiwan and the PRC intensified. A first trade accord between Taiwan and the PRC—the Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement (ECFA), negotiated under KMT President Ma Ying-jeou in 2010—seemed to offer a way for further economic integration. However, the Sunflower Movement led to the cancellation of a second trade agreement in 2014, and the election victory of the DDP’s Tsai Ing-wen in the presidential election in 2016 ended the expectation of a possible “unification” through economic cooperation for the time being.
By the mid-2010s, the geopolitical conditions shaping the conflict around Taiwan had changed substantially. The PRC had become the center of global manufacturing, the main trading partner of the majority of countries, and the second largest economy in the world. The CCP regime increased its efforts to use this economic strength to improve its geopolitical standing and influence. In the 2020s, it has built up the PRC’s military capabilities so that, for the first time, a successful military campaign to gain control over Taiwan seems possible in the near future.
Fueled Confrontation…
In the past few years, the situation in and around Taiwan has been dominated by two trends: the first trend points to increasing tensions. The competition for control over markets or resources between the capitalist classes of the United States and the PRC has intensified recently, and their militaries try to expand their control in East Asia and beyond. As a result, the conflict about Taiwan as a military and economic asset has become more pressing for both sides.
Tensions between Taiwan and the PRC have also increased under the DPP presidencies of Tsai Ing-wen (2016–2024) and Lai Ching-te (since 2024) because they both emphasized their willingness to defend Taiwan’s self-determination. The CCP regime has regularly confirmed its claim on the island and criticized the DDP’s “separatism.” Against the backdrop of the modernization and expansion of the PRC’s combat capacities and its build-up of military bases in the South China Sea, the threat of a military attack on Taiwan is more plausible than before. As a show of force, the PRC military has organized several large-scale exercises that simulated the sea blockade of the island since 2022.
Meanwhile, the 2019 popular movement against the influence of the CCP regime in Hong Kong and its repression by the CCP-aligned Hong Kong government has strengthened the determination of large parts of Taiwan’s population to not allow a CCP takeover of the island under the “one country, two systems” model because that had failed to secure Hong Kong’s political autonomy.
Taiwan’ status quo includes exploitation, capitalist rule, racism, patriarchy, and militarization—all of which need to be criticized and attacked. However, they need to be criticized and attacked by proletarian movements and progressive forces in Taiwan and elsewhere. The occupation of Taiwan by the capitalist and imperialist PRC needs to be avoided.
US governments have taken an increasingly hostile stance towards the CCP regime in the past years. They introduced tariffs to reduce the US trade deficit with the PRC, restricted the export of high-end semiconductors and other high-tech equipment to the PRC to hamper the latter’s technological and military capabilities, stepped up their efforts to initiate and strengthen military alliances such as the Quad (US, India, Australia, Japan), and have built new military bases and reinforced existing ones in the region. The second US government under Donald Trump is expected to continue this strategy. However, it remains to be seen if it will go as far as abandoning the policy of “strategic ambiguity” and support Taiwan more openly, or if it chooses another path.
In sum, these developments point to an intensification of the conflict around Taiwan and even a possible escalation in the near future.
… and Continued Interdependency
The second trend is the deepening interconnectedness of the Taiwanese, US, and Chinese economies; all three play an important role for the global economy in one way or another.
The United States and the PRC are the two largest economies in the world, leaders in a wide range of technologies, seats of major global investors, and important markets for many companies around the world. Their connection is evident due to vast US investment in the PRC, massive exports from the PRC to the United States, and the fact that the PRC is the second largest creditor of US treasury bonds (behind Japan). Big US companies like Apple rely on suppliers’ factories in the PRC; others, such as Tesla, have set up big production facilities there. The PRC is still the global center of manufacturing, a hub in many production chains, and an important market for US companies.
Taiwan and the PRC have had close economic relations since the 1990s, when Taiwanese capitalists invested heavily in the PRC and relocated a substantial part of its manufacturing capacities there. Today, the PRC is also Taiwan’s most important trading partner. In addition, over the past two decades, Taiwanese companies have gradually become global leaders in the production of semiconductors, especially in foundry operations and OEM wafer manufacturing. Today, they dominate the production of high-end semiconductors, an important commodity for the production of consumer goods, high-tech machinery, and “intelligent” weapons. Other countries’ economies and military producers, including those in the PRC and the United States, depend on the supply of Taiwanese high-end semiconductors. And some Taiwanese companies, such as the electronics producer Foxconn, play important roles in production chains of their sectors and as global investors.
In sum, the economic importance and the web of dependencies between these three economies speak against military escalation over Taiwan in the near future, because it would lead to a major economic crisis both in the region and around the globe. Such a crisis could not only destabilize the governing regimes and political systems in the involved countries, but shake the foundations of the global system of capitalist nation-states.
How Should the Left Position Itself?
After having looked at different aspects of Taiwan’s trajectory in historical perspective, the question of how the left should position itself towards the conflict around Taiwan remains.
First, the claim of the CCP leadership (and part of the left) that “Taiwan has been an inalienable part of China’s sacred territory since ancient times,” is simply wrong. Taiwan experienced a series of (settler) colonializations driven by European, Japanese, and Chinese colonizers. For many of Taiwan’s Indigenous people the island is “stolen land,” and they continue to struggle for recognition, control, and the end of enclosures and discrimination.38On the Indigenous people in Taiwan today, see Adawai, Mali, and Ahuan’s “Taiwan.” Jason Pan Adawai, Aidu Mali, and Kasainan Ahuan, “Taiwan,” in The Indigenous World 2024, ed. Dwayne Mamo (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 2024), 280–83: https://www.iwgia.org/en/taiwan/5373-iw-2024-taiwan.html.
Second, other parts of the left who claim that Taiwan is a “model democracy” and who demand support for Taiwanese nationalism ignore the capitalist character of Taiwan’s postauthoritarian representative democracy—a form of bourgeois rule in which reconfigured political institutions continue to serve the interests of Taiwan’s capitalist class. The split between different bourgeois political forces behind the two main parties (the KMT and DPP) amounts to the split between two different strategies for dealing with the CCP regime and reflects the positions of different capital factions and their investment interests in the PRC.
Third, Taiwan’s political economy is based on a historically evolving form of racialized labor in which colonizers and colonized subjects from China played a leading role. From the early seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century on, Taiwan’s economic development was based on the subordination and exploitation of migrant or racialized labor from China in the interest of different colonizing powers. The capitalist model of contract manufacturing in the second half of the twentieth century relied on the exploitation of women’s labor. Since the 1990s, increasing numbers of racialized migrants from Southeast Asia have been recruited and exploited to keep Taiwan’s capitalist economy going. Thus far, the left has largely ignored this history of racialized capitalism.
Fourth, the left needs to acknowledge that the vast majority of people in Taiwan would see the establishment of CCP rule over the island as another case of foreign rule and colonization. Taiwan’ status quo includes exploitation, capitalist rule, racism, patriarchy, and militarization—all of which need to be criticized and attacked. However, they need to be criticized and attacked by proletarian movements and progressive forces in Taiwan and elsewhere. The occupation of Taiwan by the capitalist and imperialist PRC needs to be avoided.
Fifth, the left faces the political challenge of attacking capitalist relations in Taiwan while, at the same time, defending the self-determination of the people living in Taiwan against imperialist interventions and mobilizing a movement against a military escalation. The urgency posed by the possibility of war exacerbates this challenge. A military escalation has been prevented so far by the (assumed) military stalemate between the US supported Taiwanese military and the PRC military. This stalemate could disappear in a few years due to the military buildup and arms race in the region.
Sixth, the left is advised to keep the focus on its long-term aim: the fundamental social transformation beyond capitalism and nationalism on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Consequently, considerations about what area belongs to which nation state are irrelevant. In the short term, efforts in pursuit of this goal need to further the erosion of capitalism and the political forces that support it in Taiwan and the PRC. Moreover, these efforts need to be based on the social struggles and leftwing opposition in both places, even if these might be weak at the moment.39Social struggles of workers, migrants, and women as well as leftwing opposition in the PRC are facing harsh repression but, nevertheless, exert permanent pressure on the CCP regime. Ralf Ruckus, The Left in China: A Political Cartography (London/Las Vegas: Pluto Press, 2023). Social struggles in Taiwan have been rather small in recent years while the leftwing opposition seems mostly focused on changing state policies and not on developing class power from below—a major weakness. Additionally, pursuing such a fundamental social transformation also entails the struggle against all imperialist actors responsible for the present military buildup, provocations, and the possible escalation.
Seventh, to formulate an alternative position, the left needs to overcome nationalist perspectives or frameworks limited by nation-state borders. Leftists must organize a collective discussion open to leftists in different places; such a discussion must include, for a start, all interested Chinese speakers in Hong Kong, the PRC, Taiwan, and their connected diaspora.
Eighth, the fight against nationalisms is the key to finding a consistent position. Chinese nationalism on both sides of the Taiwan Strait serves competing cross-class alliances and different capitalist actors in both Taiwan and the PRC. Taiwanese nationalism serves the creation of a cross-class alliance that strengthens Taiwan’s capitalism. The framing of Taiwanese nationalism as a form of anti-imperialism or “national liberation” is misleading in two ways: Taiwanese nationalism is in no way connected to an emancipatory anticolonial and anticapitalist project. Quite the contrary: it supports the subimperialism promoted by Taiwan’s capitalist class. In the past, even “national liberation” or anticolonial movements that were connected to emancipatory anticapitalist projects have led to the establishment of new nation-states, but not to the overcoming of exploitation, patriarchy, and racism. While the failure of these movements needs to be analyzed in detail, their focus on what they conceived as a “nation” (and their attempt to establish an anticolonial regime within a “nation-state” that is part of the capitalist world-system) doomed them to failure. The PRC and the CCP’s nationalist project are significant examples of such failure.
In sum, this article proposes what the political left should know about Taiwan (at the minimum). Against the orthodox leftist camp that supports PRC capitalism and nationalism and the reformist leftist camp that backs Taiwan’s US-supported capitalism and nationalism, this article argues for an alternative perspective that refuses to take a side in the geopolitical confrontation of capitalist great powers and refuses to align with any “nation” or nationalism. It suggests a leftwing consensus against the status quo of exploitation, racialization, patriarchy, and imperialism and promotes the support of social struggles from below as well as leftwing movements that oppose both the status quo and the looming military escalation from above—on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and beyond.
Abbreviations
CCP Chinese Communist Party
DPP Democratic Progressive Party
GDP Gross Domestic Product
KMT Kuomintang or Guomindang, Chinese Nationalist Party
ODM Original Design Manufacturer
OEM Original Equipment Manufacturer
PRC People’s Republic of China
SEZ special economic zone
SME small and medium enterprises