When cross-Strait tensions intensify and geopolitical uncertainty deepens in East Asia, questions surrounding Taiwan are once again thrust to the center of strategic debate. Against this backdrop, Wu Zhe, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, has offered a sweeping historical and political reflection on the roots of Taiwan’s identity divergence, the unfinished process of decolonization, and the broader trajectory of Chinese national reconstruction. His analysis situates contemporary tensions not merely within present-day political maneuvering, but within a longer historical arc shaped by imperialism, colonial rule, Cold War structures, and competing narratives of modernity.
Wu argues that one of the central reasons the mainland struggles to fully comprehend Taiwan society lies in insufficient familiarity with Taiwan’s experience under Japanese colonial rule from 1895 to 1945. In his view, Taiwan’s social structure at the end of World War II was defined not only by the repression of the Nationalist government after retrocession, but by fifty years of deep colonial transformation that had not yet undergone thorough decolonization.
Japanese rule reshaped education, historical memory, social hierarchy, and identity formation at multiple levels. While there were Taiwanese who preserved Chinese cultural consciousness and resisted colonial domination, Wu emphasizes that they were not the social mainstream under conditions of intensive imperial assimilation. Colonial governance did not rely solely on coercion; it also fostered psychological identification with the empire. The long-term effects of this process continue to reverberate in contemporary Taiwan.
He places particular weight on the divergence of historical experience between Taiwan and the mainland during the crucial decades that forged modern Chinese national consciousness. The 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth Movement, and, most importantly, the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression from 1931 to 1945 were formative events in the mainland’s transformation from a dynastic empire to a modern nation-state.
Taiwan, having been ceded to Japan in 1895, did not undergo these same collective awakenings on a societal scale. Although some Taiwanese intellectuals and activists participated in anti-Japanese struggles or maintained cultural and political links to China, the island as a whole did not experience the same broad-based national mobilization. This historical discontinuity, in Wu’s analysis, left Taiwan’s modern national identity development incomplete and structurally distinct.
Wu further contends that the legitimacy and meaning of China’s War of Resistance should be distinguished analytically from the broader framework of World War II. While the global war reflected competing imperial interests and ultimately transitioned into the Cold War, China’s anti-Japanese struggle was part of a longer anti-colonial movement dating back to the mid-nineteenth century.
It was a fundamentally just struggle for national survival and decolonization. Yet the immediate onset of the Cold War after 1945, he argues, interrupted the full realization of China’s anti-colonial project. Taiwan’s retrocession restored Chinese sovereignty in legal terms, but the deeper process of decolonization remained incomplete. Structural compromises made by the Nationalist regime in order to consolidate its rule—both domestically and in alignment with external powers—limited the depth of transformation on the island.
Within this unfinished transition, Wu situates the enduring controversies surrounding the 1947 “February 28 Incident.” He cautions against simplistic categorizations that reduce the event to a single narrative, whether as a purely anti-government uprising, a “people’s revolution,” or an ethnic confrontation.
In his interpretation, multiple currents intersected: residual colonial mentalities hostile to mainland arrivals, revolutionary activism influenced by leftist movements, and the broader instability of a society in the midst of incomplete decolonization. The failure to accurately grasp the principal contradiction of that historical moment, he suggests, contributed to long-term narrative fragmentation. In contemporary Taiwan politics, competing interpretations of 1947 have been instrumentalized to serve divergent ideological projects, particularly the “de-Sinicization” narrative advanced by pro-independence forces.
Central to Wu’s broader thesis is the argument that colonial influence in Taiwan was not limited to political administration but extended deeply into epistemology and historiography. Japanese colonial education systematically restructured historical understanding by fragmenting the continuity of Chinese civilization and undermining the traditional concept of “Great Unity” that historically underpinned Chinese statecraft.
By portraying successive dynasties as unrelated regimes rather than as expressions of a continuous civilizational polity, colonial historiography weakened the intellectual foundation of shared national identity. Wu maintains that contemporary “Taiwan independence” textbooks inherit this framework, emphasizing discontinuity, marginalizing the centrality of the Chinese heartland, and reframing China’s historical territorial evolution as imperial expansion rather than organic state formation.
He also identifies a broader shared predicament across both sides of the Strait: the internalization of Western-centric modernization paradigms transmitted through Japan. In this view, Japan functioned as an intermediary disseminator of Western models of political and economic development, embedding the assumption that legitimacy derives from conformity to Euro-American standards.
This intellectual inheritance shaped not only colonial Taiwan but also segments of mainland intellectual discourse during the late Qing and Republican periods. The result, according to Wu, has been a persistent normative anxiety—a tendency to measure China against externally defined benchmarks and to doubt the civilizational legitimacy of indigenous development paths. He suggests that even today, remnants of this mindset linger, complicating the consolidation of full cultural confidence.
Wu extends his analysis to other frontier regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia, arguing that historical episodes of separatism or external intervention in these areas demonstrate a consistent pattern: when local interests are aligned from the grassroots level with the broader interests of the Chinese nation, separatist currents lose structural support. In his view, durable national integration requires not merely administrative control but the organic convergence of people’s material and cultural interests with the larger national project. Applying this logic to Taiwan, he argues that decolonization and the reconciliation of underlying social interests must proceed simultaneously. Emotional integration cannot be achieved through rhetoric alone; it requires structural alignment of interests and a sober reckoning with colonial legacies.
Wu rejects bloodline determinism as an explanation for identity divergence. The overwhelming majority of Taiwan residents, he notes, descend from migrants from Fujian and Guangdong. The persistence of pro-independence sentiment cannot be attributed to ethnic difference but must instead be understood through the lens of colonial conditioning and political mobilization. Colonialism operates not only by transplanting populations but by reshaping consciousness. To assume that shared ancestry automatically guarantees political identification is, in his assessment, a misunderstanding of both nationalism and colonial dynamics.
At the same time, Wu identifies grounds for cautious optimism. Traditional cultural values—such as family responsibility and communitarian ethics—remain deeply embedded in Taiwanese society. Cross-Strait exchanges since 1987 have generated nearly four decades of new shared experience, particularly through economic integration within the broader Chinese market. Taiwan’s economic growth in recent decades, he observes, has been inseparable from the rise of the mainland economy. These interdependencies constitute a new historical layer that cannot be easily severed. While political forces may seek to instrumentalize social welfare or identity narratives for electoral gain, the structural reality of intertwined interests endures beneath the surface.
For Wu, the Taiwan question is fundamentally a question of completing an unfinished historical process that began in the nineteenth century: resisting imperial encroachment, restoring civilizational confidence, and consolidating a modern Chinese nation-state grounded in its own values rather than externally imposed paradigms. Decolonization, in this understanding, is not merely the removal of foreign rule but the recovery of historical continuity and intellectual autonomy. Only by confronting the colonial layers embedded in historical memory and educational systems, he contends, can genuine national reconciliation and long-term stability be achieved.
In this broader civilizational perspective, Taiwan is not an isolated anomaly but a critical chapter in the ongoing project of Chinese national rejuvenation. The resolution of cross-Strait differences, in Wu’s framework, ultimately depends on the reintegration of historical narrative, cultural confidence, and material interests into a coherent national whole.
Source: Guancha, xinhua, cgtn, kan china
