Today, October 10, is Taiwan's National Day, although, like everything else about Taiwan's political status, this claim is fraught with misinformation and political manipulation. On the surface, there seems nothing wrong with commemorating this day when the last emperor of China, Pu Yi, was overthrown by Chinese Nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen on October 10, 1911, thus ushering in a unique brand of Chinese democracy.

However, few things are as simple as they first seem. To begin, the ancestors of today's Taiwanese came to Taiwan almost 400 years ago to escape the tyranny of the Chinese Emperors. Taiwan was still Chinese land, but the sea between the island and the mainland provided relative security from Imperial subjugation and Taiwanese developed their own form of Chinese culture and identity and no longer recognized the Chinese Emperor as their ruler. Wasn't this perhaps Taiwan's National Day?

Secondly, when Pu Yi was overthrown in 1911, Taiwan was not part of China, but belonged to Japan. The armistice agreement between China and Japan following the 1895 war between the two countries, which China lost, ceded Taiwan to the Japanese. For 50 years, until the end of the Second World War in 1945, Taiwan was a Japanese colony, albeit an unhappy and reluctant one. Not regarding themselves as Mainland Chinese, it was a bitter pill for Taiwanese to swallow to be ceded to another power by a power that they did not recognize. Jubilation and a reborn sense of independence followed the Japanese withdrawal from Taiwan in 1945. Wasn't this perhaps Taiwan's National Day?

This renewed hope was short-lived however, when the Allied powers gave Taiwan to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese Mainland. At the time Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army was fighting a civil war against Moa Ze-dong's Communist forces, a losing battle that had been halted during the Japanese occupation of China during WWII so that both Chinese factions could fight the Japanese. It did not take long after the resumption of the civil war for Moa Ze-dong's Communists to force Chiang Kai-shek to flee China for Taiwan, where he arrived in 1949. This was no liberation for the Taiwanese, who were treated by the Chinese Nationalists as Japanese collaborators and, like under the Japanese colonial rule, were treated as second class citizens. Chiang Kai-shek set up his Nationalist Government on the island and behaved as if he still ruled Mainland China. Cold War politics allowed this charade to continue until 1971 when the China seat at the United Nations, held by Taiwan, was transferred to Communist Mainland China and Taiwan was declared part of China, which Chiang Kai-shek had always maintained anyway, but for different reasons. When moving his government from the Mainland to the island, Chiang Kai-shek retained all the practices of Mainland politics, including the Mainland's National Day of October 10. Is this really Taiwan's National Day?

Double Ten is a reminder to Taiwanese not of what they have achieved, but of what they have lost and are still struggling to achieve. It is not a National Day, but a hope for a National Day.

10 October 2003

Dion Marc Delport

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