13yo king beats Tetris, Ethiopia made friends with Somaliland but Somalia got mad, someone named Gypsy Rose Blanchard is living out her redemption arc on TikTok, the investigation into the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 incident continues apace even as global airlines ground 171 of those jets on FAA orders, and Sheikh Hasina maintains her stranglehold on Bangladesh politics in yesterday’s election. What a start to the “year of democratic elections” – Vox wonders if the concept will survive it. I’m more concerned if humanity will, in quixotic pursuit of it.
This Monday briefing will focus both eyes on the Sinosphere, as we head into one of the most consequential elections in modern history. By next Monday’s briefing, we will have enough information about whether 2024 and beyond will maintain a grotesque status quo or escalate into an eruption most of us would like to avoid.
I’m talking about Taiwan’s election on 14 January, of course. I recently stated that I’d like any party that won’t propel us into WWIII to win, an unserious remark on the surface, but a dead serious one in reality.
Taiwanese politicians are not known for their temperance, in general, whether in the hallowed halls of democracy or otherwise. Anyone who thinks the Chinese are a placid, docile and obedient people because of oppression or suppression has clearly never read even a Wikipedia article on Chinese history or meaningfully interacted with a member of said identity group.
As a rule, the Chinese tend to be rebellious, rowdy and revengeful, lassoed into a semblance of order by cultural concepts such as All Under Heaven, Mandate of Heaven and the social contract of rulers providing stability, security and prosperity in return for submission.
Take even one of those conditions away and you risk a band of upstart rebels repurposing their pitchforks and marching on the capital. There is a reason why the urban legend of “call me emperor” exists in the Sinosphere rather than “call me daddy”, because any Chinese man could conceivably muster enough support around him to topple the existing mandate and announce a new one.
All this to say that nothing about the status quo should be taken for granted. Some look at Xi and see an emperor. Most Chinese people remember that emperors rarely met peaceful ends, and bide their time. The arc of history, in the collective Chinese psyche, is extremely long, and can almost be said to be an unbroken one.
The DPP will probably win, and we’d see more sabre-rattling from them, saying they are acting on the will of 66% of the electorate, egged on by warmongers who are desperate to fill their coffers, as if they weren’t already having a good time with Ukraine plodding along and Gaza blazing up. Meanwhile, China will maintain its red line.
That the KMT’s coalition could win as an upset is not out of the question, especially if enough of the electorate decide that all they’ve ever really wanted is a peaceful existence for themselves and their progeny, as I suspect the majority of people – Chinese or otherwise – desire.
By the way, these polls? I question the methodology, because I have never known of an official stance that the Taiwanese are not ethnically Han Chinese, unless they were actually Indigenous Taiwanese. There’s a difference between 華夏 hua xia or 中華人 zhong hua ren or 漢族 han zu and 中國人 zhong guo ren, the latter a nationality designation sometimes co-opted as an ethnic one. In fact, hardline Taiwanese independence separatists would consider themselves to be 中國人 zhong guo ren, since they live in the Republic of China. Slowly and subtly rebranding themselves as Taiwanese is first of all a massive disservice to the Indigenous peoples who have been terribly mistreated, and a sly but generally ineffective PR co-opting exercise, not to mention contemptible.
This is not about regional flavours, by the way. Plenty of Cantonese, Shanghainese and Sichuanese will proudly declare their ancestral roots without saying they aren’t Chinese. You can’t hold the national treasures in a fortress museum, the symbols of legitimacy and nationhood, and not call your cultural patrimony 華夏 hua xia. It certainly isn’t Indigenous Taiwanese.
So, who gets to be Chinese? Who gets to call themselves Chinese? Will Singapore become an outpost of the PRC, as some of the commentariat believe? For the Sinosphere, this is but the start of a protracted existential mini-crisis, with fault lines widening and factions heating. My greatest wish is for this mini-crisis to play out virtually without spilling over into flesh and blood.
After all, what is that saying we’ve heard since time immemorial? 天下太平 tian xia tai ping. May all under heaven be peaceful.
Will 14 Jan start another cycle of conflict? We shall see.
P. S. If you didn’t understand any of the Chinese terms without in-depth googling, I am not knowledge-shaming anyone, but the mere act of it also demonstrates how subtle the language of identifiers is, and how people of the Central Plains have sought, throughout history, to name themselves. As an example, Singapore does not use 漢人 han ren to refer to ethnic Han Chinese, but 華人 hua ren, both a politically shrewd distinguish-er and a nod to cultural rather than ethnic tones. Colloquially, almost every old-timer Chinese Singaporean uses 唐人 tang ren, person of Tang, the dynasty during which most of our ancestors pushed south and intermarried with the Yue peoples.