Determined to See Taiwan: A Review + Travelogue
48 hours with Taiwan history, big-hearted film producers, five NZ ministers of parliament, an ambassador, wineries, toothy sourdough, and soul-stirring coastal scenery that rivals Big Sur.
How far would you drive for a movie?
This past weekend, I made an 8-9 hour trek from Wellington—in New Zealand’s North Island—down to Christchurch in the South Island. It was a wager.
Officially, I was invited to the Doc Edge film festival in Christchurch to moderate the Q&A session for a screening of Invisible Nation—a new, award-winning film about Taiwan and its first female president, Tsai Ing-wen.1
But I’m always on the lookout for and trying to connect with my people—Un-Diplomatic types, if you will. I was betting my birthday weekend that hanging out with Vanessa and Ted Hope—award-winning indie filmmakers who run the production company Double Hope Films—would be worth the journey.
Vanessa, the director of Invisible Nation, had been pouring her soul into this film for somewhere between seven and twenty-five years, depending on when you date the start of the project. Early in the film, you’re treated to brief footage Vanessa captured on Taipei’s streets during the inauguration of Taiwan’s first democratically elected president, Lee Teng-hui, in 1996. The political has its start in the personal.
Seeing the Invisible
You may recall that 1995-1996 was a dicey time in China-Taiwan relations. Prior to this film, I’d never considered what it might’ve been like to be on the ground in Taipei amid the so-called Third Taiwan Strait Crisis.
China saw Taiwanese democracy as a potential challenge to its multi-decade claim that Taiwan constituted part of China even though, as the film makes clear, the PRC has never controlled, owned, or held Taiwan. The Clinton administration had somewhat clumsily managed its ties to both China and Taiwan throughout this period. And as I explained in Pacific Power Paradox, it was this series of incidents in the Taiwan Strait that solidified the view of both the US and Chinese militaries that each was a long-term competitor of the other.
By the time the slow-burning crisis was over (it spread over many months), China had fired warning missiles over Taiwan; the US had issued a veiled nuclear threat and deployed an aircraft carrier in the direction of the Taiwan Strait (it never actually sailed through the Strait); and both China and the US had conducted military exercises, signalling the diplomacy of violence.
I’d been in touch with Vanessa the past couple years while she was in post-production on Invisible Nation, though we’d never met in person. And I honestly didn’t know what to expect from the film. There tends to be a tradeoff between emotional resonance and good analysis—the more you achieve one, the more you sacrifice the other. It’s also hard to communicate to both general audiences and policy wonks at the same time. It’s equally difficult to talk about abstractions like geopolitics while telling a protagonist-centered story.
But Vanessa is a longtime student of China and Taiwan, and, for reasons I’ll explain, this might’ve been a film that only she could make.
Invisible Nation situates Tsai Ing-Wen’s presidency in a narrated history of Taiwan’s political evolution from dictatorship to social democracy. In so doing, it manages to make the personal political and vice versa. It invites questions about what is to be done now. And it hits emotional chords without forsaking the larger power-political context. During our screening, many Taiwanese (and two Ukrainian refugees) in the audience were visibly emotional, hearts swelling with pride at being fairly portrayed. Being seen.
The film really does make you see Taiwan—they’re a self-determining people who happen to exist in the shadow of a much larger neighbor. The documentary’s title—Invisible Nation—gestures at the way in which China has gone to great lengths to erase Taiwan’s existence from international society.
The brilliance of the film is that it leaves the viewer to sit with an uncomfortable tension: Taiwan is a florid democracy whose aspirations to keep on living as an independent nation conflict with the CCP’s preferences. Taiwan wants peace, but not at any price. China wants peace, but on terms that are likely to suffocate Taiwan’s political and cultural identity. The geopolitics are such that otherwise reasonable assertions of nationhood carry existential risks. It’s a situation crying out to be reframed, reimagined, because the current frame sets us up for conflict.
Taiwan On Its Own Terms
Of course, film is art and art is open to interpretation. Because Invisible Nation paints China in some dark hues, the film might be vulnerable to unfair critiques that it’s either one-sided or part of some larger anti-China project.
The most striking, even noble, thing about Invisible Nation is that it was 85 minutes of Taiwan effectively holding the mic. Giving voice to Taiwanese national identity and the Taiwan perspective on the big screen is brave; a commendable use of Western privilege to help Taiwan tell its story.
The movie industry is dominated by autocratic—and specifically Chinese—money. While right-wing think tanks have made a scandal of Chinese influence in Hollywood, their critiques are not entirely off base, just disgustingly selective. Heritage Foundation, AEI, and others have nothing to say about the prominence of Israeli arms dealers or Saudi oil profits corrupting the production and distribution of cinema. Everyone is worried about biting the hand that feeds them, and even geopolitically aloof auteurs would feel the pressure not to piss off the 800-pound gorilla in the room…which might be why we haven’t yet seen a film about Taiwanese national identity!2
Now, “influence” is not always a bad thing, and the CCP is not a totalitarian regime. But, as I’ve written before, it is an ethnonationalist oligarchy.3 It practices authoritarian state capitalism and a version of settler colonialism in its non-Han periphery. That’s bad, and an important context within which to understand China’s revanchist attitude toward Taiwan.
But threat perceptions are part of national identity. Taiwan has good reason to see China as menacing in a way that many others might not. To worry about a Chinese invasion and the reasons why such a nightmare could come to pass is an existential matter for Taiwan. In a way, so is the global diplomatic campaign to be seen as a normal nation in the world. To represent Taiwanese national identity on film, therefore, you must relay to the audience the threat as Taiwan sees it. Invisible Nation does that without validating hyperbole. And because this is about Taiwan, China does not take center stage at any rate.
Taiwan As Synecdoche
Taiwan has been dealt a shitty hand in geopolitics. When its democracy emerged in 1996, it was despite—not because of—US foreign policy. America actively stood in the way of Taiwan’s self-determination for decades. Its military dictatorship was a US client state.
As a matter of policy, we never saw Taiwan’s people; we saw it as a piece on a chessboard. I worry about the many Washington types who see Taiwan as a giant semiconductor and nothing more. Or as a lynchpin for the first-island chain and nothing more. Or as a conscript in a new Cold War and nothing more. The US pundit class, to a great extent, has taken an interest in Taiwan in a Western-gaze sort of way. Taiwan is an object on which to project our fantasies, be they military, grand strategic, or morally redemptive. America’s political class extracts pleasure and purpose from Taiwan’s exposure to existential danger.
This is wrong, and it’s also the sort of thinking that created the highly combustible situation we find ourselves in today—it’s why Taiwan has been dealt a shitty geopolitical hand.
Edward Said urged us to see the world from the perspective of its victims. Feminist foreign policy stresses not only equality and representation but also redressing imbalances of geopolitical power. Both perspectives recognize that only justice, in the final analysis, begets peace. Invisible Nation suggests (implicitly, not didactically) that we ought to understand Taiwan in these ways.
If we did, we’d see Taiwan’s struggle for recognition as being of a category with struggles for self-determination in Guam and New Caledonia; with the People’s Defense Force waging a guerrilla war against the junta in Myanmar; with Palestinian liberation; and with Ukraine’s resistance against Russian domination.
I find it deeply troubling that few people are capable of seeing Palestine, Guam, New Caledonia, Ukraine, Taiwan, and minority groups in Myanmar in common. On the left and the right, we find so many people dividing these struggles in self-serving and analytically incorrect ways.
But when you look at Taiwan, you should see its 24 million people insisting on self-determination as a cause to which we owe solidarity. For moral people, the debate is only about how, not whether, to stand with Taiwan’s society. Invisible Nation invites that conversation.