Taiwan’s Anti-China Polarization

Geopolitics is at once an abstract mode of thought and a way of dealing merely with the surface level of reality. When it becomes a fissure in your domestic politics, only bad things can happen.

Financial Times had a deep-dive piece about the fear among some Taiwanese that China could take over Taiwan “from within”:

many Taiwanese are far more concerned that Beijing could subvert their country from within, by tapping into long-standing cultural and economic links, grooming collaborators and sidelining the country’s elected government.

Even though an overwhelming majority of Taiwanese prefer to maintain the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, China paranoia (and its mirror, distrust of America) breaks sharply along partisan lines:

In essence, your party affiliation in Taiwan is a very strong predictor of whether you’re more likely to distrust the US or China. That’s problematic, especially because geopolitics is the primary political cleavage in this case.