In Taiwan, Fear and Hope
The film "Invisible Nation" is a study in paradox.
Where will it begin, that WWIII nobody wants to think about?
Ukraine? Maybe. Baltic countries are girding to be Russia’s next target, and Putin has already called nuclear warfare with NATO inevitable in the current trajectory of invasion and self-defense.
Middle East? This weekend, Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones in retaliation for the assassination of Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi in its Syrian consulate. Israel claimed that he was a provider of strategy, training and resources for the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians at a music festival on October 7 — the attack that triggered Israel’s catastrophic invasion of Gaza. Iran’s air assault was repelled, but in the vortex of retaliation, what trigger will be pulled next?
Let’s not forget Kosovo, which, depending on whom you ask, is either an independent Balkan nation or an autonomous region of Serbia. After three decades of separatism, countless episodes of ethnic harassment and violence by and against the Albanian majority, NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia after the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars by the Serb military, the ongoing presence of peacekeeping troops and international observers and even broad international recognition of Kosovo’s statehood, it remains a tinderbox. With reports of Serbian troops massed near the Kosovo border, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić three weeks ago warned of imminent actions in defense of Serb interests.
“Difficult days are ahead of Serbia,” he posted on Facebook, without specifying who, what, when or where. “At this moment, it is not easy to say what kind of news we have received in the last 48 hours, [but] they directly threaten our vital national interests, both of Serbia and [Republika] Srpska … In the coming days, I will introduce the people of Serbia to all the challenges that lie ahead. It will be difficult. We will fight. Serbia will win.”
Yikes, that’s ominous, especially considering Serbia’s closest ally is Vladimir Putin.
If you’re worried that some regional crisis will lead to a superpower showdown, none of these developments is very reassuring. So much violence. So many tensions. So many opportunities for miscalculation. Speaking as someone who was trained in 1st grade to cower under my school desk in case the Cuban Missile Crisis spawned nuclear war, the headlines are Proustian Madeleines summoning Cold War memories. Although, not, you know, in a good way.
Thing is, that was by no means an exhaustive list of powder kegs. As made abundantly clear in the forthcoming documentary Invisible Nation by director Vanessa Hope, not to be ignored is Taiwan — also known as the Republic of China. Which sure sounds like a country. But let’s just say that is a subject of dispute.
This small archipelago clustered around the main island of Formosa is densely packed with 24 million people, mostly Han Chinese, situated 110 miles across the Taiwan Strait from the mainland People’s Republic of China. The existential problem is that mainland China doesn’t countenance any notion of an independent Taiwan. Nor do 181 of the 193 United Nations member states, the US among them. Nor does the United Nations itself, nor the World Health Organization, nor the International Olympic Committee. Nor, as of a couple of weeks ago, the mighty Republic of Nauru.
“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne in 1664, “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” The Beijing corollary would be, “No island is an island, either. So don’t get any funny ideas.”
Enter Vanessa Hope. In 1995 and 1996, she lived in Taiwan amid the first-ever direct presidential election campaign since the authoritarian and nationalistic Kuomintang party ended martial law in 1987. It was a multiparty contest, generating high aspirations for the then-fledgling democracy.
High aspirations, and, on the other side of the strait, high anxiety. Though the leading candidate, Lee Teng-hui, had been deliberately vague about matters of sovereignty, the Communist Party was, you might say, just done with all the independence chatter that flourished along with Taiwanese democratic freedoms. You might also say the PRC was just Donne with such chatter. As Hope only too vividly recalls, “They sent missiles flying over us.” Not hypothetical missiles, either, like the ones I crouched under my first-grade desk in fear of. These were actual missiles, which made an impression on her. As did the election’s outcome. When Lee prevailed, “I borrowed a camera and ran around filming inauguration weekend.”
Flash forward 20 years. Having completed a documentary about US-China relations, Hope was asked to join an international group monitoring the 2016 Taiwanese elections. Well, hell yes. One of the candidates was Tsai Ing-wen, a dour but courageous professor who was outspoken about Taiwan’s statehood. If Tsai won, she’d be only the second popularly elected leader of Taiwan and the first woman president. Hope knew she had the chance to document the moment. In her previous film about the region, she says, “Taiwan plays a small role in terms of US arms sales to Taiwan upsetting the leaders of China. But I knew there was much more to Taiwan’s story.”
The election-monitoring gig is what you call serendipity. Or, in the documentary world: indescribable peril. You will notice that most docs are retrospective. They explore stuff that has happened already. The denouement is known before production ever begins, but it forecloses the most terrifying risk of a prospective production: nothing particularly interesting or dramatic happening at all. Or, maybe worse, something that happens at the end making your months or years or many years of work instantaneously irrelevant. When she committed to following Tsai through the last stages of campaigning and up to eight years in office, it was a triumph of Hope over common sense.
“Nobody knew what they were getting us into,” she says, “including me.”
Yes, Hope made the foolish choice, and we now will be ever richer for it.
Invisible Nation is a riveting, intermittently inspiring and ultimately troubling look at what may well wind up as a brief interregnum in Taiwan’s history, bookended by Chiang Kai-shek’s military dictatorship and eventual annexation by Beijing. Early in the film, for instance, we see a clip of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping vowing to end the schism, one way or another:
We will continue to strive for peaceful reunification with the greatest sincerity and the utmost effort, but we will never promise to renounce the use of force, and we reserve the option of taking all measures necessary. This is directed solely at interference by outside forces and the few separatists seeking ‘Taiwan independence’ and their separatist activities; it is by no means targeted at our Taiwan compatriots.
That is what diplomats call “a frank and candid exchange,” and what everybody else calls “a naked threat.” And it is Taiwan’s Sword of Damocles. By population, mainland China is 59 times larger than Taiwan. Its economy (measured in nominal GDP) is 10 times larger. Taiwan is rated by the think tank Global Firepower as the 24th strongest military in the world. Not bad. China is third.
To have such an adversary is, let’s just say, an unenviable position. Not to mention the geopolitics, which are a version of realpolitik, based on econopolitics. What Russia’s nuclear arsenal does to limit American retaliation to its many provocations, PRC’s consumer marketplace accomplishes all by itself. The world’s biggest supplier and the world’s potentially biggest customer gets to set the rules of engagement. It also gets to renege on promises without consequences. “One country, two systems,” to describe Taiwan’s political and economic freedom relative to Beijing rings a bit hollow, as it is exactly what Beijing said about Hong Kong in 1997 when the erstwhile British colony was handed over to Beijing. Promises or no promises, free speech and democracy in Hong Kong have since been incrementally suppressed to the near vanishing point. If, or when, Beijing makes its move on Taiwan, will the global stewards of democracy lift a finger? Will they come to Taiwan’s defense anymore than they came to Hong Kong’s defense when China clarified that its pledge of “One country, two systems” translates to “One country, one system, and by the way you are under arrest”?
What powers Hope’s film is the steadfast refusal by Tsai, parliamentarians and other brave democracy advocates to accept such a cruel destiny. Without the bluster or histrionics that characterize modern politics throughout the world, Tsai has labored during two terms in office to build Taiwan’s institutions and to prepare the nation to defend both its borders and its values. This includes massive growth to the military budget and civil-defense, which scenes add a poignant underdog vibe to the movie. If you squint, the civil defense maneuvers recall David vs. Goliath but it’s really more evocative of The Mouse that Roared, a 1955 comic novel by Leonard Wibberly in which a tiny European duchy invades America with bows and arrows.
Notwithstanding the staggering odds, the central tension of Invisible Nation is Tsai’s stolid defiance in the face of them. It’s simply thrilling to witness, especially when she is invited to cross one of Beijing’s ever-present red lines. In the film, we see a BBC journalist ask the president, “Will there ever come a time when you feel you need to make a formal declaration of independence?”
Her reply, delivered with all the raw emotion of an airport departure announcement, is glorious: “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state — we are an independent nation.”
It’s all you can do not to rise, breaking into applause. Glorying in the plucky, courageous, liberating, inspiring present is one of Invisible Nation’s charms — and also quite the paradox, inviting us to savor the inherent optimism attached to the Tsai presidency despite the mortal threats to a democratic future. In fact, it is one of the three paradoxes upon which the film is constructed.
Another is its feminist subtext. Original funding came via a $100,000 grant from the Women, Peace and Security Project of the Compton Foundation. Hope more than fulfilled her obligations to the foundation, but not by larding the film with feminist doctrine or anything resembling polemic (there is no narration). It is a powerful and intentionally feminist document in its essence — by focusing on Taiwan’s first female president and forever:
“I just think the discrimination women face, marginalization, isolation, silencing, second class status is what Taiwan faces,” Hope says. In other words: the condition of a nation as a microcosm of a condition of humanity itself. In place of “mainland China,” just substitute “the patriarchy” and you can see what Hope is getting at.
Surely there is no better protagonist for this exercise than President Tsai Ing-wen, who cops to her reputation as a cold fish, notoriously exuding none of the incandescence we associate with political insurgents. She doesn’t do bombast. She has the demeanor of an actuary. “Nobody thinks I’m a warm person,” she acknowledges — which acknowledgment is itself endearing. Beyond that, it raises the question about (especially male) expectations of a leader. Who says we need a Stepford president, grinning stupidly in all circumstances, including but not limited to scandal and/or indictment? As we inevitably come to realize, many a genius is undemonstrative and the barracuda is also a cold fish.
Paradox number three is how Tsai’s diffidence — in its quiet dignity, determination and keen political omniscience — comes to constitute a charisma all its own. Her reserve is so genuine as to border on the seductive, especially when she ever-so-slightly breaks character. When we get a brief glimpse at something verging on puckishness — her amused frustration when her cat repeatedly interrupts a recorded interview in her home — we cannot but kinda fall in love.
This was one of the critical scenes in the movie, filmed by Hope on her last day in Taiwan. The setting was Tsai’s gracious home, where she was seated and mic-ed up for the interview. Just as she replied to the first question, her cat XiangXiang began to mewl. Tsai blinks, then starts to answer again. Meooooow. It’s hard to describe her reaction, which is clear frustration but also amusement as a wry smile just barely slips across her face. “XiangXiang means ‘ThinkThink,’” Tsai mordantly remarks. “But she doesn’t.”
I ask you, how can someone be so simultaneously dull and irresistible? I asked Hope about the moment, which she described as “an acceptance of the absurdity of thinking you can control everyone and everything around you. She has a good sense of humor about reality. She’s not living in a fantasy world of power and control. She’s not a dictator. ‘Go get rid of that cat. It’s ruining the shot.’”
That interpretation also seems to be refracted through a feminist prism; the comparison to male leaders is implicit. And probably pretty dead on.
As to the conflict between the film’s optimism and the likelihood of eventual catastrophe, Hope tries to be hopeful. Joe Biden has, after all, said four times that the United States will defend Taiwan’s interests — notably departing from the previous half-century of the so-called “strategic ambiguity” doctrine on such a prospect. And in the event of attack or blockade, other regional powers could well intervene, as Japan and the Philippines have their own existential stake in combating Chinese expansionism. So there are scenarios in which Beijing is stymied. Still, when I voice my pessimism, Hope confesses to moments of despair.
“Everybody working on this project has been feeling all the feelings that you describe,” she says.
On the other hand, she cannot unsee the image that first electrified her: that shot in the film of the triumphant Tsai Ing-wen exulting in her 2016 election victory. There was the dour academic acknowledging her throngs of ecstatic supporters, smiling the widest smile you’ve seen, on what Tsai describes as “the most emotional day of my life.” The image fills your heart and focuses you on the prize.
Realpolitik is realpolitik, but hope springs eternal.
This is an excellent essay - thanks very much for so much insight and background. I hope I can find this documentary.