From Independence to Interdependence: Taiwan Independence as

Critique, Strategy, and Method toward Decoloniality

Wen Liu

American Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 2, June 2021, pp. 371-377 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2021.0018

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/796792
 Taiwan Independence as Critique, Strategy, and Method toward Decoloniality | 371

From Independence to Interdependence:

Taiwan Independence as Critique,
Strategy, and Method toward
Decoloniality
Wen Liu

T
aiwan’s precarious sovereignty has been centered on the discourse of
being caught between the two imperial powers—the US and the ris-
ing Chinese Empire.1 The modern nation-state formation of Taiwan
today, the Republic of China (ROC), would not have existed without the
following: first, US imperial domination over Asia-Pacific during the Cold
War, and second, the Chinese Kuomintang’s (KMT) rule on the island after
the Chinese civil war in 1945, with the military and financial support from
the US.2 Historically speaking, Taiwan is inevitably entangled between Han
Chinese settler colonialism and Americanism, and their continuously com-
peting yet coexisting influences over the country’s political economy, cultural
practices, and national identity. To resist centuries of colonial rule on the island,
Taiwan Independence, as multifaced movements that consist of heterogeneous
ideologies from both the left and the right, is not necessarily equal to the
present expressions of ROC nationalism. Whereas the stance on anti-Chinese
imperialism, particularly on China’s territorial claims of Taiwan, is generally
shared among the Taiwanese Independence milieus, the defense of Taiwanese
sovereignty in the current “New Cold War” global order continues to turn
toward a conservative alliance with the US military and economic power. This
tendency not only feeds into an increasingly right-wing US Empire but also
marginalizes and erases the possibilities of leftist international support for
Taiwan Independence.3
In seeking de facto independence from China’s annexation attempt, the
fetishism surrounding the nation-state form in the right-wing of the Taiwan
Independence milieu often limits the vision of sovereignty within a Westpha-
lian definition of modern nationalism and reproduces a Sino-American Cold
War competition between democracy and authoritarianism. This dwelling
discourse of being “between two empires,” in fact, reproduces the normative

© 2021 The American Studies Association

372 | American Quarterly

conditions of global capitalism as well as settler colonial knowledges of Han

Chinese and Taiwanese domination over Indigenous Austronesian peoples in
Taiwan.4 Therefore, in this essay, I assert that a leftist Taiwan Independence
movement must be both anti-imperial and anti-colonial. Rather than seeking
Taiwan Independence—the global recognition of Taiwanese national sover-
eignty—as an absolute end goal, a decolonizing practice of Independence is
to become independent from Taiwan’s role in sustaining a Cold War imaginary
that is no longer productive against the increasingly authoritarian US and
neoliberal China. Additionally, it necessitates a politics that situates Taiwan in
the interdependent relations between the nation’s anti-imperial resistance and
de-Sinicization, and Indigenous peoples’ struggle of decolonization. To put
forth a left-oriented vision for our movement and practice toward sovereignty, I
argue that it would be more productive to conceptualize Taiwan Independence
as critique, strategy, and method toward a broader decolonial project that chal-
lenges both the imperial domination and settler colonial relations.

Critique of Sovereignty

Frequently, the discussion on Taiwan Independence is steered toward a debate

around its state of sovereignty. From a “province of China” as claimed by the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) and an “administrative division” by the US
Central Intelligence Agency,5 to an inconclusive recognition of self-ruled “is-
land” or a de facto “civic nation”—scholars have argued both for and against
the categorical recognition of Taiwan as a nation-state.6 Despite all these
conversations around statehood, discussion has focused little on the notion
of sovereignty itself, as it has been taken for granted as a postcolonial form of
national governance. This phenomenon has significantly limited Taiwan In-
dependence to a matter of international relations, instead of a deeper inquiry
into imperial domination and ongoing coloniality in Taiwan.7
Whereas critical scholars on globalization have articulated the instability
of sovereignty underneath forces of global capitalism, Yarimar Bonilla asserts
that the notion of sovereignty is not specific to globalization but an ontological
problem in relation to coloniality.8 As a particular form of postcolonial norma-
tive ideal about nations, rights, and citizenship, she argues that sovereignty is
in itself a Euro-American colonial concept that is grounded in colonial treaties
with Indigenous communities, marking territorial boundaries to justify the
continuing practices of dispossession, disfranchisement, and legalizing differ-
ences between the settlers and Indigenous communities. After World War II,
 Taiwan Independence as Critique, Strategy, and Method toward Decoloniality | 373

sovereignty has emerged as a concept about pursuing self-determination and

social change among Indigenous scholars and activists. However, Joanne Barker
observes sovereignty is frequently generalized across all Indigenous communities
and used to reinforce ideas about normative legal and political rights, rather
than understanding it as heterogeneous and inseparable from the diverse em-
bodiments of Indigenous identities, cultures, and epistemologies.9 Therefore,
the challenge is to understand “how and for whom sovereignty matters.”10
Subjugated under ROC’s constitutional policy of Chinese nationalism
(zonghua minzu) and ethnic unification, the sovereignty of the aboriginal tribes
in Taiwan is conceptualized through the category of minority rights, rather
than independent and self-governing nations.11 The stateless status of Taiwan
in the United Nations further marginalizes Taiwanese Indigenous peoples’
sovereignty in the realm of international politics, where they lack official
representations in organizing bodies such as the United Nations Permanent
Forum on Indigenous Issues. In this sense, the nonsovereign conditions of
Taiwan are not merely about its lack of de jure independence status; they are
multilayered and entangled in Han Chinese domination and Euro-American
centrist international politics. Hence an anti-imperial struggle via a hegemonic
“Taiwanese” ethnic nationalism is doomed to be incomplete and replicating
colonial mentality. An ontological critique of sovereignty makes visible how
our activist practices toward national independence and self-determination
are often intertwined with ongoing colonial forces that have taken away our
sovereignties in the first place.
From Taiwan and Hong Kong to Okinawa, Puerto Rico, and Palestine—
many postcolonial states are trapped between multiple imperial forces and
have in fact resulted in enduring forms of nonsovereignty in global imperial
politics.12 While technically “postcolonial,” these nonsovereign or semisov-
ereign societies continue to host many spaces of “suspended, subcontracted,
usurped, or imposed foreign jurisdictions” such as military bases, free-trade
zones, and occupied colonies that escape the Westphalian order of territorial
authority.13 Consequently, the constrained sovereignty of Taiwan is far from a
global “exception” or historically specific “paradox” to be forcibly corrected via
further imperial and colonial means. Alternatively, it provides fertile ground
for building a broader leftist alliance beyond the US–China–Taiwan geopoliti-
cal triad and seeking structural changes and solidarity based on the material
conditions of oppressed communities.
374 | American Quarterly

Strategy against Cold War Binarism

The ongoing coloniality in Taiwan not only reproduces a settler colonial men-
tality that subsumes indigenous sovereignty under the colonial nation-state
but also inevitably frames Taiwan Independence as an ontological impossibil-
ity—either doomed to be a failure due to China’s military threats or perpetually
trapped between the two imperial powers. As a consequence, the insecurity of
sovereignty fuels the mainstream pro-independence milieu’s overreliance on US
military and financial power. This phenomenon is a troubling development
in transpacific geopolitics,14 as it erases the fact that the US can easily betray
its diplomatic promises when they no longer suit its economic and political
interests.15 The overreliance on the “anti-communist” fraction of the US Right
also demystifies the fact that the present volatile US–China relations are a result
not of the competing Cold War ideologies but of the regimes’ responses to a
paradigmatic shift amid their respective crises of global capitalist accumulation.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, both the regimes have extended their imperial
reach—from US “Pivot to Asia” and “Indo-Pacific Strategy”16 to China’s “Belt
and Road Initiative”17—to solve their internal debt crises and counter each
other’s geopolitical influences in Asia, which is a drastic turn from the previous
mutually beneficial neoliberal partnership between the two powers.
Under the increasing reality of a “New Cold War,” it’s ever more urgent for
leftists to develop a material analysis on the shifting global capitalist condi-
tions. Taiwan Independence can serve as a strategy of clarifying what’s really
at stake for the imperial powers: expansion of neoliberal trades, restructuring
of the economy via debt financing, assertion of technological dominance,
and creation of control measures over workers and other marginalized com-
munities. Both the US and China have created conditions of subjugation for
Taiwanese, although with qualitatively different impacts for various ethnic
and class groups. We must be clear that these imperial interests will not be
easily swayed by a change of leadership in Washington or Beijing. The regimes
breathe and survive through their internal drive toward expansion, accumula-
tion, exploitation, and domination. Instead of choosing sides from the pretense
of a Cold War ideological rivalry, the present disfranchisements and austerity
that marginalized communities face should be the common point of alliance
building across nation-states that perpetuate our nonsovereign conditions.
 Taiwan Independence as Critique, Strategy, and Method toward Decoloniality | 375

Toward a Method of Multiple Sovereignties

A central principle of a leftist Taiwan Independence vision is to recognize

that nation-state building in settler societies is inseparable from capitalist
processes of accumulation and dispossession of those who are deemed unfit
for the ethnic nation-state. A settler nation is built on ongoing relations of
coloniality in the structure of governance, identity construction, and cultural
practice. Building toward an Indigenous-centered sovereignty is not merely
about correcting historical wrongs to the Indigenous communities but also
about seeking transforming values through denaturalizing the oppressive
structures—ethnic-national, heteropatriarchal, and developmentalist—inher-
ently constituted in the Han settler society. Today, despite the nascent efforts
under the transnational justice programs and the inclusion of Indigeneity in
the Taiwanese “national imaginary,”18 the ROC regime has continually granted
class, cultural, and linguistic privileges to the ethnically Han populations from
both of the major political parties.19
While the Taiwan Independence milieus and Indigenous activists may
share a common goal in seeking de-Sinicization by asserting sovereign claims
to identity, land, and history, the construction of sovereignty is never singu-
lar but contains multiple iterations. Amis Indigenous activist Namoh Nofu
Pacidal asserts that the multiple layers of sovereignty in Taiwan must start
with a recognition of the de facto sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over the
land above the state form of any foreign regime, including the current ROC
state.20 This framework necessitates the alliance between Taiwan Indepen-
dence movements to take seriously that the present inequalities between Han
Taiwanese and Indigenous peoples are not merely distributional but based on
an ontological denial of Indigenous stewardship of the land and knowledge.
It further emphasizes that as a method of multiple sovereignties, Taiwan In-
dependence’s goal is not about building a normative nation-state; instead, it
seeks to challenge its present reification. For example, the present Indigenous
movement in Taiwan for the right to hunt contests the territorial and legal
restrictions between the state and Indigenous tribes, the relationship between
human rights and cultural life, and a developmentalist versus an ecological
approach to nature and land resources.21 The movement not only challenges
the legitimacy of the ROC rule of laws but also the deeply rooted settler logic
of the Han Chinese.
It’s critical to note that Taiwanese sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty are
neither mutually exclusive nor always in a competing relationship of interests.
376 | American Quarterly

Since the Sunflower Movement in 2014, the idea of Indigenous Independence

(yuandu) has gained more traction in the public discourse and challenged the
dominant paradigm of the Taiwan Independence movement based on Han
ethnocentrism.22 Such sovereign projects are merely representational, but are
crucial to highlight the problem of sovereignty itself as initially situated in
colonial domination and legal boundary-making of racial and ethnic differ-
ences. Looking at Taiwan as a site of knowledge, it’s clear that simply having
conditional sovereignty—Taiwanese nationalism—will not resolve its internal
class, ethnic, and gendered inequalities. Beyond building a united front against
the PRC, Taiwan Independence necessitates a politics of decoloniality that
builds alliances across the dispossessed, impoverished, queer, and migrant
communities—those whose participation in the nation-state form has been
conditional and limited. The struggle toward sovereignty, in this sense, is
forever unfinished yet full of radical potential.

Notes
I would like to express my very great appreciation to Wendy Cheng and Chih-Ming Wang, whose
initiations made this forum possible, as well as Judy Wu’s and Leo Ching’s thoughtful feedback on
the essay.
1. Whether China has become a “neo-imperial” force has become a central debate across academic fields,
in which most of the conversations have been focused on China’s capitalist expansion in Africa. In this
essay, I maintain that China’s relationship to Taiwan has imperialist characteristics due to its aggressive
military threats, consistent territorial claims, and structural inequalities between how the PRC and
the ROC are valued and treated in global diplomatic relations.
2. Min-Hua Chiang, “The US Aid and Taiwan’s Post-War Economic Development, 1951–1965,” African
and Asian Studies 13.1–2 (2014): 100–120.
3. Funie Hsu, Brian Hioe, and Wen Liu, “Collective Statement on Taiwan Independence: Building
Global Solidarity and Rejecting US Military Empire,” American Quarterly 69.3 (2017): 465–68.
4. Shu-mei Shih, “Theory in a Relational World,” Comparative Literature Studies 53.4 (2016): 722–46.
5. The CIA’s World Factbook lists Taiwan as a separate administrative division but also notes under
China’s page that it claims Taiwan to be its twenty-third province: www.cia.gov/library/publications/
the-world-factbook/geos/tw.html (accessed June 30, 2020).
6. John Franklin Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province? (New York: Routledge, 2019). See also Rwei-
Ren Wu, “The Lilliputian Dream: Preliminary Observations of Nationalism in Okinawa, Taiwan, and
Hong Kong,” Nations and Nationalism 22.4 (2016): 686–705.
7. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a
Concept,” Cultural Studies 21.2–3 (2007): 240–70.
8. Yarimar Bonilla, “Unsettling Sovereignty,” Cultural Anthropology 32.3 (2017): 330–39.
9. Joanne Barker, ed., Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles
for Self-Determination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
10. Barker, 21.
11. Kun-hui Ku, “Rights to Recognition: Minority/Indigenous Politics in the Emerging Taiwanese Na-
tionalism,” Social Analysis 49.2 (2005): 99–121.
 Taiwan Independence as Critique, Strategy, and Method toward Decoloniality | 377

12. This transnational alliance through the framework of “non-sovereignty,” particularly between Hong
Kong and Puerto Rico, was originally conceptualized through a panel organized by Dr. Yarimar Bonilla
and the Lausan Collective on December 5, 2019, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York,
where I was also a panelist. The transcript has been edited and published on Lausan’s website: lausan.
hk/2020/part-one-non-sovereign-revolutions-thinking-across-puerto-rico-and-hong-kong/ (accessed
June 30, 2020).
13. Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
14. Hsu, Hioe, and Liu, “Collective Statement on Taiwan Independence.”
15. Issac Stone Fish, “The Long Fall of Taiwan,” Atlantic, December 5, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/
international/archive/2016/12/taiwan-china-trump-beijing-mao-chiang/509582/.
16. Wolfgang Streek, “The Return of the Repressed,” New Left Review 104 (2017): 5–18.
17. Sit Tsui, Erebus Wong, Lau Kin Chi, and Wen Tiejun, “One Belt, One Road: China’s Strategy for a
New Global Financial Order,” Monthly Review 68.8 (2017): 36–45.
18. Tomonori Sugimoto, “Settler Colonial Incorporation and Inheritance: Historical Sciences, Indigeneity,
and Settler Narratives in Post-WWII Taiwan,” Settler Colonial Studies 8.3 (2018): 283–97.
19. Both the DPP and the KMT have explicitly and implicitly reinforced the settler colonial conditions
in Taiwan: the former through appropriating Indigenous histories as a justification for the political
independence of the island, and the latter by denying such histories to assert a timeless claim over the
island’s sovereignty. See Katsuya Hirano, Lorenzo Veracini, and Toulouse-Antonin Roy, “Vanishing
Natives and Taiwan’s Settler-Colonial Unconscious,” Critical Asian Studies 50.2 (2018): 196–218.
20. The framework of Indigenous Independence was presented by Namoh Nofu Pacidal at an event hosted
by Café Philo on April 22, 2019, in New York City, which I attended.
21. Chuan-Ju Cheng, “Analyzing Indigenous People’s Right to Hunt—From the Perspective of Two Hu-
man Rights Covenants,” Fu Jen Law Review 52 (2016): 1–60.
22. A fraction of the Taiwan Independence and the Indigenous Independence movements criticizes the
colonial structure of the ROC, which has promoted Han Chinese ethnonationalism. This critique was
targeted against the then president Ma Ying-jeou’s infamous endorsement and advocacy for Chinese
nationalism and identity based on Han ethnocentricism. See 原獨研究會, “破除馬習會的「一中
各表：原住民族獨立,” New Bloom Magazine, November 2015, newbloommag.net/2015/11/09/
aboriginal-independence-one-china/.