Taiwan's Everywhere War

“Sitting around wood fires in front of their one-storey cement houses, they called out to him: ‘Galawas!’ That is his name, not the Chinese name on his uniform patch, which he, like all indigenous Taiwanese, was forced to wear until recently. These were his people, the Kaaluwan tribe”

“These mountains have long divided Taiwan into two worlds. The cities on the plains to the west, facing across the strait to China, are home to 22 million of the country’s 23.5 million people. That’s where the factories that make most of the world’s semiconductor chips are located, as well as the country’s major highways, rail lines and power plants. But on the east side of the range, farming villages perch on slim slivers of flat land between stretches of sheer cliff that drop into the ocean”

“Neither Chiang nor the communist leader Mao Zedong had shown any interest in Taiwan until the Chinese civil war. The island had been under Japanese rule since 1895 and, even before that, it was never more than loosely attached to China. But in 1945, with the help of the US, Chiang took over Taiwan. As Chiang slipped through Mao’s fingers, the Chinese Communist party claimed Taiwan had been part of China since time immemorial. Ever since, Beijing has insisted the island must unify with China, through military force if necessary”

“Pa enjoyed life in the military. ‘I was young. I had joined the special forces because I liked challenges,’ he told me. He developed a sense of pride and belonging. Short, tanned and muscular, he believes indigenous Taiwanese are better suited to being soldiers than their compatriots of Chinese heritage. Living in the mountains where they are often out hunting and fishing has made them tougher, he said”

“Pa applied for a transfer to an army unit closer to home and the morning after that September night in 2012 when he returned to Jialan, he reported to work at Taiping, a garrison a 40-minute motorcycle ride to the north”

“This was a true backwater. The narrow roads to the base passed through small indigenous villages and plantations of custard apple. Backed up against the mountains, the base was often wet with drizzle from the heavy clouds that settled on the mountains in the afternoon. From beneath that grey blanket, the white buildings of Taitung City and the Pacific Ocean could be seen gleaming under the sun in the distance”

“The base was home to the army’s Taitung Area Command. Its main task remains protecting Chihhang Air Base, where Taiwan’s air force would shelter part of its fighter fleet if the PLA were to invade across the strait on the other side of the island”

“‘When the Communist military didn’t have so much advanced equipment and so many ships yet, this was the rear,’ Major General Tan Yong, commander of the Taitung Area Command, told me. ‘The Central Mountain Range was our shield, and the enemy’s weapons couldn’t reach us’”

“Living so close to home, he became part of a close-knit group of fellow indigenous soldiers. More than half of the 1,800 soldiers who serve at Taiping are indigenous, at least 40 of them from Jialan. ‘I encourage the youngsters from my tribe to join the army and brought many of them in here,’ Pa said. One such soldier from his company lives to the right of his home, another to the left”

“On March 30 2015, a Chinese H-6 bomber transited the Bashi Channel, the strait between the southern tip of Taiwan and the Philippines, and flew out into the Pacific to the east of the island. The enemy had taken its first look behind Taiwan’s mountain shield”

“Over the next few months, the bombers appeared in pairs, then in packs of four, and later they came with electronic warfare planes and fighters. In November 2016, a group of Chinese warplanes flew the first full circle around Taiwan. As it cruised north, it had a panoramic view, theoretically allowing the crafts to target any point in eastern Taiwan. Warships soon followed. In April 2018, the Liaoning, China’s first aircraft carrier, held a battle drill east of Taiwan for the first time”

“The men and women at Taiping realised their mountain range was no longer a shield”

“After the former navy commander Admiral Lee Hsi-ming took over as chief of the general staff in 2017, he proposed a new defence strategy. Instead of trying to defeat China’s vastly superior air and naval forces head-on, Taiwan should ensure that any force attempting to come ashore would be slaughtered”

“But the military brass resisted. Lee’s concept would mean concentrating budgets on buying large numbers of relatively small weapons that would be easy to hide and move. Tsai Ing-wen, who became president in 2016, started boosting the military budget, but the generals kept spending the lion’s share on big new ships, planes and tanks”

“‘Taiwan cannot count on Beijing’s forbearance for its security,’ David Helvey, then the principal deputy assistant secretary of defence, told General Chang Guan-chung, Taiwan’s vice-minister for defence. ‘Taiwan [ . . . ] cannot afford to overlook preparing for the one fight it cannot afford to lose,’ he said. Helvey told Chang that Taipei needed to train and organise its forces better and empower junior and non-commissioned officers to make decisions at the lowest level — a matter of survival when a military unit is cut off from communications with senior commanders”

“The day after the drill, we drove to Jialan, past murals depicting the soldiers who rescued villagers from the raging floods after a typhoon hit in 2009. Their uniforms bore fantasy patches combining the wings of the paratrooper symbol with the hundred-pacer, a venomous snake that is the emblem of the Rukai people Pa’s tribe belongs to. Despite the close mesh between tribe and army, many in the village told me they doubt the force is anywhere near ready to fight”

“‘The flatlanders will not obey us. There is discrimination,’ he said. “They are hard to lead. They may tell you to your face, or let you know some other way’”

“Many of the people Pa wants to fight for are deeply ambivalent in their national identification. Tseng Ming-sheng, the policeman, was in a good mood watching his three grandchildren play. But he baulked at the idea that Taiwanese democracy and independence were worth fighting for. ‘I would rather have unification,’ he said”

“President Tsai has personally apologised for the wrongs done to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples by the ethnically Chinese majority and her government has supported the teaching of indigenous languages and the preservation of their cultures”

“But Tseng was unconvinced. After all, he said, his people, the Paiwan, were robbed of their way of life long ago when the Japanese rulers forcibly resettled them from the upper reaches of the river to Jialan in 1937. His marriage reflects that resettlement. His wife belongs to the Kanakanavu, one of the smallest tribes, and their only common language is Mandarin”

“The country he identifies with is the nationalist China that came with the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek”

“‘Look at Russia and Ukraine, how they fight, it’s no longer face to face. If we fight the Chinese communists, their missiles will drop, everyone will be dead, and everything will be over’”