Taiwan, Palestine, and Cross-Movement Solidarity in an Increasingly Campist World
By: Aurora Chang
Image: Minsik Jung
Reading news about the wave of pager bomb attacks in Lebanon, witnessing the scramble to investigate Taiwan's role in another Israeli crime against humanity, and seeing reactions online towards this attack has left a sinking feeling in my stomach because the questions being asked are all wrong. In Taiwan, we saw media coverage of Taiwanese company Gold Apollo that asked if they were the manufacturers or not and whether the pagers used in the attack were made in Taiwan. This media coverage failed to contextualise the attack or even mention its implications, which we are seeing now as Israel tells its troops to prepare for a possible ground operation in Lebanon. There was nothing of Israel's terror in the region, the genocide they're committing against Palestine, and how it all relates to Lebanon and Hezbollah. To me, the coverage felt like an attempt to save face, to emphasise that surely a Taiwanese company couldn't possibly be involved in this kind of violence, right?
Yet even if Gold Apollo by their own words didn't manufacture those pagers, it's no secret that the Taiwanese government is pro-Israel, or that there exist companies and institutions within Taiwan that are complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestine. This is something that a lot of pro-Palestine Western campists like to bring up as an argument against Taiwanese independence. At the core of a lot of the reactions I've seen online regarding Gold Apollo and the pagers is the irrefutable fact that Taiwan does have a unique relationship with the US, which some describe as clientelist or neocolonial. It is, in brief, characterised by our dependence on US allyship for deterrence against China. This is a subject that I’ve thought extensively about and discussed over and over again with my Taiwanese friends. Our country’s relationship with the US is not something Taiwanese people are blind to, and contrary to popular opinion in certain online spaces, neither is it something that we are particularly happy about.
I've been fairly involved in the small but growing pro-Palestinian organising groups in Taiwan which cropped up after October 7 last year, and my experience with this has been hopeful in some ways, yes, but for the most part disappointing and distressing.
Hopeful because of the comrades I've met who get it, who stand together in the diminishingly small intersection of being pro-Palestine and pro-Taiwanese independence; hopeful because against a lot of odds, we're seeing some of our efforts slowly pay off, opinions on Palestine and Israel changing for the better, individual by individual.
Disappointing because after almost a year of Israel intensifying its genocide in Gaza, our government largely has not changed its official position or even given way to any of our demands. Hours of planning can go into organising marches, press conferences, and strategising the best ways to sway the people to our cause while also holding the government accountable for its complicity. This is time that our comrades volunteer out of a shared belief in Palestinian resistance and desire to see a free Palestine in our lifetime. We can draw a good number of Taiwanese people to protest for Palestine but barely get any media coverage on these solidarity events, especially not from pan-green media outlets. The circles of solidarity and empathy towards Palestine in Taiwan are expanding, but at a rate that feels just too slow, too heartbreaking.
Finally, distressing because for our efforts we've been slandered and attacked from all over the political spectrum: from Taiwanese Zionists and deep-green nationalists for being pro-Palestine, calling us Chinese spies and bootlickers; from the Israeli Representative Office, calling us anti-Semitic for protesting the Israeli genocide of Palestine; from Western campists, who fed-jacket us for holding on to our core belief that Taiwan deserves self determination and liberation from oppression just like everybody else.
Western campists demand that we answer for Taiwan's relationship with the US and Palestine's relationship with China just for holding the position that both Taiwan and Palestine need to be free. Our harshest critics often come from countries that by any measure contribute more to the genocide than Taiwan, yet hold us to higher standards and expect perfect activism.
A close friend of mine was attacked by the head of security of the Israeli Representative Office here for quietly holding up an anti-war sign at a pro-Israel event, and despite us holding a press conference, getting international media coverage, and sending letters to Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there has been no resolution for him, no justice. Israel committed a blatant act of transnational repression within Taiwanese borders and was effectively allowed to get away with it.
On a personal level, I've been harassed, accused of being a US federal agent, accused of being a Chinese spy, cyberstalked, and in some cases sent rape and death threats for being vocal online about both Taiwan and Palestine. While the abuse is not unexpected, the most bitter thing for me is that outside of direct victims of US imperialism, there is nobody who understands US tyranny more than those who are forced to rely upon it. We are supposedly pawns of one imperial power and victims of another, a people still reckoning with our bloody colonial history and authoritarian legacy while fighting an existential struggle in the present.
Many of us recognise that the US is not the benevolent, freedom-loving, democracy-promoting ally that it projects itself to be, and I will not deny that Taiwan’s agitation for self-determination and decolonisation is mired in liberal rhetoric favourable to the Western world. We are forced to ask if not the US and the West, then what? Chinese invasion and colonisation? And it is the indignity of this position that puts our most liberal politicians in bed with American fascists in the name of defending Taiwanese freedom and democracy, while campists who reside comfortably within the imperial core jeer at us and demand we pay for this complicity with our freedom, dignity, and lives.
On the other hand, I cannot name how many times in the Taiwanese independence movement and other adjacent movements that I've met people who are “on the right side” of the “Taiwan question,” who use the rhetoric of human rights and decolonisation and are always quick to criticise China, yet fail to recognise that their own countries commit the same crimes China does, if not currently then at the very least historically.
Are these people my allies, when they advocate for my country's existence at the expense of another's?
The silver lining is that in all of the movements I interact with – Taiwan, Tibet, Ukraine, Palestine, Uyghurs, Hong Kong, etc. – there will always be people who do understand that solidarity is not transactional, and that it happens between peoples and not states. Taiwan's independence does not begin and end at our relationship with China or the US, and our identity is more than being a fucking silicon shield or a chess piece in inter-imperialist rivalries. And regardless of what anybody – be it the Taiwanese government or campist critics abroad – might say, there will always be Taiwanese people who stand with Palestine.