Taiwan: 
An Ironic—and Precarious—Oasis of Peace, Equality, and Accountability

by Ian Hansen
15th Street Meeting

Taiwan has received steady attention over the decades, particularly recently, as a potential flashpoint for superpower conflict, with any invasion of Taiwan by China potentially upending global stability even more than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Discussion of this issue usually gets funneled into one of two standard viewpoints: U.S. imperial apologist or expansionist Chinese nationalist apologist. Working from my own experiences in Taiwan particularly (and also “Greater China” more broadly), as well as the interplay of these experiences with my connection to Friends and other peace communities, I have a rather idiosyncratic view. I side with those on both sides of the Taiwan Straits who like neither oppression nor war, and want to avoid the ensnaring logic of both.

My connection to Friends has intersected to some extent with my experience of Taiwan. My family has had the good fortune to overlap a couple of times, by serendipity, with Fifteenth Street Friends who were in Taiwan when we were there: Steven and AyJy, and their daughter Nation. The first time this happened was when both our families were enjoying the protected openness of Taiwan during the pre-vaccine height of the COVID pandemic. And we met them there again more briefly this January, and had a delightful time. Nation is now nine, and great at being an instant big sister to our five year old son Nathan.

In the past couple of years, I have also befriended a historically significant long term Taiwan human rights activist, Linda Gail Arrigo, and gotten a richer sense of the political history there from our conversations and emails. I owe this connection to Linda’s late sister Jean Maria and thus, indirectly, to the community of psychologists concerned with peace and human rights she was a leading light of, a community that has played a formative role in my more recent life. So communities of peace and human rights advocacy have continued to give me an independent sense of investment in Taiwan.

During our most recent visit this January, Linda suggested we could get the flavor of contemporary discourse in Taiwan from a political event in a historic Presbyterian church. That event made a lasting, and ominous, impression on me. Its unspoken assumption—all too common, unfortunately—was that peace work and human rights work are sometimes competitive values. The speakers, taking the podium in a revered institution of moral courage in Taiwan’s history, effectively argued that a vast reshaping of Taiwan’s society in preparation for war is what must be done to preserve Taiwan’s human rights-respecting democratic society—and presumably all the other advancements in public accountability, public education, public health, infrastructure, environmental responsibility, historical honesty, labor rights, sexual minority rights, indigenous rights, and rule of law. These accomplishments make Taiwan feel like an oasis to me, and an ironic one given the four decades of anticommunist dictatorial martial law and “white terror” that set the tone for Taiwan culture for more than half of its history under its current flag.

I understand the need to preserve all these accomplishments, accomplishments that have made Taiwan a standout in Asia and the world over the last few decades. And yet from everything I have digested from engaging with communities of peace, it seems obvious to me that war, even just preparations for it with the hope of “peace through strength”, gambles on erasing all those accomplishments. Yet still I understand why so many Taiwan people are willing to take the risk, though it means adding more dangerous ironies to the ones that make Taiwan so compelling. The foremost irony, in this case, is the culture of “Taiwan independence” reviving a militarism more characteristic of the old regime, militarism that independence culture has contributed greatly to attenuating in other ways.

I would like to connect to other Friends interested in ways opening to peace-with-justice regarding Taiwan and China. Please write to me if you are interested in discussing your own views and experiences, or in reading the longer piece I had hoped to share on this subject: ianthehansen AT gmail DOT com.