Good morning to readers; Taipei remains in Taiwanese hands
Discover more from The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak
Good morning to readers; Taipei remains in Taiwanese hands
Reporting from the Taiwanese capital, we examine how the Russian invasion has been a wakeup call. And we explore the tradition of ‘Ghost Month,' where spirits come looking for attention.
Editor’s note: We’re thinking about doing occasional dispatches from other places where free people are threatened by dictators, while keeping our main focus on Ukraine.
Will you vote below in our subscriber-only poll about whether this is welcome? And leave comments regarding your thoughts about how you see the evolution of The Counteroffensive as a publication?
Taipei residents Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu met while volunteering in California – teaching in prison – and quickly bonded over their mutual love for books about revolt and rebellion.
They’re both from what they called ‘mixed marriages’ (all four parents are from Taiwan, but each has a set of grandparents from China). Michelle, a lawyer who specialized in working with marginalized communities in the U.S., needed some convincing to move to Taipei.
Albert, a historian, had told her that his dream was to live there.
"I was really weirded out," when he suggested moving to Taiwan, she said. ”[I initially thought,] does he know that I have a law degree here, and I work with undocumented immigrants and am very much American?"
But she recalls that they fell in love quickly, and she describes him as a “catalyst for thinking more broadly about the world.” (An alternative, or supplementary explanation, she quips, is that "he worked on me for ten years.")
The couple ultimately moved to Taiwan two years ago, and have closely observed the full-scale Russian invasion while noting just how many parallels there are between Taiwan and Ukraine.
"We're young democracies... [we both had a] transition to democracy in the 1990s, and so we're really trying to figure out what it means to be a multicultural democracy,” Albert said.
Both Taiwan and Ukraine erupted in popular protest in 2014 – the Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity and Taiwan's Sunflower movement happened around the same time, as an act of resistance against an autocratic neighbor.
The Sunflower Movement emerged in opposition of a trade agreement between China and Taiwan. Protesters occupied the country's legislature and executive offices, and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, ultimately forcing the government to back down.
The Russian full-scale invasion was a wake-up call for this region of the world: deep historical, cultural, linguistic, familial, business ties don’t mean that an all-out war can’t happen. Many Taiwanese people had previously discounted the possibility of an invasion for these reasons.
A Chinese invasion may not be imminent, but one lesson of the Russian invasion is very clear: when your autocratic neighbor says that you don’t exist as a distinct identity and is willing to use violence to impose this misguided conclusion, you should take that threat seriously.
Now Michelle and Albert are engaged in local civil defense training: learning how to use tourniquets to stop bleeding; what to pack in Go Bags; and how to carry injured people. It’s a hot ticket in town, she said, with friends asking how they managed to book their training sessions.
“You think it would increase anxiety, but it actually calms you, because you're like, 'okay, this is what you would do'” in the event of an emergency, Michelle said.
The wakeup call that has Michelle and Albert rehearsing how to staunch blood from a traumatic wound has broader geopolitical implications.
Yurii Poita, a Ukrainian national security researcher living in Taipei, says that it may actually make China speed up plans for an invasion.
“China will not abandon its strategic plans to take over Taiwan,” he predicted, and may want to strike earlier due to renewed alarm (and related military buildups) by China’s adversaries in the Asia-Pacific.
Japan has announced a massive military expansion – the largest since World War II. The American presence in the Philippines is growing. And the Australian Defense Forces are increasing their personnel size by 30 percent by 2040.
“There is a perception that the window of opportunity for the Chinese leadership is closing, and it could make Chinese leadership... take more risk," Poita said, adding also that a domestic crisis – such as an economic slowdown that China is now experiencing, could lead to a temptation to launch an invasion to rally national opinion around the government.
In the meantime, the small Ukrainian community in Taiwan is eagerly building ties of solidarity. Two days a week, in front of the Russian government's diplomatic office in Taipei, you’ll find a man named Alex Khomenko waving a Ukrainian flag, raising money for humanitarian relief.
A typhoon had just passed by recently, stirring up ferocious rains and battering winds – which Alex embraces simply as “good flag-waving weather.”
He grew up in Kharkiv and moved to the United States in the mid-90s, where he said that the ideals of American democracy and freedom became his core values. A software engineer by trade, he moved to Taiwan with his wife, who has some family ties here.
On February 24th, 2022, when Russia launched an all-out war, Alex began protesting in front of this office by himself. A trickle of support became a flood – more than one hundred people showed up to join him. What began with a tweet showing himself outside the Russian office led to a movement that has raised more than $100,000 in Ukrainian relief funds.
“The Taiwanese government supported Ukraine from day one, even though Ukraine has always been oriented more towards China,” Alex noted. The most touching moments, he said, are when elderly Taiwanese supporters come with drinks on a hot day.
Nearly twenty months have passed since he first started protesting, but he’s still coming out every single week. And the countries are becoming closer as the result of the war, he said, and Taiwan is learning lessons about the need to prepare for the possibility of open conflict.
"Of course, you hope that it will never happen," Alex said, ticking off the steps the Taiwanese government is taking publicly. "But establishing those links, getting the [military] arms right, making sure you have resources locally, making sure you have plans for what you would do if something happens."
Good morning to readers, Taipei remains in Taiwanese hands.
We’re doing something new today: publishing reporting from Taiwan as part of efforts to expand our coverage, while keeping our main focus on Ukraine.
The parallels are obvious: two countries fighting to assert their democratic system against larger authoritarian neighbors that seek to extinguish them as a separate identity via threats of (or actual) violence.
Our goal is to tell the personal stories of people who are threatened by the rise of authoritarianism around the world.
We want to cover these places not merely as the sites of conflict, but regions with vibrant historical, cultural, linguistic and culinary traditions worth exploring -- to provide a more holistic approach to war correspondence and foreign affairs journalism.
We want to write about individuals not merely as the pawns of great powers, or objects being acted on by great events, but humans with deeper meaning and stories. Taiwan will have a historic presidential election in January 2024. With your support, we hope to cover it.
To the news — Taiwan tells Elon Musk off: Taiwan has said it is "not for sale," after the billionaire said that the self-governed island was an "integral part" of China. This is Taiwan's Foreign Minister, on Twitter:
Mixed Messages: China announced new initiatives that would "make it easier for Taiwanese people to live, study and work in China," The Guardian reports. But at the same time, it conducted massive naval exercises in the ocean to Taiwan's east – a not-so-subtle hint to Taiwanese that China has peaceful and violent methods at their disposal.
U.S., China Expand Global Spy Operations: Taiwan is the most prominent issue in the escalating spy vs. spy operations between China and the United States.
With both countries confused about the intentions of the other, the NYT reports that American intelligence is obsessed with learning whether China will order an invasion; and Chinese spies are obsessed with finding out whether America would defend Taiwan if so.
Everywhere I travel I tend to notice Ukrainian flags or pro-Ukrainian graffiti. There is this example from Brick Lane in London, an image of the now-departed Wagner Group leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Meanwhile in Odesa, passers-by near the Chinese consulate are treated to an interesting sight – two cats, one Ukrainian and the other Taiwanese, painted over the Ukrainian word for ‘support.’
We spoke to the artist, Igor Matroskin, about what drove him to paint this mural.
He tells us that he has always dreamt about visiting Taiwan, and has a Taiwanese friend in Odesa. He wanted to paint street art in order to emphasize the natural friendship between Ukraine and Taiwan. Cats, he explains, are the non-official symbol of Odesa -- "as with any port city, it has a lot of cats."
The art has some subtle cultural references: the Ukrainian cat on the left is wearing vyshyvanka (a folk outfit that we’ve covered before), while the Taiwanese cat is also wearing traditional clothing originating from the indigenous peoples of the area.
Taiwan is a place with rich traditions that I’m hoping we can explore more. I happened to visit while it was marking ‘Ghost Month,’ a period that Buddhist and Taoist tradition holds that the gates between the world of the living and the afterlife open – and spirits roam freely among us.
The ghosts, as my friends Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu explain on their brilliant Substack (‘Who are the ghosts and what do they want?’), are most commonly described as "hungry" – for attention, companionship, money, or food.
“The idea is that you appease their sad spirits, by offering them different things. You can offer food. I've seen instant noodles, I've seen beer, and Cheetos, and Doritos. Sometimes you'll see, because it's really hot.. a bowl with water and a towel that [they] can wipe their brow,” Michelle said.
They told me that there are some common prohibitions during ghost month: don’t buy a house or get married during this month; and, for example, don’t point your slippers at the bed, because that’s inviting them to join you there.
"Don't call them ghosts," Michelle said with a grin. "So I've been violating the rule. You should be calling them ‘good brothers and sisters.’"
I had the pleasure of sitting with Michelle and Albert (and their lovely daughter) to have dinner and talk about this. Taiwan is the second most religiously diverse place in the world (after Singapore), with many different spiritual traditions mixing and intermingling.
"There aren't really secularists here," Michelle said. "People don't define themselves strongly in camps of being religious or not religious because religion is so interwoven in everyday life... almost everybody knows somebody who does the equivalent of prayer... people consult fertility gods, study gods, marriage gods."
Today’s dog of peace is this devilish pup who is warning me not to bring products into Taipei without properly declaring them to customs. 10/10 would be interrogated again.
Stay safe out there!
Best,
Tim
Good morning to readers; Taipei remains in Taiwanese hands
The war in Ukraine is existential in importance for Ukraine. A freedom loving people, who would like to overcome corruption, is in a fight for existence against a vile, insatiably power hungry, dictator.
But the impact on the rest of humanity is no less significant. Freedom from oppression and corruption is at risk the world over. Evil dictators have taken over in a number of countries (Hungary, Belarus, Venezuela...) and are trying in others - including the United States.
We need to keep track of all of the developments worldwide. The struggle against tyranny in the world is an existential struggle for freedom worldwide.
So bring on insightful coverage of struggles against oppression and corruption worldwide. Please.
I think most of your paying readership are people who care about the threat of autocracy all over the globe. Whether it's Putin trying to destroy Ukraine or Xi trying to destroy Taiwan, it is part of the same problem. I will continue to pay my subscription fee, as long as you continue to cover Ukraine in the mix.