Taiwanese youths want to see China with their own eyes 

In January 2024, Taipei’s Ningxia Night Market, a popular joint among locals and tourists, announced on its Facebook page (see the image below) that it will organise a dance tournament on “Subject Three”. The so-called Subject Three is not a test but a PRC pop dance that features smooth and fast movements of knee and hand gestures, accompanied by fast-tempo viral songs, and it has become popular among youngsters in Taiwan throughout Chinese short video platforms such as TikTok and Kwai.

Despite, or rather because of the fact that the tournament was well attended and the winner was an eight-year-old girl, it drew severe criticisms in Taiwan, some of which claim that the tournament is a form of wutong 舞统 (“dance unification”, a homophone of military unification 武统), a worrying indication of China’s soft power infiltration to weaken Taiwan’s national consciousness and determination for independence.

Two months later, a Taiwanese Youtuber known for his metrosexual femininity, Chung Ming-hsuan, released two short videos about his first visit to China in which he claims that despite Taiwan’s official and friends’ warnings against his plan to visit China, he believes that the best way to know a country is by being there, and having done so, he realises that China is not as horrifying and horrible as the media has portrayed, and he really “likes this place called China”.

Despite being only 25 years old and implicated in several controversies, Chung’s YouTube channel has over a million subscribers, and has been praised for his “pro-democracy” positions, especially for his 2020 choice to shoot a video in support of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Tsai Ing-wen. The mounting criticisms of his China visit was as surprising to him as his China visit is to his fans, but he held onto his ground by retorting in a Threads post later that “even though I do not self-identify as a Chinese and believe I am Taiwanese, that does not mean I cannot love the land of China and the people living in it”.

Considering the escalating tension between Taiwan and China in which the Taiwanese are reported to be resentful of China, these two incidents suggest interesting twists of the Taiwan-China relations and offer a critical lens for understanding Taiwanese youths’ attitudes towards mainland Chinese popular culture influences.

To begin with, it is believed that the millennials in Taiwan, having grown up with Taiwan’s democratic system, tend to identify themselves more as Taiwanese than Chinese, and therefore have developed a natural tendency to be against China and the reunification idea. Especially after the 2014 Umbrella and Sunflower Movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, it is believed that given the choice, they would opt for an independent Taiwan and insist on a democratic way of life, regardless of China’s military coercion or economic seduction.

A recent poll on Taiwanese’s identity choices shows that more than 61% of people surveyed identify themselves as Taiwanese, and only 2.4% identify as Chinese, while the remaining 34% identify as both. Therefore, it indeed is a surprise that the Ningxia Night Market should choose a Chinese pop dance to market itself and a Youtuber of Chung’s pedigree would release videos that are decidedly against the mainstream sentiment.

If the popularity of “Subject Three” can be ascribed to the infiltration of Chinese social media platforms as the kind of cultural flow that should be guarded for concerns with bio-data security and the crassness of mass culture, Chung’s fairly mundane representation of everyday China is an audacious poke at Taiwan’s information cocoon to reveal a China different from what has been portrayed in the mainstream media. It unveils a soft form of censorship akin to cancel culture. Most importantly, his retort to criticism questions the moral imperative of nationalist allegiance and demands a space for youngsters in Taiwan to see China with their own eyes.

Indeed, Taiwanese millennials have begun experimenting with different ways to access China. A 2023 survey of Taiwanese students’ media literacy shows that while YouTube (80.2%) and TV (65.7%) remain the dominant portals by which Taiwanese youths access information, TikTok/Douyin is in third place (50.7%).

The Taiwan Internet Report shows that although the total number of TikTok users in 2023 is small (only 2.41%), it is growing fast, and the millennials (ages from 18 to 29) is the majority. Besides TikTok, IQIYI, a Chinese video streaming service, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), a Chinese social media and e-commerce platform, and other online shopping portals such as Taobao, Jingdong, and Shein are also gaining traction.

PRC scholar Ren Dongmei in her article on China’s soft power influence on Taiwanese youths argues that Chinese social media and online portals for shopping and video streaming — like TikTok, IQIYI, and Xiaohongshu — are making a “positive” impact on Taiwan’s youths so much so that they create a “virtual living sphere” where youths on both ends of the Taiwan Strait can learn to appreciate their similarities and differences, as well as Chinese culture and products as part of their everyday life.

As familiarity, sympathy and affinity increase with the sharing of aesthetics, taste and feelings, Taiwanese youths may no longer assume an anti-China stance without thinking. In Ren’s view, while TikTok and Xiaohongshu will not change Taiwanese youths’ self-identity overnight, fostering a common culture and positive mutual feelings is the foundation to cultivating Taiwan-China relations.

The popularity of Subject Three and TikTok amongst Taiwanese millennials seems to support Ren’s analysis, but not without a grain of salt. In fact, many in Taiwan believe that through these online portals and popular culture, China is waging a war of cognition on Taiwan to win the hearts and minds of Taiwanese youths and lower their guard against China’s intention of invasion. While this worry is not entirely ungrounded, it may also become a convenient excuse for policing cultural exchange across the Taiwan Strait and fuel anti-China sentiment.

Among attempts at policing cultural boundaries in Taiwan, the worst kind is the policing of “Chinese language”. While mostly a form of online taunting and mockery aiming at the growing usage of mainland Chinese vocabularies and juvenile idioms, policing “Chinese language” quite potently manifests Taiwan’s anxiety of cultural and political liminality.

While Taiwan’s Guoyu (国语) is not the same as China’s Putonghua (普通话), they are not mutually unintelligible, and has been a means for connecting people across the Taiwan Strait, the same way Singaporeans may find Hokkien speaking Taiwanese both familiar and different. To police “Chinese language” is thus an attempt to install a barrier in communication, and to turn cultural differences into political differences. It is a form of cancel culture in the service of the cognitive warfare.

Rather than treating language as a means of communication, the policing of Chinese language imposes a statement of identity on the everyday language, and demands the youths to follow suit. While it is impossible to implement, the act of policing has produced a censorship consciousness, labelling anything Chinese as suspicious and politically incorrect.

The vehemence of its rhetoric, however, reveals only the vulnerability of its purpose and the infeasibility of its practice. That is why the millennials, while worrying about being labelled by peers as pro-China, often find these attempts annoying and become politically indifferent, if not defiant. They turn to TikTok, Xiaohongshu, and Kwai, usually not so much because these platforms speak “Chinese” or offer spaces of belonging, but because they provide entertainment from which they may find shelter from politics.

Of course, China remains a potent menace to Taiwan, especially if viewed in the zero-sum game of sovereignty, and the rise of Chinese soft power has only intensified this anxiety. But the last thing Taiwan needs now is a war with China; it needs creative ways to resolve the political conundrum. The Taiwanese youths’ wish to see China with their own eyes, and pursue peaceful development as Taiwanese, may crack open a different kind of political discussion on freedom and democracy across the Taiwan Strait.

Related: Moving away from the Chinese-language market: The renaissance of ‘new Taiwan dramas’ | [Big read] Will Taiwan ban TikTok and Douyin for fear of mainland China’s influence?