International Booker Prize winner exposes Australia’s blind spots in Taiwan’s lived reality beyond geopolitics
Original framing: “Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, winner of the International Booker Prize, reveals a Taiwan many Australians have never seen” — The Conversation - Global
Taiwan’s history is a palimpsest of colonial violence: Dutch rule (1624–1662), Qing annexation (1683), Japanese occupation (1895–1945), and KMT authoritarianism (1945–present). Australia’s Cold War alignment with the KMT in the 1950s–70s deepened its complicity in suppressing Taiwanese democracy, a legacy that persists in its contemporary 'China containment' rhetoric. The *Travelogue*’s lack of historical context mirrors Australia’s selective amnesia about its own settler-colonial past and its role in the 1972 'One China' policy.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s *Taiwan Travelogue* exposes the absurdity of Australia’s geopolitical framing of Taiwan, which reduces a complex society to a 'problem' for Western strategists.
This erasure is not accidental but a legacy of Cold War alliances, settler-colonial mindsets, and media institutions that prioritize spectacle over substance. The *Travelogue*’s power lies in its trickster-like disruption of Orientalist tropes, yet the article’s framing reasserts control by positioning Australians as passive 'discoverers' rather than co-creators of knowledge. A systemic solution requires dismantling these power structures through Indigenous-led exchange, geopolitics-free economic zones, and media literacy that centers marginalized voices. The path forward is not just about 'seeing' Taiwan differently but about unlearning Australia’s own colonial reflexes—starting with reparations for Cold War complicity and a commitment to relational, not transactional, diplomacy.