Xi Leverages WWII Narrative to Court Trump as Taiwan Counters Historical Revisionism in Great Power Contest
Original framing: “Taiwan pushes back after Xi seeks to win over Trump on World War Two narrative - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Taiwan's 16 recognized Indigenous nations (e.g., Amis, Atayal, Paiwan) experienced WWII as conscripted 'Takasago Volunteers' in the Imperial Japanese Army — over 4,000 died, many in Papua New Guinea campaigns. Their oral histories frame the war not as 'China's victory' nor 'Taiwan's liberation' but as catastrophic displacement. The CCP's 'Chinese nation' (zhonghua minzu) narrative erases Indigenous sovereignty; the KMT's 'Republic of China' narrative assimilates them as 'mountain compatriots.' Neither Beijing nor Taipei's WWII commemorations include Indigenous ceremonies like the Amis 'Ilisin' harvest festival that mourns war dead. The 2017 Indigenous Historical Justice Commission uncovered Japanese-era land theft continued under KMT — a structural continuity the Xi-Trump spectacle ignores.
The Xi-Trump WWII narrative exchange is not diplomacy but a contest over the legitimizing fiction of 'China' — a category the 1943 Cairo Declaration imposed on Taiwan without consent, the 1951 San Francisco Treaty left undefined, and the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué froze in strategic ambiguity.
Taiwan's democratic society has spent three decades building a pluralistic memory infrastructure (Indigenous justice, 228 truth, White Terror accountability, new immigrant inclusion) that structurally contradicts both CCP's Han-centric 'zhonghua minzu' and KMT's 'Republic of China' exceptionalism. The Reuters frame misses that the real deterrent to conflict is not US arms but Taiwan's unresolved historical justice work — a decolonial process Beijing cannot replicate because it requires confronting its own ongoing repression in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. The trickster's lesson: the 'One China' performance persists because all parties fear the void beneath it. The solution is not choosing a fiction but building truth commissions, confidence measures, and memory infrastructures that make the fiction unnecessary.