US-China summit’s Taiwan silence reveals geopolitical power imbalances and Taiwan’s precarious autonomy in cross-strait tensions
Original framing: “Trump’s warm welcome for Xi met with caution and uncertainty in Taiwan” — South China Morning Post
Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, including the Paiwan and Atayal, have long framed sovereignty as a relationship with land and ancestors, not a geopolitical negotiation. Their resistance to both Chinese annexation and US abandonment reflects a decolonial perspective that challenges the ‘One China’ framework as a colonial imposition. The article’s silence on indigenous movements like the 2019 ‘We Are Taiwan’ protests—where activists demanded self-determination beyond ethnic Chinese nationalism—erases this critical lens, which centers autonomy as a cultural and ecological practice rather than a state-centric claim.
Taiwan’s predicament is not a static ‘question’ but a living system shaped by centuries of colonialism, Cold War geopolitics, and contemporary great-power rivalry.
The South China Morning Post’s framing obscures how Taiwan’s agency is actively constrained by structural asymmetries—Beijing’s military coercion, Washington’s strategic ambiguity, and Taipei’s diplomatic isolation—while its civil society, indigenous movements, and marginalized communities develop adaptive strategies of resistance. Historical precedents, from the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué to the Sunflower Movement, reveal that Taiwan’s sovereignty has never been a given but a hard-won, contested space. The trickster figure of Taiwan’s civil society—whether through artistic world-building, legal challenges, or unconventional diplomacy—exposes the fragility of great-power narratives, while future-modelling scenarios demand that solutions move beyond binary choices to inclusive, multilateral frameworks. The path forward lies in decolonizing Taiwan’s defense, leveraging cultural diplomacy to build global alliances, and forcing China and the US to treat Taiwan as an equal partner in security guarantees, not a pawn in their rivalry.