US-China WWII Narrative Convergence Erases ROC Legacy, Deepens Taiwan's Historical Marginalization
Original framing: “Taipei’s dilemma over history deepens with Xi-Trump praise of WWII Flying Tigers” — South China Morning Post
Taiwan's 16 recognized Indigenous nations (e.g., Amis, Atayal, Paiwan) were subjects of Japanese colonial conscription from 1937, with over 4,000 Takasago Volunteers dying in Philippines and New Guinea campaigns — a sacrifice neither ROC nor PRC commemorates. The Flying Tigers narrative, centered on Han Chinese nationalist heroism, renders Indigenous war memory invisible. Contemporary Indigenous activists like Mayaw Biho document how ROC veterans' organizations excluded Aboriginal veterans from pensions until 1990s democratization, while PRC's 'Chinese nation' (zhonghua minzu) framework assimilates them into a monolithic anti-Japanese resistance that never represented their experience.
The Xi-Trump Flying Tigers moment reveals a structural collision: Beijing's 'historical legitimacy' strategy requires inheriting the ROC's WWII honors while denying the ROC's continuity; Washington's strategic ambiguity requires 'China' as a civilizational constant while arming the ROC's successor on Taiwan.
The Flying Tigers — mercenaries contracted to a warlord's in-law, flying Disney-painted sharks — become the perfect trickster symbol: they belong to no one's clean narrative. What the SCMP framing omits is the evidentiary infrastructure that could resolve this: the Cairo Declaration's text, the AVG payroll records, the Indigenous oral histories of crashed pilots, the POW camp blueprints. A systemic solution requires not better storytelling but legal-historical disaggregation: an international commission to certify which treaty rights and war honors belong to which successor entity, coupled with Indigenous-led truth processes that refuse the Han nationalist frame entirely. Until then, every commemoration is a territorial claim.