Recently I saw news that Taiwanese people have begun leaving en masse, fleeing the prospect of future forced reunification by the mainland.
These people are Taiwan’s elite class. Only they have the financial means to relocate their entire families overseas, and only they have the basic intelligence to know that after forced reunification, Taiwan will be nothing like what the CCP has promised.
The loss of this elite class will begin to erode Taiwan’s financial strength and its capacity to resist the CCP’s political and military pressure. More fatally, it will trigger a vicious cycle that keeps accelerating: the more of them who leave, the higher the proportion of CCP-brainwashed lower-class Taiwanese, the stronger the KMT becomes, the less capable Taiwan is of resisting the CCP, the greater the likelihood of being taken back by the CCP, and the faster the elite drain accelerates.
Once this vicious cycle begins, it cannot be stopped — unless there is a massive external factor, such as the CCP imploding, or suffering a catastrophic defeat in a large-scale conflict with the US military and fundamentally changing course. But as I argued in The Consequences of Trump’s Reckless War: The Fall of Taiwan is Almost Inevitable, to truly defeat China militarily, the US national debt would need to reach 50 or even 100 trillion dollars — it would have gone bankrupt many times over. The only remaining hope for US intervention against forced reunification was for America to send troops while its allies footed the bill — but Comrade Vladimir Trump has alienated every one of America’s allies and is pushing to withdraw from NATO, all on the orders of his boss Putin, effectively sealing off that path entirely.
The CCP has been threatening Taiwan for decades, and the international community has long been surprised by how unconcerned Taiwanese people seemed. So why are Taiwan’s elites afraid now?
Two reasons:
- After Trump came to power, Taiwan’s elite class lost confidence in the United States.
- After the KMT began acting as the CCP’s inside agents without any pretence of concealment, and Taiwanese people nonetheless refused to recall them, Taiwan’s elite class lost confidence in Taiwan’s own political system.
As long as Taiwanese stood united, even without US participation in the war, they would still have a solid chance of repelling forced reunification and defending their democracy and dignity — as I wrote in 預言台海之戰全過程(Prophecy: The Full Course of the Taiwan Strait War).
Taiwan’s foundation was the entire Chinese elite class that fled the mainland in 1949. That is precisely why Taiwan was able to transition from dictatorship to democracy without bloodshed, and why its economy has flourished. But the rise of the internet has allowed the CCP to brainwash Taiwanese people through apps like Xiaohongshu and ByteDance without needing to control Taiwan’s mainstream media. Combined with the deeply ingrained failings of the Chinese nation (see 評判式思維是中华民族千年愚昧的根源 Critical Thinking Is the Root of a Thousand Years of Chinese Ignorance), Taiwanese people have gradually been dumbed down by the CCP, and the process of their fall has begun.
Will Hong Kong’s suffocating red terror be the future of Taiwan after reunification?
No. Taiwan’s future will be much more miserable than Hong Kong.
In fact, it will be even worse than Xinjiang.
Why?
Because the strait between China and Hong Kong Island is only five kilometres wide. The CCP can deploy ten divisions there at any time, and artillery can easily cover all of Hong Kong without needing to cross water — so the CCP will never worry about losing physical control of Hong Kong.
The Taiwan Strait, at its narrowest, is still 130 kilometres wide. After taking back Taiwan, if the CCP stations only 50,000 troops, it won’t be able to suppress a Taiwanese uprising, and the US and Japan could easily retake the island at any time. But if it stations 500,000 or even a million troops, it becomes an unbearable long-term burden for China — and once the US and Japan use their overwhelming naval and air superiority to cut off the Taiwan Strait, supplying that many troops with weapons, ammunition, and even food becomes a serious problem. Throughout history, military effectiveness has never simply been a matter of numbers, precisely because logistics could become the bottleneck.
Therefore, after retaking Taiwan, the CCP will forever harbour an extremely acute sense of insecurity, and will feel an urgent, pressing need to fully subjugate the Taiwanese people.
So, once CCP occupy Taiwan, they will immediately impose indefinite martial law and silencing of speech — at which point the most optimistic fantasy a Taiwanese person could hold would be the hope of going Hong Kong, that “paradise of freedom." At the same time, the CCP will immediately launch an extremely harsh and possibly bloody purge, sending several million Taiwanese with independent thinking ability into re-education camps — similar to Stalin’s purge of the Polish elite after he took Poland. How to send millions of people into re-education camps is something the CCP has already mastered through years of practice in Xinjiang. At that point, large numbers of Taiwanese will join the CCP’s machinery of iron fist— and they will persecute their fellow Taiwanese with even more zeal than the state security officials sent from the mainland, just as large number of Germans joined East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, becoming a core force in the persecution of the German people. At that point, a Taiwanese going out to buy groceries might be stopped and have their phone searched three times. Taiwan will one hundred percent become more Xinjiang than Xinjiang itself — because the CCP’s armoured divisions can roll into Xinjiang at any time, while the Taiwan Strait is 130 kilometres wide; also because Taiwanese people have seen what democracy is, and are more educated — making them far more dangerous to the CCP than Xinjiang’s population, therefore requiring far stricter control than Xinjiang.
What fate awaits the CCP’s fifth column in Taiwan, the KMT, at that point?
You only need to look at what happened to the KMTs who stayed behind after the mainland fell. The vast majority, those without fame or standing, were simply shot. Those with reputations — such as Fu Zuoyi and Song Qingling — were given nominal posts and placed under strict supervision. You want to leave the island, or send your children abroad? Not a chance. If Fu Zuoyi had been content with his circumstances after the mainland fell, would he have cut off all ties with his daughter who had been a CCP underground agent and convinced him to surrender? Ten years later, once the CCP feels Taiwan has stabilised and no longer needs the KMT, the KMT politicians will fare worse than ordinary Taiwanese — because in the CCP’s eyes, they were once politicians within a democratic system, which makes them more dangerous than the ideologically simple lower-class Taiwanese.
By then, the second generation of Taiwanese, having lived under control even stricter than Xinjiang’s, will be more ignorant than mainlanders.
By then, the last candle of hope for the Chinese nation will have been snuffed out.
Pan-pinks of Taiwan — your haydays are coming.
做个明白人 