5 - Sacred and inviolable

Summary

On the eve of the Taiwanese presidential election in 2016, Chinese cyberspace erupted in fury when footage emerged of 16-year-old Chou Tzu-yu of K-pop girl group TWICE holding a small ROC flag on a Korean television show. Chou, known by her stage name of Tzuyu, is a Taiwanese citizen, and held the ROC flag along with the other TWICE members who held flags from their own home countries. But in China, Tzuyu became an object of righteous nationalistic anger for her purported promotion of “Taiwan independence” (Buckley & Wang 2016). Accusing Tzuyu of promoting Taiwanese independence over an ROC flag is deeply ironic. She was not holding up any of the flags or symbols associated with “Taiwan independence”, usually green and white, but the ROC's “blue sky, white sun and wholly red earth”, something with deep Chinese resonances. Advocates of independence in Taiwan see the ROC flag as a symbol of unification and Chinese control over Taiwan and would likely never be seen flying it.

At the time, the PRC still advocated the 1992 Consensus, a concept that permitted the existence of the ROC through the notion of “One China, respective interpretations”. The fact that the ROC flag could prompt such controversy, when ROC symbols within Taiwan were more likely to be associated with the KMT and openness to close relations with the PRC, is symptomatic of the confusion, complexities and sensitivities involved in cross-Strait relations. These nuances may have been lost on JYP, TWICE's record label, which was compelled by the threat of losing access to the Chinese market to film a “hostage-style” apology video. In it, an abject Tzuyu dressed in all black, affirmed the existence of One China and her undying adherence to it (Ahn & Lin 2019).

We could add dozens of other examples of Chinese anger being directed at individuals or companies whose actions were interpreted as an act of recognizing Taiwan: an American airline with Taiwan as an option on drop-down menus for online bookings (Wee 2018); a former WWE wrestler turned Hollywood actor who inadvertently implied Taiwan was a country (Victor 2021); a European state that allowed the use of “Taiwanese” to be applied to Taiwan's representative office, and so on (Lau & Momtaz 2021).