On May 8, before a global audience gathered to mark the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te delivered a warning laced with historical gravity. Pointing directly to China, he spoke of election interference, cyber disruptions, and the creeping advance of “gray-zone tactics”—all hallmarks of Beijing’s modern authoritarian playbook. And then, discarding the polite evasions of diplomatic language, he said: “Taiwan and Europe are now facing the threat of a new authoritarian bloc.”
In that brief yet momentous utterance, President Lai did more than catalog the perils arrayed against his island nation; he summoned the restless specters of the last century’s defining ideological conflict, cautioning that the lessons of history are once again being tested by tyranny’s resurgence.
For too long, Western discourse has reduced Taiwan to an economic asset or a logistical concern—a pawn on the grand chessboard of supply chains and strategic alliances. In this shallow calculus, Taiwan’s value is measured in microchips and maritime choke points, its fate debated in boardrooms and security councils with the clinical detachment of cost-benefit analyses.
Central to this framing is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the crown jewel of global technology. TSMC produces nearly 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors—the infinitesimal circuits that drive everything from smartphones and artificial intelligence to missile guidance systems and next-generation quantum computing. The tech titans of Silicon Valley—Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, OpenAI, Qualcomm—all rely on Taiwanese ingenuity. Even China’s own technological ambitions, despite its growing hostility, are still tethered to the chips born from Taiwan’s democratic shores.
This overwhelming technological dominance has birthed what strategists call the “Silicon Shield”—the notion that Taiwan’s role in the global economy makes it simply too valuable to fall to authoritarian control. Some, like former U.S. presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, argued that America’s security commitment to Taiwan should extend only until “semiconductor independence” is achieved by 2028, after which Taiwan’s fate might be renegotiated. President Donald Trump echoed this transactional logic, lamenting that Taiwan had “taken about 100 percent of our chip business” and should “compensate” the United States for its support, likening American protection to an unpaid insurance policy.
But is economic leverage really the highest cause for which a free society should be defended?
The fault line between tyranny and liberty.
America once believed that the preservation of liberal democracy was reason enough to act. After World War II, West Germany stood as a fragile outpost of freedom on the edge of an iron curtain. It symbolized a subversive contradiction for the Soviet bloc—a German people who, given the chance to govern themselves, excelled under democracy while their kin to the east languished behind barbed wire and propaganda.
Nowhere was that contradiction more starkly revealed than in the divided city of Berlin. When the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on West Berlin—an isolated enclave deep within Soviet-controlled East Germany—in 1948, the United States did not pause to ask whether the beleaguered city contributed anything vital to the global economy. It remembered, instead, that freedom itself was essential.
Over the course of 15 months, the Western Allies undertook what would become one of history’s most extraordinary humanitarian endeavors: the Berlin Airlift. American pilots—many of them veterans of a war just won—flew round the clock through narrow air corridors, braving harsh weather and the constant threat of Soviet provocation to deliver food, fuel, and medicine.
And in a gesture of profound humanity that captured the hearts of a generation, those same pilots began dropping chocolate bars and chewing gum attached to tiny handmade parachutes—Operation Little Vittles. To the children of Berlin, those roaring aircraft engines became the pulse of freedom, a daily reminder that the free world had neither abandoned nor forgotten those stranded at liberty’s precarious frontier.
At this juncture, Taiwan occupies that same fateful role West Berlin did. It stands unbowed along the fault line between tyranny and liberty—a free society that, by the cold arithmetic of authoritarianism, ought not to exist. But the stakes are even higher. The question is no longer simply which side will prevail—but whether the free world still remembers why it must.
The China Model.
Unlike the Soviet Union, which exported its ideology through revolutionary zeal and the blunt force of military conquest, the Chinese Communist Party has perfected a quieter, more insidious model of control—one that cloaks repression in the language of prosperity and stability.
At the heart of this strategy lies the so-called “China Model”: an alluring proposition that nations can achieve economic growth without political freedom, that government-imposed order is preferable to liberty, and that the chaos of democracy is a uniquely Western disease—unsuited for the Chinese people and the developing world alike.
In December 2021, the Chinese Communist Party formally enshrined this ideological framework in a document titled China: Democracy That Works, articulating the doctrine of “whole-process people’s democracy” (全过程人民民主). The statement proclaimed:
Whole-process people’s democracy, giving full expression to the socialist nature of the state and the people’s principal position, serves to better represent the people’s will, protect their rights, and fully unleash their potential to create. Whole-process people’s democracy has formed and developed in a nationwide effort, led by the CPC, to strive for national independence, the country’s prosperity, and the people’s liberation and wellbeing.”
But this is not democracy as conceived by the intellectual traditions of Athens or Philadelphia. It is democracy denuded of its essential substance—recast and hollowed out to serve authoritarian ends.
Rather than empowering citizens through free elections, independent courts, and an unfettered press, the CCP claims to represent the will of the people directly—dispensing with the need for popular consent or meaningful dissent. In place of competitive elections, it offers managed consultations, state-run surveys, and carefully controlled public hearings. Political participation becomes a ritual performance, not a mechanism for change.
Behind this redefinition is a more profound assertion: that Chinese civilization is historically and culturally incompatible with liberal democracy, that the Chinese people require a paternalistic state to shepherd them through the hazards of modernity. In this view, freedom is considered less an inalienable right than a dangerous indulgence that must be withheld for the people’s own good.
This argument, however, rests upon a highly selective interpretation of China’s philosophical legacies and historical traumas, skillfully curated to legitimize the perpetuation of authoritarian rule. It leans heavily on Confucianism—a venerable tradition that, while rich in ethical reflection and social philosophy, offers no framework for participatory governance as understood in the democratic West. Writing in the fifth century BCE, Confucius envisioned a political order anchored not in the sovereignty of the people but in the cultivation of virtue and the maintenance of hierarchical harmony. His was a world in which the very notion of popular consent was as inconceivable as the modern nation-state itself.
“Today, this small island nation is an irrefutable repudiation of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological creed. It proves that prosperity does not necessitate repression, and that liberal democracy is neither a Western imposition nor a cultural anomaly—it is a universal aspiration springing from the shared yearnings of the human spirit.”
In the Confucian schema, a well-governed society depends upon the moral rectitude of its rulers who must embody ren (仁), or benevolence, and uphold li (礼), ritual propriety. Legitimate authority flows not from the consent of the governed but from the ruler’s demonstrated moral fitness. Although Confucianism extols meritocracy, it stops well short of endorsing the mechanisms of electoral choice or adversarial political competition. Order, rather than individual liberty, is its paramount good. Harmony, rather than open debate, is its ideal state of society.
The CCP has deftly repurposed this philosophical inheritance into a modern justification for authoritarian rule under the banner of Confucian cultural exceptionalism—the belief that Chinese civilization is uniquely predisposed to prize social harmony and collective well-being over the rugged individualism and combative politics emblematic of Western liberalism. It draws substantially from a broader tradition of developmentalist authoritarianism, most famously articulated by Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. By this logic, democracy—with its inherent mayhem, contentious debate, and fractious pluralism—is both foreign to Chinese culture and corrosive to its social fabric.
To buttress this narrative, the party invokes the turbulent catastrophes of China’s early 20th century, when fledgling republican experiments devolved into warlordism, civil war, and humiliating subjugation by foreign powers. In this official historiography, the democratic aspirations of the Republic of China (1912–1949) failed not for want of virtue but because such ideals were incompatible with the exigencies of Chinese society, producing only disarray and suffering.
From this perspective, what is required is strong leadership, centralized decision-making, and the suppression of dissenting voices—an ostensibly pragmatic formula oriented toward “national rejuvenation.” Though framed in utilitarian terms, this vision forms the cornerstone of the CCP’s claim to legitimacy: a transactional compact burnished by the shimmering skylines of megacities, the sleek velocity of high-speed rail, and the technological marvels of booming innovation hubs. It promises modernization without democratic disorder, prosperity without political paralysis, and social stability without the uncertainties of liberal pluralism.
Xi Jinping made this vision explicit at the 19th National Congress in 2017, asserting that Western-style democracy has failed to resolve the problems of poverty and upheaval in developing countries. In contrast, he stated that “[China’s system of governance] offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence; and it offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.”
Nonetheless, for all its confident projection, beneath this polished façade lies a lingering insecurity. If this model is truly superior—if it heralds not merely China’s destiny but the imminent trajectory of global governance—why, then, does it remain so resistant to open comparison?
The answer lies just across the Taiwan Strait. Here stands a society shaped from the same historical clay, bound by the same bloodlines, speaking the same language, and drawing from the same ancestral wellspring—yet thriving under a radically different political order. Taiwan’s people have embraced competitive elections, enshrined civil liberties, and cultivated a public sphere vibrant with debate, dissent, and cultural plurality. Contrary to authoritarian predictions of inevitable decline, this open society has forged one of the world’s most resilient economies and an innovation sector that rivals—and in some domains surpasses—Silicon Valley, the very pinnacle of global technological leadership.
Far from being a breakaway province or a footnote of history, Taiwan is the living continuation of the Republic of China—a political experiment that did not fail after 1949 but endured, adapted, and ultimately fulfilled its founding promises.
The birth of the Republic of China in 1912 marked a revolutionary moment not only for China but for all of Asia. In the wake of the Qing Dynasty’s collapse, Sun Yat-sen—revered as the “Father of the Nation”—set forth an audacious vision for a modern, constitutional republic grounded in the Three Principles of the People (三民主義): nationalism (民族), to overthrow the twin yokes of imperial domination and dynastic despotism and to forge a sovereign, unified Chinese nation free from foreign subjugation; democracy (民權), to establish political rights and popular governance; and people’s livelihood (民生), to ensure the economic well-being of all citizens through a synthesis of Western social welfare ideas and Confucian concern for the common good.
He did not envision this as a wholesale rejection of China’s civilizational inheritance, but as an elevation—marrying the ethical governance of Confucian virtue with the institutional safeguards of Western republicanism.
Though the early Republic struggled—beset by warlordism, Japanese imperialism, and civil strife—it did not perish. When the Chinese Communist Party seized the Mainland in 1949 and Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China from the rostrum in Tiananmen Square, the government of the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan. There, in exile, it kept alive the republican ideals first articulated in 1912.
This was, for a time, an imperfect and authoritarian guardianship. Under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), Taiwan fell into dictatorship. The long night of martial law—known as the White Terror—suppressed dissent and extinguished political freedoms. Yet even in those dark years, the ROC preserved something the CCP never permitted: The constitutional infrastructure of the republican experiment, though suspended, was never dismantled.
Unlike the CCP’s permanent entrenchment of one-party rule, the Republic of China remained capable of reform. And reform did come. In the 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo—the son of the very strongman who had once ruled with an iron fist—took steps toward liberalization. Martial law was lifted in 1987, political opposition was legalized, and by 1996, Taiwan held its first fully democratic presidential election.
What emerged in the final years of the 20th century was not a Western transplant, but the long-awaited maturation of a republican promise conceived in China’s own revolutionary crucible.
Prominent thinkers of the New Confucianism movement, such as Tu Weiming, have long championed a modern, humanistic Confucianism, frequently citing Taiwan as a living testament to this vision—a civic laboratory where concepts like ren (benevolence) have evolved beyond hierarchical paternalism into mutual respect among citizens, practiced through participatory governance and a robust social welfare state.
Whereas on the Mainland, ren traditionally governed the vertical relationship between ruler and subject—depicting the ruler as a moral exemplar who dispensed benevolence from above—in Taiwan’s liberal democracy, ren is reimagined as a horizontal virtue, flowing laterally among citizens and instantiated in policies that promote human dignity and collective responsibility. Taiwan’s progressive social programs, its universal health care system, and its historic decision in 2019 to become the first nation in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage are indicative of this modern, inclusive rendering of ren. Here, benevolence is no longer a condescending favor bestowed by the powerful, but a shared civic virtue that uplifts marginalized voices and guarantees the rights of all people.
Likewise, the Confucian principle of li—ritual propriety, once the instrument for maintaining social order through strict hierarchies—is transfigured in Taiwan through the civic rituals of democracy. Public life now expresses the will of the people in orderly and peaceful ways: via voting, civil discourse, and nonviolent protest. Rather than disturbing social harmony, these acts have become the new civic ceremonies of citizenship—ritualized practices that foster public virtues like tolerance, responsibility, and reciprocal respect, while turning the negotiation of differences into a dignified and constructive process.
The 2014 Sunflower Movement stands as a luminous example of this reimagined li. When the government attempted to push through a controversial trade pact with China without full legislative review, tens of thousands of students and activists occupied the Legislative Yuan. Yet this was no descent into chaos. The occupation was meticulously organized, remarkably peaceful, and imbued with a ritualistic dignity. In the spirit of li, the Sunflower Movement transformed protest into a civic liturgy of dissent, proving that harmony does not require enforced unanimity but can instead blossom through thoughtful engagement with pluralism.
Today, this small island nation is an irrefutable repudiation of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological creed. It proves that prosperity does not necessitate repression, and that liberal democracy is neither a Western imposition nor a cultural anomaly—it is a universal aspiration springing from the shared yearnings of the human spirit.
Liberty as a universal inheritance.
Just as the Soviet Union could not abide the success of West Germany, so too does Beijing find Taiwan’s independence intolerable. As long as Taiwan continues to be free, it casts a long and damning shadow over the central lie of authoritarian determinism. If freedom can take root in that same civilizational soil, what justifies authoritarian rule? What claim does the paternalistic strongman have if the heirs of that shared heritage have, through the rituals of democracy, mastered the art of self-government?
The Cold War was not won by missiles alone, nor by the tenuous logic of mutually assured destruction. Rather, free societies demonstrated, through the lived reality of their citizens, that they could offer not only greater material prosperity but a more transcendent promise of human dignity.
If the West now relegates Taiwan to a mere bargaining chip in a larger geopolitical calculus—or treats its freedom as a temporary inconvenience to be bartered away once economic “independence” is secured—it surrenders something far graver than territory. It surrenders the conviction that liberty, self-government, and human rights are the universal inheritance of all humankind, not the parochial luxuries of the West.
In 1963, standing before the scarred heart of Berlin—its streets still lined with the rubble of war and its skyline split by the concrete blade of the Wall—President John F. Kennedy declared: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” It was not a call to conquest, nor the prelude to a new crusade, but a simple and unshakable affirmation that the defense of freedom knows no borders. He stood for a city where children fell asleep to the thunder of Allied cargo planes and awoke to find chocolate bars drifting from the sky on handmade parachutes. He stood for a people who danced defiantly in underground clubs beneath the harsh glare of Soviet floodlights, who painted their side of the Wall in brilliant colors while the other side remained a bleak, gray void.
He stood for the idea that free people—even when surrounded, even when outnumbered—are never alone.
Sixty-two years later, that same credo is needed more than ever. The free peoples of the world must recognize that the longing for self-determination burns no less fiercely in Taipei at this moment than it did in Berlin at the height of the last great ideological struggle. And once again, we must summon the clarity and courage to speak with the same unwavering resolve:
我是台灣人—I am a Taiwanese.
