China’s ‘inevitable’ not acceptedBy Noa WynnTaiwan has been living on borrowed time according to outside predictions for longer than most countries have existed. What they usually miss is that Taiwan’s resilience comes from historical memory about what happens when you accept someone else’s version of your inevitable future. When Xi invokes blood and kinship as justification for unification, Taiwanese already know what those appeals are worth. Each military drill does not make unification seem more inevitable, but rather confirms why Taiwan spent decades fighting for the right to determine its own future. The colonization, the massacres, the decades of authoritarian rule, all of it was supposed to be permanent and inevitable, too.

Source: Taipei Times January 10, 2026 16:10 UTC