Taiwan's President is Misrepresenting History for Political Gain

Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) has a recurring problem with public remarks — and his latest slip reveals something more troubling than a momentary lapse.

At a symposium marking the thirtieth anniversary of Taiwan's first direct presidential election, Lai referred to the celebrated Japanese author Shiba Ryotaro — known for his famous 1994 conversation with former President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) — as the "Governor of Tokyo." For members of his own Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the error was startling. This was not an obscure historical footnote. Shiba's dialogue with Lee, in which Lee spoke of "the sadness of being Taiwanese," remains one of the most iconic exchanges in Taiwan's modern political memory.

This came just three and a half months after Lai mistakenly cited the title of a novel by Taiwan's most celebrated Hakka writer, Chung Li-ho (鍾理和), calling it The Stranger — the title of Albert Camus's French novel — instead of the correct title, Homeland. That earlier slip was forgivable as a minor social gaffe. This latest one is harder to excuse. The thirtieth anniversary of direct presidential elections is precisely the kind of occasion Lai should be able to speak to from memory, without notes. He entered politics the very year of that first election, beginning as a DPP National Assembly delegate. It was the defining moment of his political generation.

Lee Teng-hui's conversation with Shiba Ryotaro was a landmark moment — two men of the same generation, both shaped by Japanese colonial rule, reflecting on identity, sovereignty, and Taiwan's path forward. Lee spoke not only of sadness but of transcendence: of building a proud "new Taiwanese identity" through constitutional reform, direct elections, and a sense of shared civic destiny.

Yet the political logic Lee and the DPP built on that foundation contains a persistent contradiction. By treating direct presidential elections as the primary symbol of Taiwan's sovereignty, they implicitly reject the legitimacy of the Republic of China as a sovereign state, while being unable to replace it with formal independence. The belief that abolishing Taiwan's provincial government would dissolve international perceptions of Taiwan as part of China belongs to the same category of political wishful thinking: gestures that satisfy ideological instincts without changing geopolitical reality.

At the same symposium, Lai traced Taiwan's democratic struggle across four centuries of successive rule. That framing is legitimate. But in an apparent attempt to discredit the Kuomintang (KMT), he claimed that the KMT had treated Taiwanese worse than Japan's colonial administration. The claim lit a fire under his own argument.

Whatever one's assessment of KMT governance — and there is genuine ground for criticism, from the 1947 February 28th Massacre to the decades of White Terror — the comparison to Japanese colonialism is historically illiterate on its own terms. Colonial-era Taiwanese had no political rights whatsoever. They could not vote, could not send representatives to Japan's Imperial Diet, and had no path to self-governance. The Taiwan Home Rule Movement petitioned the Imperial Diet fifteen times over more than a decade, and was dismissed every time. By contrast, from the moment the Republic of China government arrived in Taiwan, the Taiwanese were included in legislative and representative bodies.

The deeper irony is that without the KMT's infrastructure — compulsory education, meritocratic examinations, and the economic foundations that produced Taiwan's industrial miracle, including the groundwork for TSMC — neither Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) nor Lai Ching-te would likely have had the social mobility to reach the presidency. And without the KMT's decades of institutionalized governance, there would have been no democratic system to reform, no direct elections to celebrate thirty years later.

Lai's apparent nostalgia for the Japanese colonial period is not merely historically inaccurate — it is a debasement of national dignity. Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan included violent suppression campaigns in the decades before 1920, the Wushe Incident of 1930, the conscription of Taiwanese men into the Imperial Japanese Army, and the exploitation of comfort women, for none of which Japan has formally apologized or offered compensation. Japanese right-wing governments have consistently denied the comfort women issue entirely.

A president who speaks at length about democratic freedom while expressing warmth toward a period when the Taiwanese had no political rights at all has a coherence problem. Strategic engagement with Japan is a legitimate foreign policy posture. Romanticizing colonial governance is something else.

There is a broader warning here that Lai would do well to heed. As the third DPP president produced by Taiwan's democratic system, his administration has presided over its own record of democratic regression: criminal prosecution of citizens for insulting the president, and the use of espionage and "united front" accusations to suppress cross-strait civil exchanges. Each such action adds to a ledger that increasingly reads: the DPP's treatment of Taiwanese citizens is beginning to resemble the very authoritarianism it built its identity opposing.

Human lives lost to state violence — whether in the February 28th Massacre or the White Terror — matter as historical truth, not as electoral ammunition against a KMT that has long since ceased to be the party of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) or Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). When the value assigned to those lives is purely instrumental — useful against political opponents, ignored when inconvenient — the moral authority of the argument collapses. （Related： Opinion | When Leaders Call for War, Do Their Children Ever Answer? ｜ Latest ）

Lai can dislike the KMT. That is his political prerogative. But as the sitting head of state, he has an obligation to speak accurately, consistently, and with a minimum of historical honesty. Right now, he is failing that obligation — and the damage is not only to his own credibility, but to the democratic narrative he claims to champion.