Opinion | Taiwan Travelogue vs. Dear You: Culture Is Shareable, Sovereignty Is Not

Does sharing a language and script with China mean Taiwan must be treated as part of the same nation? Does Beijing's claim that Taiwan has been "an inseparable part of China since ancient times" make political unification historically inevitable?

These questions sit at the heart of two cultural phenomena that have taken the internet by storm. One is Taiwan Travelogue(《台灣漫遊錄》), the novel by Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子), translated into English by Lin King (金翎), which recently made history by winning the International Booker Prize — the first win ever for both a Taiwanese author and a Taiwanese translator. The other is Dear You (《給阿嬤的情書》), a low-budget Chinese film that has become a box-office sensation, pulling in nearly two billion RMB.

On the surface, both works deal with family, history, and memory. But placed side by side, they reveal a deep conceptual clash between two irreconcilable worldviews: Zhu Xia (諸夏) — a pluralist world of distinct regional identities — and Da Yitong (大一統), the ideology of absolute, centralized Great Unity. Their contrast exposes what may be the most consequential political lie in contemporary East Asia: the idea that cultural affinity equals political legitimacy.

The concept of the "Chinese nation" (Zhonghua Minzu,中華民族) is not an eternal reality handed down from antiquity. It is a modern political construction, synthesized in the late Qing period by the intellectual Liang Qichao (梁啟超). What Beijing now treats as an inevitable ethnic destiny was, in the words of political theorist Benedict Anderson, simply an "imagined community."

In modern Chinese history, nationalism mutated rapidly from a tool of liberation into an instrument of authoritarian control. During the May Fourth Movement (五四運動) of 1919, China stood at a crossroads between enlightenment — individual freedom, democracy, science — and nationalist mobilization. Under successive crises of national survival, the drive for "salvation" consumed the enlightenment impulse entirely. Individual freedom and local diversity were dismissed as "loose sand," while science and democracy were weaponized in service of state power. The result was a Leninist authoritarianism that replaced older imperial structures with something far more disciplined — and far more total.

This historical trajectory is precisely why Taiwan Travelogue and Dear You matter. They represent rival accounts of what identity means and what it demands.

Taiwan Travelogue is not, as some have casually described it, a food diary. Its pacing is unhurried, its plot understated, and its prose unflashy. It won the International Booker Prize not for dramatic sweep, but for something rarer: structural insight into the quiet, pervasive power dynamics of colonialism.

Set during the Japanese colonial era, the novel traces the relationship between Aoyama Chizuko (青山千鶴子), a visiting Japanese writer, and Wang Tsian-hoh (王千鶴), her Taiwanese interpreter. Aoyama genuinely loves Taiwan — its food, its people, its atmosphere. She is educated, well-meaning, and entirely without malice. Yet she cannot escape her imperial identity. She has the freedom to "experience" Taiwan as an exotic landscape; Wang, by structural necessity, exists to serve, translate, and facilitate that experience.

The novel's power lies in showing how even the most well-intentioned individuals can participate in structural oppression without awareness. The colonial bureaucrat Mishima (三島) keeps Aoyama away from ordinary markets, plying her instead with official banquets of shark fin and abalone — substituting a sanitized "official Taiwan" for any encounter with the real thing. Wang enters precisely in this gap. As a translator, she holds the genuine power of interpretation. The empire may govern administrative space and infrastructure, but it cannot fully possess Taiwan's cultural meaning.

Food throughout the novel operates as a metaphor for political control. Who gets to define food, who explains it, who has the right to "experience the exotic," and who is treated as local scenery — all of this is compressed into the act of eating. The deeper logic, as Yang and Lin affirmed in their award acceptance speeches, is experiential rather than declarative: "Taiwan is the Taiwan of the Taiwanese people." Through centuries of shifting rulers, Taiwan's vitality persisted in its night markets, local dialects, and folk customs. Over time, this shared everyday life produced a civic identity rooted in free will, elections, and the rule of law — not bloodlines.

Dear You operates on an entirely different psychological register. It mobilizes low-friction cultural symbols — Chaoshan (潮汕) family letters (qiaopi 僑批), classical prose, regional dialects, intergenerational longing — to draw audiences into an imagined community of shared ancestry. It is a film designed to make you weep. And it largely succeeds.

But the warmth it generates demands scrutiny, because it thoroughly erases a brutal history.

In the Chaoshan diaspora communities of the 1950s and 1960s, having "overseas relations" was not a romantic narrative — it was a politically dangerous stigma that destroyed families. During the PRC's Land Reform in 1950, over 80% of properties owned by overseas Chinese were violently confiscated or occupied, despite official regulations nominally protecting them. During the Great Leap Forward (大躍進), diaspora homes were forcibly emptied to serve as public canteens. By the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命), anyone with relatives abroad was branded a "reactionary," leading to systematic persecution and, in many cases, suicide among returned emigrants.

The film erases this state-sponsored trauma entirely, repackaging politically coerced separation as mere geographic misfortune — families kept apart by distance and circumstance rather than by the violence of the state. By inviting audiences to weep for an idealized "Chinese Motherland," the film performs a clear ideological function. It uses cultural memory to lower the civic vigilance of diaspora communities, redirecting natural nostalgia into sympathy for authoritarian power. It is no surprise that Singaporean media — from a nation with a long history of vigilance against communist influence — widely criticized the film's united front undertones.

Authoritarian systems excel at blurring the boundary between civilization and political regime. Dear You is a case study in that technique.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson established that a nation is strictly a political community, not an ethnic or linguistic inevitability. His famous example: residents of Sumatra's east coast shared an identical language, ethnicity, and religion with Malays across the strait. Yet through modern state-building, they came to regard distant Amboinese as fellow Indonesians, while their cultural twins across the water became foreigners. The logic of "same culture, therefore same nation" simply does not hold.

The modern world is full of examples of cultural symmetry alongside sovereign separation. The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada share the Anglosphere but are fiercely independent nations. Germany and Austria share language and deep historical memory but remain separate states. Singapore is a majority-ethnic Chinese nation whose national identity insists on "Singaporean first" — treating Chinese heritage as one cultural background among many, never as a political obligation.

To treat shared language or ancestry as an automatic claim to political ownership is the defining delusion of authoritarian nationalism. When people identify as Hunanese, Hokkien, Cantonese, or Taiwanese, they are describing regional culture — food, memory, local habits. When a centralized state cracks the whip of Da Yitong, demanding that these distinct identities surrender to a singular project of national rejuvenation, it is not offering connection. It is demanding submission.

Taiwan's younger generation rejects Beijing's unification narrative not because they have repudiated Chinese food, characters, or classical literature. They reject it because they refuse the logic that cultural similarity requires the surrender of freedom.

Taiwan Travelogue and Dear You are, at their core, rival theories of belonging. One demonstrates that identity is an ongoing act of self-definition, built through lived experience and civic participation. The other insists that identity is an inescapable inheritance of bloodlines and emotional return — a debt that must eventually be repaid.

One point toward civic freedom. The other toward what might fairly be called civilizational captivity.

In a sense, this cultural contest mirrors the political one: it is Lai Ching-te (賴清德)'s vision of Taiwan against Xi Jinping (習近平)'s vision of Great Unity, played out not in diplomacy or military posture but in bookshops and cinemas. The outcome of that contest remains undetermined. But the lesson Taiwan's own history offers is already clear: who we are does not dictate who we must belong to.

*The author, Wu Tsai-lin (吳再臨) is a journalist, columnist, and independent writer based abroad. He covers Chinese politics and economics, and writes in defense of democratic values. （Related： A Foggy Tale: The 10 Numbers Behind Taiwan's White Terror That the Film Leaves Unsaid ｜ Latest ）

Original Article in Chinese