Chiu Yi-jen (邱義仁) does not give interviews casually. As former Secretary-General of the National Security Council, presidential adviser, and Vice Chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party's New Frontier Foundation think tank, he is a figure who chooses his moments. So when he sat down with the Central News Agency for a lengthy on-record conversation on the eve of KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun's (鄭麗文) departure for the United States, the timing demanded scrutiny — because the substance did not.
Strip away the preamble and the careful scene-setting, and the interview amounted to roughly a thousand Chinese characters of deliberate non-revelation. It was unremarkable by design. Which is precisely what made the decision to give it — publicly, prominently, at that particular moment — so conspicuous.
The Independence Question Washington Won't Let Drop
Whether President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) qualifies as a Taiwanese independence advocate is, in one sense, not a serious analytical question. He has called himself a "pragmatic Taiwan independence worker." He is, in plain terms, an independence advocate who will not declare independence — and that description fits all three DPP presidents. Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) pursued independence objectives while acknowledging he lacked the means to achieve them. Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) held the same convictions while keeping them largely implicit and largely out of Washington's hair. Lai holds them too, but has generated considerably more friction — with Beijing and, increasingly, with the United States.
None of the three has crossed into what political scientists call de jure independence: no formal declaration, no new constitution, no change of the national title away from "Republic of China." That line has held despite periodic escalation in cross-strait tensions. Most people in Taiwan continue to operate on the quiet assumption that outright war remains unlikely — and Lai's two years in office have not fundamentally altered that calculus.
What has changed is the external pressure on this question. After the Trump-Xi summit, President Trump stated plainly that he did not want Taiwan moving toward independence and did not want anyone in Taiwan pursuing it on the assumption of American backing. Lai responded at his two-year inauguration anniversary address by insisting there was "no Taiwan independence problem." Ten days later, the promised direct phone call from Trump had not materialized. KMT Chairwoman Cheng was boarding a plane to Washington. It is difficult, in that context, to read Chiu's interview as anything other than a damage-limitation exercise — an attempt to reassure Washington that Lai is not what Trump's remarks implied, delivered through a senior surrogate precisely because Lai himself could not deliver the message credibly.
What Chiu Said, and What He Carefully Left Out
Chiu framed his interview around two questions he said the think tank's international visitors ask most frequently: Is President Lai pursuing Taiwanese independence? And what does the government's "resilience" agenda actually mean? He argued the two are routinely conflated — that critics wrongly read "resilience" as a covert independence strategy, branding it "resilience independence."
His answer to the first question ran to roughly ninety Chinese characters and reached no firm conclusion. His answer to the second consumed nearly nine hundred and constituted the real argument of the piece.
On resilience, Chiu's core claim is that Chinese infiltration of Taiwanese society has deepened substantially over the past decade — through economic ties, people-to-people exchanges, religious organizations, and media cooperation. He cited National Security Council figures showing that sixty-four individuals were indicted on China-linked espionage charges in 2024, more than three times the figure from 2021. The implication is stark: Chinese intelligence assets are operating inside Taiwan at scale, and if left unaddressed, the state is at risk. The "resilience" agenda, in Chiu's telling, is fundamentally about mobilizing the whole of society — military and civilian, public and private — to resist this penetration.
A Security Argument That Indicts Its Own Authors
There is a problem with this framing that Chiu does not address. He attributes deepening Chinese infiltration partly to the era of KMT governance under former President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). But the DPP has now governed Taiwan for a decade. If Chinese infiltration has grown to the point where sixty-four espionage indictments were filed in a single year, that deterioration occurred largely on the DPP's watch — including through two full terms of Tsai Ing-wen's government, during which Chiu himself held senior national security roles. His argument implicitly indicts his own party's security record.
More troubling still is what "resilience" looks like in practice. Chiu points to religious exchanges and media cooperation as the primary vectors of Chinese influence. These are not military targets. They are civil society spaces — temples, community organizations, local media — that have historically served as the connective tissue of Taiwanese social life, and that are, not coincidentally, arenas where the DPP has long struggled to build durable support. The pattern of treating these spaces as security threats is familiar. During election cycles, the DPP has repeatedly used national security framing to cast civil society networks — neighborhood associations, religious groups, local temples — as conduits of foreign interference.
An indictment count of sixty-four tells us nothing about how many of those cases resulted in convictions. What it does tell us is that the security mobilization machinery is running at high speed ahead of year-end local elections. Read in that context, Chiu's "resilience" rhetoric looks less like a defense doctrine and more like an electoral rallying call dressed in the language of national security. That should concern anyone watching the health of Taiwan's democracy closely.
A government that repeatedly deploys security mobilization to divide society along loyalty lines cannot credibly claim to be building national cohesion. And without national cohesion, "resilience" is an empty concept.
Lai's Cross-Party Dialogue Pledge Rings Hollow
The gap between Lai's rhetoric and his conduct is widest on cross-party engagement. Around the time of Cheng Li-wun's departure for Washington, Lai appeared at a youth forum and spoke at length about his commitment to promoting dialogue between the ruling and opposition parties. Before her mainland trip, Cheng had publicly indicated she was willing to meet with Lai. No meeting was arranged — not before her visit to the mainland, not after, and not before she left for the United States.
The president's talk of cross-party dialogue was delivered to an audience of young students who had no means to hold him accountable for the gap between word and action. Whether that reflects a failure of follow-through or a speech that was never meant as a genuine commitment is a question Lai has yet to answer.
The Label Chiu Tried to Kill May Now Stick
Chiu Yi-jen set out to draw a clear line between "resilience" and "independence" — to prevent the two concepts from fusing into a single damaging brand. The interview may have achieved the opposite. By making the argument so publicly, and at such a sensitive moment, he has drawn more attention to precisely the association he sought to dissolve. Observers in Washington, Tokyo, Seoul, and Canberra will note that a senior presidential adviser felt the need to make this case at all, and will draw their own conclusions about why.
Chiu cannot resolve the independence question on Lai's behalf. What his interview does reveal is what the Lai administration's resilience agenda actually prioritizes: not institutional reform, not credible deterrence, not cross-party consensus-building, but a security mobilization framework that has historically been turned inward as readily as it has been pointed outward.
The label "resilience independence" — the very phrase Chiu went on record to reject — may yet prove to be the most accurate shorthand for what this government is actually doing. （Related： Taiwan Re-Nationalized a Bank. Now It Should Sell It Off. ｜ Latest ）
