Jessica Gina Chen Shih, Chairperson, Shih Ming Te Foundation
On an afternoon in August I pulled an old manuscript from my study. On the cover was a date in handwriting: second proof, August 2011. It was the final proofread copy of Shih Ming Te’s Common Sense before it went to press. Fifteen years on, the paper has yellowed, but the corrections in pencil are still perfectly legible.
That was the year the two sides of the Strait signed ECFA, and “China’s rise” was the background noise behind every political statement made in Taiwan. Shih Ming Te neither avoided the subject in his book nor treated it with contempt. He called the China of that moment an “infant empire”: per capita income of US$4,382, ranked ninety-fourth among more than two hundred countries, its military power grossly out of proportion to its economy. He reminded his readers that every great empire in history has had to be rich as well as strong; no empire that was strong but poor has ever lasted long, and the Soviet Union was the most recent example. (Common Sense, ch. 7)
Fifteen years have passed, and the infant has grown. The China of today is not the China of 2011 — in economic weight, in military reach, in the instruments it brings to bear on Taiwan, it is not of the same order of magnitude.
But one thing has not changed, and China’s rise has made it more urgent, not less: when the country next door grows powerful, the last thing a nation can afford to lose is certainty about who it is.
Gaps in national strength can be narrowed with time, effort and allies. The one question that cannot be settled by external conditions is whether we are a country at all. Once that loosens, every other effort — the defense budget, diplomatic breakthroughs, economic resilience, the purpose of conscription — loses the object of its loyalty. No one will die for something they cannot name.
On August 7, 2026, in an interview on the online political talk show 《政經關不了》 (Zheng Jing Guan Bu Liao), Cheng Li-wun, chairperson of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), said: “Taiwan has never been independent, and Taiwan has never been a country.”
What, exactly, did she just say?
I. What This Sentence Does
Begin by measuring the distance between the sentence and reality. On the day it was uttered, Taiwan had its own president, its own armed forces, its own courts, its own central bank and its own passport; twenty-three million people had voted not long before to decide who would lead this country that “has never been” one. A sentence that contradicts the visible facts to this degree cannot have been intended to describe reality.
So the question to ask is not whether it is true — plainly it is not — but what it does.
Political slogans that distort reality have never functioned to persuade. They function to serve power. This one does at least three things.
First, it reverses the burden of proof. Before the sentence was uttered, whether Taiwan is a country was a question answered by seventy-seven years of fact. Once it is uttered, Taiwanese must open their mouths and prove themselves. The argument itself is the sentence’s achievement — a country compelled to keep proving that it exists has already been dragged into a debate that should not exist, and at precisely the moment when the other side of the Strait most needs that debate.
Second, it does not need to be believed, only repeated. Precisely because it contradicts common sense, echoing it carries a cost; and whoever is willing to pay that cost has thereby handed over a pledge of loyalty. A reasonable statement is one everybody can agree with, which reveals nothing about who is obeying; an absurd statement makes an effective loyalty test. This is also why slogans of this kind are never corrected — correction would destroy their capacity to sort.
Third, it supplies an internal citation for an external claim. “Taiwan is not a country,” said in Beijing, is propaganda; said by a political leader in Taiwan, it becomes evidence. From now on, any document seeking to argue that Taiwan’s status is undetermined has one more passage in the original Chinese to quote. It is the cheapest of contributions, and the hardest to withdraw — the speaker may change her mind, but the quotation will not change with her.
There is a further, incidental function: humiliation. Those who hold that Taiwan is already independent are described as talking “the way street thugs talk,” as spouting “nonsense.” The purpose of such vocabulary is not to reason but to mark out which statements will cost you something. Nor is it new: the Chiang Ching-kuo apparatus used the same class of words about the defendants in the Kaohsiung Incident. Shih Ming Te recorded in Common Sense that in those days “we were thoroughly vilified — I above all, portrayed as a monster beyond redemption whom everyone agreed deserved to die.” From criminal law to ridicule, the instrument has changed; the intended effect has not.
Shih Ming Te gave this whole mechanism its name fifteen years ago. In the first chapter of Common Sense he argued that the long confusion in Taiwan over national identity is not caused by any obscurity in international law, but by the fact that somebody profits from the confusion itself.
The deliberate blurring of national identity has become the means by which the Blue and Green parties and their politicians acquire money and power. (Common Sense, p. 11)
He then wrote something colder still: unless national identity is resolved, the country will remain divided, in conflict and in mutual hostility; suspicion and distrust will place national security in danger, and “no quantity of American weapons will keep Taiwan safe.” (Common Sense, p. 11)
He had also long since rejected a politics of slogans in place of thought: a complex question of statehood requires grounding in international law and a historical political argument, and therefore “cannot be handled the way politicians would like, with slogans in place of reasoning.” (Common Sense, p. 15)
This essay therefore does not discuss the person. It takes apart the sentence. The six layers that follow are answered entirely from Common Sense.
And the answer of the whole book was in fact given in March 1980. At the Formosa Military Trial, facing an indictment under the article known as “2-1” (Article 2, Paragraph 1 of the Statute for the Punishment of Rebellion), which carried the death penalty as its only sentence, the defendant Shih Ming Te stated to the court, repeatedly:
“Taiwan should be independent, and it has already been independent for thirty years; its present name is the Republic of China.” (Common Sense, p. 20)
It was the first time anyone had stood in a court of the Republic of China and put an equals sign between “the Republic of China” and “Taiwanese independence.” Shih Ming Te believed at that moment that these would be his last words, which makes the statement less a legal defense than a political testament. Forty-six years later, Taiwan’s politics, its democracy and its sovereignty are still operating inside the frame that testament drew. Direct presidential elections, the full re-election of the legislature, seven constitutional amendments, the building of the armed forces, the substance of our foreign relations — the working premise of all of them has been the same: Taiwan is the Republic of China, and she is already independent. “Never has been” does not overturn that frame. It merely refuses to admit that it has been standing inside it all along.
II. First Layer: The Switched Subject
“Taiwan has never been a country.” The first question is: what does “Taiwan” refer to in that sentence?
This is where the mechanism sits. In Chinese political usage “Taiwan” has at least three referents: the island as geography; a state name that does not yet exist, the “Republic of Taiwan”; and the state that actually exists and governs this territory.
If the second is meant — that no country called the “Republic of Taiwan” has ever existed — then the statement is a triviality that requires no rebuttal. If the third is meant, then what is being said is this: the political entity that today governs Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu, issues passports, levies taxes, conscripts soldiers, tries criminal cases and elects a president, is not a country.
And that political entity is called the Republic of China.
Shih Ming Te put it plainly in the first chapter of Common Sense: the definition of a state in international law has never been complicated — “territory, people, government, sovereignty; those four elements.” A piece of land, inhabited by a people, who establish a government that represents them externally and exercises jurisdiction internally: that is a state. He then wrote:
The Republic of China has “always” been a sovereign and independent state; Taiwan is “already” a sovereign and independent state. (Common Sense, p. 14)
His illustration is as sharp today as it was then. During the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when the United States and Australia moved their nationals out of Japan by way of Taiwan, they applied for entry to the government of the Republic of China in Taipei, not to Beijing. Jurisdiction over entry is an act of sovereignty.
Anyone who utters that sentence must therefore answer a question they cannot evade: is the Republic of China a sovereign and independent state?
The question is not mine. In 2011, in the fifth chapter of Common Sense, Shih Ming Te put it to Ma Ying-jeou in exactly this form: “Mr. Ma Ying-jeou, as President of the Republic of China, I ask you: is the Republic of China a sovereign and independent state? Say it out loud to the People’s Republic of China — yes, or no.” (Common Sense, p. 109)
The courtroom defense of forty-six years ago and the challenge of fifteen years ago can be put again today without changing a word. And “has never been” is a further degradation of “no independence”: the latter merely blurs the country’s status; the former cancels it outright.
If a party dares not acknowledge that the state it governed for sixty-three years is a state, what exactly does it think it is defending?
III. Second Layer: Mistaking Recognition for Existence
“Taiwan is not recognized internationally, therefore it is not a country.” This is the inference most often taken for granted behind the sentence. It sounds hard-headed. It is in fact an elementary error in international law.
Shih Ming Te devoted an entire section of the book to it. In Sydney in 1998 a professor challenged him to his face: since others do not recognize Taiwan, you cannot say Taiwan is already an independent country. He answered on the spot:
Whether a state is recognized is an entirely different matter from the question of the chicken and the egg. If you will not acknowledge that you are an independent country yourself, do you imagine that a state of Taiwan will simply appear once the international community recognizes you first? (Common Sense, p. 22)
The consensus among scholars of international law is that recognition has never had a constitutive function. Recognition merely acknowledges an existing fact, so that a state that already exists can conduct normal relations. He cited a resolution introduced in the United States Senate by Senator Alan Cranston in 1968: to recognize a state or a government is not to endorse its system, but simply to acknowledge a fact.
And then he wrote the sentence I love best in the whole book:
If no state recognizes you, you are still a state — just as a person with no household registration is still a person, and you may not kill him as you please. (Common Sense, p. 24)
It is worth adding that when he wrote the book in 2011, one hundred and fifteen countries granted visa-free entry to holders of Republic of China passports. Today there are more. There is exactly one country in the world that refuses to recognize or accept the Republic of China passport: the People’s Republic of China.
To say “Taiwan has never been a country” is to take one’s place on the side of that solitary exception.
IV. Third Layer: “Never” Erases Seventy-Seven Years
“Never” is a historical claim, not a legal one. What it asserts is that between 1949 and 2026, across seventy-seven years, nothing happened.
The whole of the second chapter of Common Sense is an answer to this. Shih Ming Te lays out the key chronology from 1947 to 1982 and then states a fact many Taiwanese would rather not face and cannot deny: the three men who set Taiwan on the road to independence were three men who were not Taiwanese — Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong and Harry Truman.
On June 18, 1949 Chiang Kai-shek recorded in his diary that Britain and the United States intended to intervene on the grounds that Taiwan’s status was undetermined, and told the Americans firmly: “I will defend Taiwan to the death.” On January 5, 1950 Truman announced that the United States had no intention of involving itself in the Chinese situation and would not aid Chiang’s forces on Taiwan; the Korean War broke out on June 25, and two days later Truman reversed himself and sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait; in October, Mao sent Peng Dehuai across the Yalu. Three men, each with his own calculations, none of them intending it, together produced one result:
They brought Taiwan’s four centuries as a colony to an end and made her a sovereign, independent Taiwan. (Common Sense, p. 53)
Shih Ming Te called this a “collective work of history.” And the sentence he returned to again and again is the blade that cuts “never” apart:
Long-standing fact is the most powerful legal foundation there is. (Common Sense, p. 16)
Both international and domestic law recognize prescription. Seventy-seven years of effective government, seventy-seven years of independence, seventy-seven years in which neither side has been subordinate to the other: this is not an assertion, it is a fact. Facts do not disappear because someone says “never” in a television studio.
He also described precisely how Taiwan’s independence came about. Not through a war of independence, not through a referendum, not because a colonial power let go, but in the manner of New Zealand, Australia and Canada — by what he called a “backdoor listing” — that is, by prescription — gradually acquiring the status of a sovereign independent state. And that acquisition was completed long ago. (Common Sense, p. 76)
V. Fourth Layer: Turning the Aggressor’s Missiles into the Victim’s Crime
From the same interview: the peace Taiwan enjoys today was brought about by the constitution of the Republic of China, not by Taiwanese independence; and if Taiwan truly moved toward independence, everything everyone now enjoys, peace included, could “vanish into thin air at once.”
Look closely at the grammar. Who makes it all vanish? The subject has been deliberately concealed. Constitutions do not launch missiles, and neither do the assertions of Taiwanese people. Only one regime can make Taiwan vanish, and the sentence will not even say its name.
This is where the deepest moral corruption of such language lies: it translates the gun in the aggressor’s hand into a charge against the victim. The threat comes from Beijing; the responsibility is entered against the Taiwanese. Say who you are, and you have brought it on yourself.
Shih Ming Te dealt with this inversion long ago. Analyzing Ma Ying-jeou’s formula of “no unification, no independence, no use of force” in the fifth chapter of Common Sense, he observed that everyone understands Taiwan cannot swallow the People’s Republic of China whole through “unification,” and will not initiate the use of force against China.
Therefore “no unification” and “no use of force” are what the People’s Republic of China ought to be promising and guaranteeing to Taiwan and to the world. (Common Sense, p. 110)
No political leader in Taiwan has standing to give those two guarantees on Beijing’s behalf, still less to shift Beijing’s responsibility onto the Taiwanese people. As for the remaining term, “no independence,” Shih Ming Te was blunt: to surrender the sovereign independence of the Republic of China in exchange for peace and trade “comes very close to treason.” (Common Sense, p. 110)
And he had already defined what a peace bought on those terms would amount to:
A cross-Strait peace obtained on such a premise would be the quiet of the grave.
VI. Fifth Layer: “The Will of the People on Both Sides” — Using the Language of Democracy to Abolish Democracy
Asked in the same interview to choose among peaceful unification, unification by force, peaceful independence and independence by force, the answer given was that if the status quo one day genuinely has to change, how it changes “must accord with the will of the people on both sides of the Strait.”
It was the most lightly delivered line of the interview, and the most lethal.
“The will of the people on both sides” sounds democratic, respectful, inclusive. But do the arithmetic on the denominator. Twenty-three million, plus one billion four hundred million. When Taiwan’s future is to be decided by “the people on both sides,” Taiwanese hold 1.6 percent of a say in their own fate.
That is not democracy. It is the dilution of Taiwanese self-determination to the point of nullity. It uses the rhetoric of democracy to accept, in advance, a “one China” electorate. It need never declare unification; it need only draw the boundary of the count wide enough, and the conclusion is already written.
What Shih Ming Te wrote at the end of the second chapter of Common Sense is the exact opposite:
The twenty-three million people of Taiwan have the right to discuss a future of shared prosperity and coexistence with the United States and China as the people of a sovereign state. (Common Sense, p. 54)
“As the people of a sovereign state” is the center of gravity of the entire book. If you are not the people of a sovereign state, you are not a party to the negotiation; you are the thing being negotiated over. That gentle phrase, “the will of the people on both sides,” does precisely this: it moves the Taiwanese from this side of the table onto the table.
VII. A Challenge to the Chinese Nationalist Party
I want to say a few words to the Chinese Nationalist Party. I am not a member of the Democratic Progressive Party; the most important movement of Shih Ming Te’s later life was leading a million Red Shirts into the streets against a president of that very party. And what I quote below is not any party’s platform. It is what your own successive leaders left on the record.
Chiang Kai-shek: “There is no coexistence between the legitimate and the usurper.” Shih Ming Te’s gloss: the spirit of this is that the Republic of China absolutely does not recognize, and does not belong to, the People’s Republic of China. (Common Sense, table of contents)
Chiang Ching-kuo: insisting on a relationship “government to government.” Shih Ming Te’s gloss: a relationship between governments is a relationship between states, because one state cannot have two legitimate governments. (Common Sense, table of contents)
Lee Teng-hui: “a special state-to-state relationship.” Shih Ming Te’s gloss: a special state-to-state relationship is still a state-to-state relationship.
Ma Ying-jeou: “no unification, no independence, no use of force” — already the first fall along this line.
2026: “Taiwan has never been a country” — the fall to the bottom.
Shih Ming Te even defended Lee Teng-hui. He wrote that across his twelve years in office Lee “did not alter the cross-Strait relationship established by the two Chiangs after 1949,” but expressed it in more precise legal language; “so it is not fair for the old guard of the Kuomintang to accuse President Lee of betraying the two Chiangs.” (Common Sense, p. 105)
And today? Who is it, today, who is truly betraying the two Chiangs?
There is one further passage I ask members of the Chinese Nationalist Party to read quietly — particularly those who grew up in the military dependents’ villages, whose fathers and grandfathers came to Taiwan with the army. Shih Ming Te wrote it at the end of the second chapter of Common Sense, addressed to the Taiwanese who arrived in 1949:
Over these decades you have kept Taiwan from becoming a province of the People’s Republic of China … you are people who have contributed to “Taiwanese independence.” That was not your original intention when you set out to “oppose the Communists and resist the Soviets,” but the rice is cooked and the boat is built. If you now turn around and oppose “Taiwanese independence,” and seek to make the “Republic of China,” or “Taiwan,” a part of the “People’s Republic of China,” can you face the Chiang Kai-shek and the Chiang Ching-kuo you loved? (Common Sense, p. 53)
The blood shed at Guningtou and in the 823 artillery battle was shed for an independent Taiwan. To say today that “Taiwan has never been a country” is to declare that the blood was shed for nothing, that the lives were thrown away for nothing, that forty years of holding the line meant nothing. That is not a repudiation of Taiwanese independence. It is a repudiation of the armed forces.
VIII. Sixth Layer: Bloodline, and a Proposition Recycled Again and Again
Another slogan was in circulation in the same period: “We are all Chinese.”
The first of the “reveries” in the seventh chapter of Common Sense carries a title of six characters: bloodline may not serve as a political position. (Common Sense, p. 147)
He wrote: “No one has any choice about their birth; ancestry should not be a policy platform.” He quoted Academician Cho-yun Hsu: “Loving Taiwan should not become the privilege of one ethnic group.” And he added, with amusement, the three acts in the life of a mainlander in Taiwan: in Taiwan he is a mainlander; abroad he calls himself Chinese; and in China he is called a “Taiwan compatriot.” It takes the full circuit for him to discover that he has been Taiwanese all along. (Common Sense, p. 148)
That passage was aimed in both directions at once. He criticized Tsai Ing-wen for using “I am Taiwanese” to imply that Ma Ying-jeou was not; he also criticized the Blue camp for manipulating “political bloodlines.” His standard was single and applied to everyone: nationality is a legal fact; bloodline is not a political position. (Common Sense, p. 149)
By that standard, “We are all Chinese” and “I am Taiwanese, therefore I love Taiwan” commit the same error — except that the consequences of the former are far graver, because it places the determination of identity in the hands of a regime that claims sovereignty over Taiwan.
The proposition that “Taiwan is not an independent country” is neither new in Taiwan nor the property of any one position. Over the past decades, those who wanted to found a state have said it — meaning “and therefore we must become independent”; today those who want unification say it — meaning “because it belongs to China.” Same premise, opposite conclusions, and both in agreement with Beijing on one point: the denial that Taiwan is already a country now.
In 1989, Cheng Li-wun, then a law student at National Taiwan University, stood before a crowd and shouted: “We want to build a country of our own.” Her proposition then was that Taiwan was not yet a country, and therefore a country had to be founded. In 2026, Cheng Li-wun, chairperson of the Chinese Nationalist Party, says that Taiwan has never been a country.
Many say she has betrayed her younger self. I see it differently. Her proposition has never changed. All her life she has been saying the same thing: Taiwan is not, at present, an independent country. The only thing that has changed is whom the sentence serves politically — in her youth, the passion of founding a state; now, the patience of annexation.
This is precisely the structure Shih Ming Te foresaw in the first chapter of Common Sense. He recorded the hard words he had once directed at the fundamentalists of the independence movement:
When you refuse to acknowledge that Taiwan is already a sovereign and independent state, your position is exactly the same as Beijing’s. The extreme unificationists and the extreme independence activists turn out to have a meeting point; the words differ, but the meaning is identical. (Common Sense, p. 23)
Hence the severest judgment in the book:
If there are still Taiwanese today who say “Taiwan is not a sovereign and independent state,” and who still claim that Taiwan “must become” independent, that is the gravest harm that can be done to Taiwan’s sovereignty. (Common Sense, p. 23)
IX. What Every Taiwanese Should Know
The closing lines of the third chapter of Common Sense are Shih Ming Te’s words to the Taiwanese of the twenty-first century:
From now on Taiwan will have no war of independence, only a war of national defense; no founding heroes, only martyrs who defended Taiwan. (Common Sense, p. 75)
Read today, the sentence carries an entirely different weight. What it means is that independence is finished business, and the work that remains is to hold on to it. And to hold on to it, the first step is to acknowledge that it exists. If even a major party that has governed the country says the country does not exist, the enemy need not fire a shot.
Shih Ming Te spent twenty-five and a half years in prison for a piece of common sense. That common sense was once a capital offense; it then became, gradually, a consensus.
I am not angry. I simply remember that the man who wrote this book fifteen years ago wrote it as China was about to rise and Taiwan had just signed ECFA. He understood clearly how large the other side would become, and he was equally clear that Taiwan would hold its place in the world.
The answer he gave then still holds, and it could not be simpler:
Taiwan is already a sovereign and independent state, and her present name is the Republic of China.
This is not an assertion, not an ideology, not a party position.
It is common sense.
All quotations from Shih Ming Te are taken from Common Sense (Shih Ming Te, August 2011). Translated from the Chinese; page references follow the Chinese edition.
Cheng Li-wun’s remarks are quoted from her interview on 《政經關不了》 (Zheng Jing Guan Bu Liao), as reported by Up Media on August 8, 2026: https://www.upmedia.mg/tw/focus/politics/265714
This essay is published in two parts; Part II addresses democratic resilience and national security.