“Taiwan hasn’t figured out who Taiwan is yet,” Lev Nachman, postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, explained. “They can’t start letting in refugees and immigrants in and giving them citizenship, because we don’t even know who’s Taiwanese here yet.” “When you’re contested, every other political issue is secondary.” Nachman continued. “It’s not that people don’t care about things like minimum wage or economics, but those things get filtered through this lens of ‘Who are we? How do I feel about China? How does that impact my identity? Am I Taiwanese? Am I Chinese? Am I both? What does that mean politically? Where does that mean my loyalties lie?’”

For the full story, please visit https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/magazine/taiwan-china.html.