A recent column by Ross Douthat in the New York Times posed a question that has occupied Americans for generations: What makes someone American?
The debate, Douthat observed, often pits two competing visions of national identity against each other. One sees America as a creed, a nation defined primarily by allegiance to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the ideals of liberty and equality.
The other emphasizes culture, history, inherited traditions, and the habits that make those ideals meaningful in everyday life.
What struck me while reading the essay was not what it revealed about America, but what it revealed about Taiwan.
Taiwan’s identity debate is often portrayed as unusual or uniquely controversial. For the Chinese Communist Party, however, the matter is simple: Taiwanese people are ethnically Chinese, speak Chinese languages, celebrate Chinese festivals, and inherit Chinese cultural traditions.
Therefore, the CCP argues, Taiwanese are Chinese and Taiwan must ultimately unify with China.
The logic appears straightforward. It is also misleading.
Douthat’s essay helps explain why.
One of his central arguments is that a nation cannot be reduced solely to ancestry, ethnicity, or heritage. At the same time, it cannot be reduced solely to abstract principles.
Nations are living communities shaped by history, institutions, habits, and shared experiences. Political ideals become real only when they are embedded within a culture that sustains them.
This insight applies powerfully to Taiwan.
There is little point denying the obvious. Taiwan has been shaped in part by Chinese civilization.
Most Taiwanese trace their ancestry to migrants from China. Mandarin is widely spoken, and traditional Chinese characters remain in use. Families celebrate Lunar New Year, honor ancestors, and observe customs that originated in China centuries ago.
Chinese philosophy, literature, and history continue to shape daily life.
Yet Taiwan’s cultural story is more complex than Beijing’s narrative allows. Long before large-scale Han migration, the island was home to diverse Indigenous peoples whose languages and traditions remain an integral part of Taiwan’s identity.
Fifty years of Japanese colonial rule left enduring influences on education, urban planning, cuisine, and social norms. After 1949, the arrival of the Kuomintang brought new waves of migrants from across China, while Taiwan’s postwar alliance with the US exposed the country to powerful Western political and cultural influences.
Modern Taiwan is therefore not simply a preserved fragment of traditional Chinese civilization. It is a society shaped by multiple historical experiences and cultural currents, woven together over centuries into something distinctive.
These are facts.
Yet they do not settle the question of political identity.
If cultural inheritance alone determined nationhood, the modern world would look very different. Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders all share roots in British civilization, yet they are not British.
Austrians speak German but are not Germans. Much of Latin America shares language, religion, and cultural heritage with Spain, yet no one argues that Mexico or Argentina should therefore be governed from Madrid.
Cultural inheritance matters. It does not determine sovereignty.
Taiwan’s experience over the past seven decades illustrates why.
Since 1949, Taiwan and China have developed under profoundly different political systems. The People’s Republic of China remains a one-party authoritarian state governed by the CCP.
Taiwan has evolved into a democracy.
This divergence has produced something more significant than a difference in government. It has produced a difference in political culture.
Taiwanese citizens have spent decades participating in competitive elections. They have watched governments win and lose power through the ballot box. They criticize presidents openly.
They read newspapers that attack the government. They organize civic groups, campaign for causes, and challenge official policies in court. They have grown accustomed to the idea that authority must justify itself to the public.
These habits are not merely political procedures. They are cultural practices.
They shape how people understand citizenship, power, the rule of law, civil responsibility, and freedom.
In this sense, Taiwan’s identity consists of two intertwined parts.
The first is civilizational. Taiwan remains deeply connected to Chinese civilization while also bearing the imprint of Indigenous, Japanese, Western, and other historical influences.
The second is political. Taiwan’s democratic experience has created a distinct political culture that differs sharply from that of the People’s Republic of China.
The first component does not automatically determine the second.
The irony is that Douthat’s argument about America helps explain Taiwan better than many discussions of Taiwan itself. His point is that nations are not sustained merely by bloodlines or ancestry.
They are sustained by shared habits, institutions, and experiences that transform ideals into lived reality.
Taiwanese should therefore reject a false choice that is often imposed upon them. They do not need to choose between acknowledging Chinese, Indigenous, Japanese, and other cultural inheritances and affirming their Taiwanese identity.
Taiwan’s diverse historical and cultural inheritances help explain where Taiwanese came from.
Taiwan’s political culture explains who they have become.
Together, these intertwined inheritances — one civilizational and historical, the other political and democratic — make Taiwan distinctly Taiwanese.
What China truly seeks in annexing Taiwan, under the benign guise of unification, is not merely territorial control or the achievement of national rejuvenation. It is the absorption of a society that has developed a fundamentally different understanding of citizenship, authority, and political legitimacy.
To succeed, that distinct political culture would have to be subordinated and eventually erased, leaving behind only the ancestral and cultural identity that Beijing defines as “Chinese.”
Absorption by China would turn Taiwanese into subjects of Beijing, an identity defined entirely by the People’s Republic of China.
By defending the status quo, the people of Taiwan will remain distinctly Taiwanese. They are no longer, to paraphrase Singapore Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong, “fallen leaves awaiting return to their roots,” but a people who have firmly put down roots where they stand.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong who lives in Taiwan and is the author of “Taiwan Is Taiwan.”
