A new Chinese law came into force with a clause aimed squarely at Taiwan on July 1.
The law on promoting ethnic unity and progress instructs the Chinese Communist Party to "deepen the sense of belonging, identification, and pride of Taiwan compatriots toward the Chinese nation," and to reinforce the idea that both sides of the strait are "Chinese people."
Its most controversial feature is extraterritorial: the law claims legal jurisdiction over people and groups outside China accused of undermining "ethnic unity" or "inciting separatism."
President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) responded the same day to the new law, announcing protection measures for any Taiwanese targeted by it. The law tries to settle by statute a question that Taiwan's own society has, in practice, already answered for decades.
In a National Chengchi University Election Study Center tracking poll — running continuously since 1992 — 61.7% of adults identified as Taiwanese only in the most recently published detailed breakdown, against just 2.4% identifying as Chinese only. This was the lowest share on record, with 32% claiming both identities.
‘Taiwanese only’
The "Taiwanese only" figure has held above 60% for four straight years, while the "Chinese only" share keeps falling. Beijing's new law is trying to legislate against a trend that has been growing for legislating for over three decades.
This is the backdrop against which we should view Taipei's cultural diplomacy in Europe. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture's "Taiwan Culture in Europe" campaign — built around human rights and historical memory this year — is not simply promotion, it is Taiwan telling its own story in the same year Beijing has criminalized the telling of it.
Italy already has a foothold in that campaign. Taiwan's pavilion at the Venice Biennale, featuring artist Li Yi-Fan (李亦凡), plus Taiwanese participation at the Bologna Children's Book Fair, Napoli Comicon, and performances by the Taoist drumming troupe U-Theatre.
What the culture communicates is worth more attention than the diplomatic choreography around it.
Yang Shuang-zi's (楊双子) "Taiwan Travelogue," the first Mandarin-language work from Taiwan to win the International Booker Prize, is set in 1938 under Japanese colonial rule. It is built entirely around the unstable ground between a colonizer's language and a colonized woman's voice — who gets to narrate whom.
New Wave
Tsai Ming-liang's (蔡明亮) films, still finding festival premieres in Venice three decades on, have never offered a single, settled account of what it means to belong in Taiwan. Even the Minister of Culture, Li Yuan (李遠), made his name writing the Taiwanese New Wave films of the 1980s that first put this unresolved, layered identity on screen.
None of this work resolves into the "Chinese nation" that Beijing's law demands. It insists, instead, on complexity: an Indigenous foundation, generations of Hoklo and Hakka settlement, Japanese colonization, martial law and the White Terror, and a democracy built afterward by Taiwanese who chose it.
For Italian and European readers, that complexity is more legible than it might seem. Italy has its own regional identities and its own unresolved 20th-century past.
Taiwan is not asking Europe to take a side in a legal dispute over terminology. It is offering literature and cinema that make the answer to "who are the Taiwanese" obvious without needing a law to argue otherwise.
