Taiwan, China, and the Regina Caeli

One way to meet folks and make friends abroad in a strange city: take mass transit, get lost on the subway, look confused, and ask for help. I must confess it didn’t work some years ago when I was in Shanghai: people hurried by, heads down, manner aloof, scared off, maybe, by surveillance cameras and government warnings about talking to foreigners.

But Taiwan is different. My wife Jody and I were there in November (I had enrolled in a language program), in the capital city Taipei, and every time we paused at a station to puzzle over an MRT map, someone approached with a smile to guide us to our goal. And on the street, people sometimes walked blocks out of their way to accompany us and make sure we got where we wanted.

Warmth and hospitality: not at all what I’d experienced in Shanghai. When I exclaimed about this, one person replied: “Shanghai, that’s the mainland. And the mainland’s controlled by the Zhongguo Gong Chan Dang [Chinese Communist Party, or CCP]. But this is Taiwan. And, so far, our island’s still free of the CCP’s grip.”

We encountered this same friendliness when we visited Taipei’s most famous shrine: Longshan Si (“Dragon Mountain Temple”). A member of the temple’s staff eagerly offered to guide us through the thick press of worshippers who were busily burning incense sticks, casting divination stones, and bowing before the many images of deities.

We paused before the temple’s best-known statue: Guanyin, the golden-faced goddess of infinite compassion. Her countenance radiates calm and untroubled bliss as she sits on a throne in the shape of a blossoming lotus. Our guide told us a tale of “miraculous survival” from World War Two, when U.S. bombers targeted Taipei in an airstrike. (Taiwan—then known as Formosa—was at that time a colony of Imperial Japan.) The raid badly damaged the temple and destroyed much of the sanctum in which Guanyin was housed. Yet, when custodians cleared away the rubble, they found the goddess unharmed. “Her gold face was a bit dirtied,” said our guide, “from all the smoke and ash,” but otherwise she was intact and as serene as ever.

I asked if resentment lingered against the U.S. because of the bombing. “No. We know these things happen in war.” Then he added, “We also know that today both America and Japan try to help us. And we need this help, because of the constant threat from China.”

Threats from China: this was a topic I made a point of pursuing in conversations with people we met throughout our stay in Taipei. I referred frequently to the recent release of advertisements and a movie trailer for a forthcoming Taiwan-produced TV series named Ling Ri (“Zero Day”). The series focuses on a subject hitherto largely avoided in local popular entertainment: a what-if scenario depicting an air- and seaborne invasion of Taiwan by China’s People’s Liberation Army.

Some individuals politely declined to discuss this. “It’s something I just don’t want to think about,” as one interviewee put it. Quite a few people—understandably—felt that way; after all, it’s an uncomfortable thing to dwell on. Although China’s Communist government has never ruled Taiwan, CCP Chairman Xi Jinping claims suzerainty and has instructed his armed forces to be ready to cross the Taiwan Straits and seize the island by the year 2027. Invasion by Beijing is an all-too-real life-shattering possibility.

But many interviewees we met had plenty to say about this. One afternoon near the city’s Sun Yat Sen Memorial, we got ourselves lost again (we were trying to find a local bookstore), and a young university student kindly approached and walked us over to the mall containing the shop. On the way, I mentioned the advertisements for “Zero Day.” He said yes—he’d seen the trailer and was glad this film would be released.

“Some people don’t want to think about it,” he admitted. “But I’ve studied history, and I know such things can happen. So we need to think hard about this possibility of invasion and have this kind of discussion.”

I asked what he thought the Taiwanese should do.

“The Chinese are jealous of us,” he replied. “They want to make us become just like them. They’re always trying to give bribes to young Taiwanese, trying to influence them. But we need to realize what China is doing. We need to realize we have choices to make.”

Choices. For many Taiwanese, this means opting to strengthen the island’s capacity to defend itself should the People’s Liberation Army try to cross the straits. In recent years, many civil defense groups have been formed that share a “whole-of-society” philosophy in safeguarding Taiwan. (They’ve studied Ukraine’s response to invasion by Russia.) The job of protecting the island from China, they say, can’t be left only to Taiwan’s armed forces; civilians of all kinds have a role to play. These groups offer basic-skills courses in first aid, map reading, disaster preparedness, and combatting Communist disinformation.

Underlying such courses is an awareness that is stated starkly on the website of an NGO called the Kuma Black Bear Academy. (The group takes its name from the Formosan black bear, a species that survives in the rugged mountain ranges of the island’s interior.) The statement reads, “The people’s will to resist will determine the outcome of the war…The war is already underway…Taiwan will not surrender, and Taiwan will firmly stand with the free world. Tell the world loudly and directly that Taiwan is not China and Taiwan does not want to be with China.” In December 2024, the Black Bear Academy coordinated with some fifty other groups to organize a nine-day march from Kaohsiung in the south to Taipei on the island’s northern tip. Its goal: to encourage public involvement in building a democracy-wide bulwark against China. “Prepare for civil defense,” cried the marchers as they walked through each town on the route. “Protect Taiwan.” (Beijing’s response has been to announce that activists involved with such NGOs are “independence separatists” who will be subject to the death penalty in a mainland Communist court of law.)

Resistance to invasion, in fact, turned out to be the main topic of dinner conversation one night when Jody and I were invited to dinner with a retired diplomat from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “We should build up our military defenses,” he advised. “Make Taiwan a porcupine”—that is, perfectly peaceful if left undisturbed, but spikey and indigestible if an aggressor tries to swallow it. He offered details of this strategy: Buy more American armaments for repelling a cross-straits armada—drones, missiles, autonomous boats. Stockpile weapons and food in Taiwan’s mountainous interior. (“We have hundreds of mountains each over three thousand meters in height. The Chinese won’t be able to find and destroy every cache.”) Divide big military units into small and easily dispersed mobile squadrons for guerrilla resistance if China lands an invasion force.

Other interviewees are worried that China might not need to risk a direct military assault. Many of the people we spoke to are more concerned about Communist Party infiltration from within.

I asked for examples. Local social influencers, they said, who receive subsidies from the Chinese Communist Party. Retired politicians who are flown to the mainland and feted and petted by CCP cadres and given “gifts” of various kinds in exchange for mouthing the notion of Taiwan’s “peaceful reunification” with the “Motherland.” Former officers from Taiwan’s armed forces who go to the People’s Republic to attend displays of the Liberation Army’s military might and then are provided a stage by their hosts to make speeches praising “how strong our China has become.”

Zhe shi yige hen da de wenti, is how my language tutor put it: “This is a very big problem.”

Wang Laoshi, I’ll call her: Teacher Wang. (Like the other individuals I interviewed, she preferred—for understandable reasons—that she not be identified by her real name.) “People who want to allow Taiwan to be merged with the mainland by shouting ‘our China’”—she frowned as she said this—“are forgetting all the things that make Taiwan distinct. We have a democracy. We’ve fought hard for it. And we love our way of life here.”

Wang Laoshi praised the various local news outlets that do everything they can to remind Taiwanese of the vast differences between democratic Taiwan and totalitarian China. On November 15, the Taipei Times ran an editorial about a controversial incident involving “night riders” in the mainland province of Henan. The term refers to young people—some of them students, many of them newly unemployed because of China’s depressed economy—who spontaneously gathered for nightlong bicycle rides that culminated each dawn with a stop at a breakfast diner for soup dumplings. At first, just a few bicyclists assembled; the next night there were hundreds; thereafter came thousands, singing and cheering each other on and in general finding a precious sense of community.

To the CCP, this was intolerable. The result: a total ban on such activities. Communist authorities claimed that “the ‘night riders’ might have been incited by foreign forces.”

The Taipei Times astutely commented:

With the Chinese government’s suppression of the night ride—which was a rare moment of escape for young Chinese from the anxiety and uncertain future they face—intended to silence any possible dissent, Taiwanese can see more clearly the difference between living under authoritarianism and democracy. This is sound evidence as to why Taiwan could never be a part of autocratic China.

So too in how Taiwanese news outlets responded in late November to the criminal convictions and jailing of 45 democracy activists by Beijing’s puppet government in Hong Kong. For years, the CCP has tried to get Taiwan to agree to “peaceful reunification” by offering it the ‘one country, two systems’ model supposedly followed in Hong Kong. The Taipei Times reported on how Taiwan’s Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo responded in an official statement of solidarity with imprisoned Hong Kong protesters: “Yesterday’s sentencing not only breaks the promises of…a ‘high degree of autonomy’ but also further proves the unworkability of ‘one country, two systems’…The people of Taiwan and Hong Kong share a common pursuit of freedom and democracy.”

A Taiwanese news editorial on November 23 followed up by noting the lessons that Taiwan can learn from how the Chinese Communist Party has treated Hong Kong since the handover of the former British crown colony to Beijing: “Taiwanese must remain vigilant. The ‘united front’ tactics the CCP used to subjugate Hong Kong—sowing division and co-opting politicians to build economic dependence—it is also using on Taiwan.”

Alert to the implications of the recent presidential election in the U.S., the Taipei Times has also published editorials suggesting how Taiwan can best present itself to the incoming Trump administration to enhance the island’s own chances of survival in the face of ongoing threats by the CCP. A November 16 essay entitled “Taiwan’s role in the US-China Battle” argued that “Taiwan should be proactive in helping in ways it can.” Already well known is that world-famous TSMC (the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation) has been assisting the U.S. in its technological rivalry with Beijing.

The essay builds on this reality by noting, “As Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung said last week, Taiwan’s chip sector can help fulfill Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign slogan. This approach sends the right message.” News outlets in Taipei responded enthusiastically to President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Representative Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Representative Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor. Rubio is a longstanding anti-Communist and China hawk, while Waltz is praised in Taiwan as “a vocal supporter of arms sales to Taiwan who has called China an ‘existential threat’.” These nominations are currently seen in Taipei as indicators that America will continue its “robust support for Taiwan.”

A resource for Taiwan in its struggle to remain free from Chinese dominion is its wide number of faith communities. Most Taiwanese practice Buddhism or Taoism or “Fo-Dao” (a syncretic mixture of the two religions); but some 7% of the population are Christian—and they, like other citizens of this island democracy, are very aware of how the CCP, with its state-sponsored policy of “scientific atheism,” harasses and persecutes religious communities. On November 22, Taiwan’s new president, William Lai Ching-te, attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Taipei, an event that is sponsored annually by a grouping of interdenominational Christian church organizations. He praised the nation’s Christian congregations for their role in strengthening Taiwan, noting how “churches have been a spiritual backbone and provide stability for society.”

The role of Christians in Taiwan’s struggle impressed itself on us when Jody and I attended Mass one Sunday morning in November at Holy Family Catholic Church in the capital city’s Da’an district. Before the liturgy began, we had time to note the artwork above the tabernacle—Mary, Joseph, and the child Jesus—as well as the two flags that flanked the altar. One bore the insignia of the Vatican—Saint Peter’s keys and the pope’s tiara. The other was Taiwan’s national banner—a radiant white sun on a field of red and blue. Near the pulpit stood a carved figure of the Blessed Virgin. At that moment I did not study the statue of Our Lady; but I would have reason to do so later.

It was the 33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the day’s readings had to do with terminus-points and the end of things as we know them. The prophet Daniel announced: “There is going to be a time of great distress, unparalleled since nations first came into existence.” The reading from Mark’s Gospel offered Jesus’s words to his disciples: “In those days, after the time of distress, the sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will come falling from heaven.”

The priest celebrating Mass commented on these readings in his sermon, saying that these apocalyptic predictions about the world’s end would have resonated with the inhabitants of Judea in the first century: for the Roman empire conquered Jerusalem and laid waste the Temple held sacred by the Jewish people. “The Romans destroyed their world and utterly crushed the land they held dear,” said the priest. “For them it was a kind of end of the world. All this is a reminder for us today: our ultimate home isn’t here. Our final destination is eternal life.”

Maybe it was just because I had been talking to people for days about the constant threats from the CCP to gulp down this whole island and everything in it that was most precious; but for me suddenly the light thinned and paled and the words of this sermon felt like war-smoke darkening the brave bright sun of the Taiwan-flag beside the altar. Ancient Jerusalem, modern-day Taipei, both menaced with sudden termination; and there before us, above the tabernacle: the Son of God upon the Cross.

There came to me the words of a poem I love by Yeats, where the poet evokes an anguished vision of Christ crucified, a vision granted to an ancient Celtic king, “whose eyes saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise in Druid vapour and make the torches dim.”

My own darkness lifted sufficiently so that after Mass I roused myself and approached the priest and shared my thoughts about his sermon. I told him that what he’d just preached about Jerusalem’s fall and the end of time reminded me of the threat from Communist China.

At once he said, “Yes, we’re on the front lines here in Taiwan. Of course we hope it won’t come to invasion.” He said everyone here hoped there could be peace and that war could be avoided. “But we have to be ready.”

I said that sounded grim.

“Grim? Yes.” But he said we shouldn’t be discouraged, and he reminded me of that day’s reading from the Psalms: “I keep the Lord ever in my sight: since he is at my right hand, I shall stand firm.”

Stand firm. Good advice. It was only after our chat with the priest, when Jody and I lingered before the altar, that I really noticed the statue of the Virgin by the pulpit. She stood firm, crowned with a nimbus of stars, the adornment described in the Book of Revelation that marks her status as Regina Caeli.

Queen of heaven, the Second Eve. And it’s because of her representation as a second Eve that she’s often shown with a snake writhing beneath her foot. The Vulgate text of Genesis tells us what God announces to the serpent in Eden: Ipsa conteret caput tuum. “She will crush your head.”

Which we can take to mean: Those serpents that threaten to swallow us—we’re not alone in facing them. We have Christ Crucified, and his Blessed Mother.

That thought gave me hope. For Taiwan. For all of us.