Full speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH9kwUJ5ij0
Arnaud Betrand’s comments:
That’s easily the most insanely provocative statement that Taiwan’s Lai Ching-Te has ever made, and that’s a very high bar.
In a speech on Saturday he literally said that Imperial Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan was better than that of the KMT (Chiang Kai-shek’s party that built modern Taiwan and his main opposition party today).
His exact words: “Japan colonized Taiwan in order to advance the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Nationalist government came to Taiwan just the same - merely [treating it] as a springboard for retaking the mainland. And especially after the KMT government arrived in Taiwan, the way it treated the Taiwanese people was even worse than colonial-ruled Taiwan - worse than colonial Japan’s treatment of Taiwan.”
There’s so much wrong with this, I’m not even sure where to start.
First of all, the expression “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” to frame Japanese imperialism during WW2 is anything but neutral: it’s Imperial Japan’s own propaganda term for their imperial project of domination of Asia. An empire, incidentally, that the WW2 allies - including his U.S. patrons - lost millions of soldiers defeating.
Used unironically as he does, it’s like describing Nazi Germany’s occupation of Europe as an effort to build a “Prosperous New European Order”
Secondly, the man is literally - officially - the President of the Republic of China, the very state that Sun Yat-sen and the KMT founded. He draws his constitutional authority from the constitution they wrote, and won his presidency through the voting system they established - and then calls them worse than Imperial Japan.
Heck this very speech was given at an event celebrating 30 years of direct presidential elections in Taiwan - which the KMT itself introduced. So he used the anniversary of a KMT achievement to argue that the KMT was worse than a colonial empire that never gave Taiwanese a single vote
Lastly, the framing of the existence of a “Taiwanese people” that was subsequently colonized by both Japan and the KMT is historically and demographically absurd. Over 95% of Taiwan’s population is Han Chinese, descended from mainland migrants - and that includes Lai’s own family (!), which came from Pinghe county in Fujian province.
So framing things this way is basically saying that Japanese colonial rule over the Chinese people of Taiwan was preferable to governance by other Chinese people, including his own! You could hardly do more to insult your own ancestors, and yourself.
I mean, think about the absurd twisting of history that’s going on here, the degree of madness in the current Taiwanese separatist narrative.
Lai doesn’t hold office as the president of some independent “Taiwanese” republic: he is the president of the Republic of China - the state that took Taiwan back from Japan. His office exists because that liberation happened. As the President he is, by definition, its inheritor.
And he’s arguing it was a mistake because, otherwise, his entire narrative falls apart. If the KMT’s arrival was a liberation - which it legally, historically, and constitutionally was - then there is no “colonized Taiwanese people,” no separatist grievance, and no justification for independence.
So we arrive at the absurd situation where the president of the Republic of China has to stand at a podium and argue that the Republic of China should never have retaken Taiwan.
Beyond shameful
Angelica Oung gives an impression of how this was received in Taiwan:
https://xcancel.com/AngelicaOung/status/2033374896273895871
BTW…people in Taiwan are NOT OK with this. I searched “Lai Ching-te” on Threads this morning and here are the top results, all related to these horrible comments:
“How do we have such a disgusting president? Lai Ching-te is the tragedy of the Taiwanese. How can the words ‘east-asia co-prosperity sphere’ leave his mouth?”
“I voted Tsai Ing-wen…hearing Lai describe Japanese colonialism as co-prosperity…I’m pretty disappointed.”
“Who is Lai Ching-te’s history teacher?”
“I don’t want to defend the KMT white terror, but the Japanese colonial regime came with armed repression and exploitation. The Yunlin massacre and the 228 massacre should be seen as equal.”,
“After seeing Lai’s talk, I refuse to vote DPP for life.”
“Taiwan is hopeless…when the president uses his ideology and misbegotten view of history to create polarization…no wonder Taiwan is full of agitation and conflict.”
“I want to throw up”
“As a leader of our country, yet he sucks up to those who colonized us. This isn’t freedom of speech but a betrayal to the Taiwanese!”
You can tell from the comments that they are not all from pro-KMT voices but betrayed DPP followers as well
Peaceful reunification hand in hand with the KMT seems less and less unlikely
While I agree, this person is not from KMT (which afaik isn’t pro independence) but DPP (which is pro independence and seems to be the party of choice for the imperialists).
The point is that DPP is losing organic support and has to be increasingly being propped up by NGOs and imperialist funded media as the people in Taiwan turn against them, which leads to it increasingly becoming more extremist in its views and more comprador as time goes on.
I think you meant “less and less likely”?
No really I mean the DPP is making people really upset and so the KMT is leaning towards reunification for nationalistic reasons so maybe in a not so far future we’ll see them sealing a deal with the PRC to secure Taiwan’s future
Yep at this point both parties are almost 2 sides of the same coin.
The KMT prefers it to be muddy and stay de-facto independent without saying the quiet part out loud.
The DPP wants to continue making money off the mainland whilst also saying the quiet part out loud, though they never had the balls to hold an independence referendum.
This seems like a great strategy to turn the people against you.
It might work if they had more time to indoctrinate the younger generations with NGO propaganda in schools, but the DPP hasn’t been in power for that long and have not yet managed to overwrite the cultural and historical memory of the population.
Sometimes it works though, if you have enough time and resources dedicated to rewriting the historical narrative to get people to identify with their colonizers over their liberators. Ukraine is the case study for what happens to a country when that self-hating brainwashing succeeds.
The problem that the DPP and its NGO-industrial complex are facing is that China rose too quickly and the US declined too fast. They needed a few more decades time, now they’re in desperation mode and so they have to escalate the rhetoric to extremes that the population is not primed for.
Yep, the DPP has successfully brainwashed an entire generation or two since their rise in 1996. Their recent census labelled the over 90% Han majority as “other ethnicity” too lol.
Prior to that, their school textbooks always put Chinese history as national history instead of “global history”. At the back of their textbooks it also used to say something along the lines of “grow up and be a proper Chinese person”.
While this indoctrination is successful, it seems most of their youth are more in line with praying their Japanese and American masters fight on their behalf rather than being thrown into the meat grinder like what happened with the Ukrainians.
China just needs to take the reigns. I’m sorry, I know they are all about not firing the first shot and saying they will take Taiwan back through diplomacy and like rainbows and fairies and whatnot, but seriously is it not becoming so unbelievably obvious that the west will never give up Taiwan without a fight? That they will try to pull some shit? The “leadership” of that country is not capable of critical thought or reasoning. I feel like, it is not crazy to say “hey China, I get your whole thing, I really do, but like, I think maybe you need to just nip this in the bud you know? Especially now that the US is pretty distracted and getting their shit pushed in by Iran?”
I think the counter-argument to that is that the longer China waits the stronger they become relative to the US and the more obvious it becomes to the population in Taiwan that peaceful re-unification is in their best interest, with economic ties to China as well as China’s soft power strengthening every year and ties to the US weakening as the US will have very little to offer apart from chaos and destruction.
China is betting on the long game. And of course we can’t know for sure if that’s the correct bet, but China has bet on the long game before even when many leftists were very skeptical of their strategy, and it has paid off for them. That’s why i think the Chinese leadership are confident that patience will pay off here too. I think they view reunification as an inevitability on their current trajectory.
The idea is that Taiwan has no choice but to become more and more integrated with China’s economy, and then political integration will happen gradually and organically given the shared cultural, historical and linguistic ties. I think there is some evidence that this process has already started and we are already seeing people in Taiwan who used to be pro-separatist but have now become “reunification realists”, seeing which way the trajectory of China is going.
My issue is, it kind of hinges on the west not pulling some unhinged shit. And with the wests “leadership” is a bunch of Nazi man children, pedophiles, and rapists, I don’t imagine they won’t. Like, what happens if one day we wake up and the US is like “hey look at all these nukes we snuck into Taiwan!” Or some such shit.
The West is going to do unhinged shit no matter what. I am certain that Chinese strategic planning takes that into account.
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Don’t worry about that. Japan is militarizing in preparation to invade Taiwan. The PM is just manufacturing consent.
Once Japan does, China will have the right to defend its borders.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/12/13/japan/japan-missile-archipelago/
Japan recently moved some of their longer range missiles to their bases to the west, with enough range to hit Shanghai.
Western media loves portraying the PRC as being a huge loser because of the new Japanese PM, but on the contrary she may just kick off enough shit to lead to both reunification and possible denazification of Japan lol.
Of course the US and our lackeys are going to pull some shit, and just like everything else we’ve been pulling China will let us do it and then respond in a way that benefits them. We’ll look incompetent and aggressive, they’ll look capable and diplomatic. We’ll likely be providing them with the perfect opportunity and justification they need to force reunification, they just have to be patient.
One of the differences between the KMT and the DPP is that the former wants China’s capital to be in Taipei where as the latter would like it to be in Washington and failing that, now apparently, Tokyo.
china: “let’s see how taipei is going…”
“taiwan”: “we were better under japan than KMT!”
so…the western puppet prefers to be an indirect western puppet as a serfdom of japan more than being a direct western puppet?
How shit do you have to be to the point where Communists are “defending” (for lack of a better term) Chiang Kai-shek?
It might surprise you but the views on the KMT are not totally negative even on the mainland. They did after all fight the Japanese, and that is something that all Chinese people, communists or not, can unite around. This isn’t to excuse Chiang Kai-shek, he murdered a ton of communists before the war and then after the war instituted the white terror on Taiwan. But he was still a Chinese nationalist, unlike these separatist traitors who side with the Japanese colonizers.
KMT is still a political party in the political ecosystem of the PRC, actually it’s the oldest party and well-respected lol, tho it’s descended from the branch that defected from the faction that included Chiang who retreated to Taiwan.
(edit I realized my wording is weird. KMT in operation in the mainland split from the group that retreated to Taiwan)
I guess, but his appeasement policy he had before the war officially broke out leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I mean, I think there were good members of the KMT but Chiang wasn’t really one of them. Still, I’d like to see a reconciliation one day if itd be possible
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
