FIGHT AGAINST THE MIGHTY ONE

Taiwanese cherish their democracy, but they have never seen war and most do not remember what their current freedom cost. China, meanwhile, is determined to achieve unification, even by force

- NAMRATA BIJI AHUJA/Taipei

Lu Ji-hua, 60, has not lived outside her zip code—Taipei 114. Her father, Lu Deh-hua, was born in China’s Zhejiang province in 1925, and as a young man, he enlisted in the army of the Republic of China. In 1949, the Kuomintang government was defeated by cadres of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War. Kuomintang leaders retreated to Taiwan with two million people, including six lakh soldiers. Lu Deh-hua was one of them.

Before he boarded a ship to Taiwan, he witnessed the horrors inflicted by the People’s Liberation Army. He never told the war stories to his daughter, who was born in Taiwan when he was 38.

“My father left his family behind and started a new family after he met my mother who was Taiwanese,” said Lu Ji-hua. Marriages between mainlanders and islanders were not uncommon, and like many other families, Lu’s family, too, was integrated into what Taiwan is today—the only Chinese-speaking democracy in the world. Her father is no more. Fewer than a hundred Kuomintang veterans who fled China are alive now. For the second, third and fourth generations in Taiwan, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is the voice of Taiwanese nationalism. The younger generation does not identify with China and does not want even peaceful unification.