Stop blaming the DPP for China's maliciousness

Somehow a bunch of drums one could beat seems appropriate

In recent weeks, a spate of opinion pieces have come out that lay out three very dangerous ideas: call for Taiwan to roll over and obey China as though it's the only possible option; romanticize the Ma Ying-jeou administration as some sort of golden era for Taiwan; and blame everyone but China for China's intentional maliciousness toward Taiwan.

You can read some examples in the New York Times, by former Minister of Culture and author Lung Ying-tai, and by some so-called analysts from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Foreign Policy, if you find them readable. It was a struggle, to be sure. 

Fortunately, these articles have received some sort of pushback. Unfortunately, although I like the Taipei Times, it doesn't have the readership of the New York Times or Foreign Policy, though those who meaningfully care about Taiwan surely include it among their regular news sources. This is (almost) as it should be: the original opinionators have every right to have and speak their minds, however misguided, and anyone can respond in disagreement. I only wish that the pushback would get as much press as the people who disseminated the original problematic views. 

All three of these opinions are problems for the same reason -- they blame the wrong people, and thus lay out a course of action that would utterly destroy Taiwan. I don't know whether this is due to the age-old problem with Taiwan "experts" pretending the Taiwanese electorate is still divided on whether or not China is a trustworthy negotiating partner (they aren't) because that sort of tension keeps them -- the analysts -- relevant, or they themselves being part of the anti-Taiwan opposition. The latter is certainly true in the case of Lung, who served under President Ma. 

Perhaps they're simply not informed about why China seemed friendlier when Ma was president and would probably be friendly again under a hypothetical future KMT administration. This is somewhat understandable, as a surface-level understanding of the mechanics of Chinese manipulation and KMT collaboration with Taiwan's only enemy implies that KMT politicians are better negotiators when it comes to dialogue with the CCP. Of course it looks like that! If they weren't, why would China be so much friendlier when they were in power? 

To this end, Lung says:

For decades, Taiwan and China were deeply estranged and essentially in a state of war. But after the Cold War, relations gradually thawed. They were at their best during the presidency of Ma Ying-jeou, of the Kuomintang, from 2008 to 2016. The Kuomintang emphasizes cooperation with China as a way to ensure Taiwan’s stability and prosperity.

Under Mr. Ma’s administration, exchanges in academia, culture and commerce flourished, culminating in his historic meeting in 2015 with President Xi Jinping of China. It seemed, after decades of hostility, that reconciliation was possible.

I see this echoed by others, as well: 

The Foreign Policy piece also begins by blaming Lai, calling him "hard-charging". I'm a far bigger fan of Tsai than I am of Lai: Tsai was calculating, smart, and tended to stand back, letting her policies and accomplishment speak for themselves. Lai's policies, however, are not fundamentally different even if his rhetoric is slightly more blunt. Both of them have always supported Taiwan's independence; this was never a secret, and the people elected them knowing this. 

That said, let's focus on Ma. The fundamental misunderstanding here is reading the China-Taiwan rapprochement as some sort of accomplishment of Ma's, not an intentional Chinese manipulation that made it seem as though Ma's approach were somehow superior. Forces within Taiwan -- business interests, mostly, and some traitorious politicians -- have also acted intentionally to make it seem as though the KMT is better for Taiwan-China relations than the DPP due to some imaginary flaw with the DPP's approach to China. 

Ma was the opposite of an independence supporter (he was, and remains, a filthy unificationist), but his stated policies, for the most part, weren't that different from the DPP's. The DPP has never been less open to trade or dialogue with the CCP than the KMT; the problem is that the CCP refuses dialogue with the DPP but accepts the same offers from the KMT. They further undermine the DPP by snubbing their repeated offers of dialogue by meeting with KMT officials instead. Let me repeat: every DPP president -- Chen, Tsai and Lai -- has re-iterated their openness to dialogue with the CCP and trade with China. 

It's not the DPP causing rifts, it's the CCP. 

It's worse than it sounds, too. Although I'm not quite finished, I've been reading André Beckershoff's Social Forces in the Re-Making of Cross-Strait Relations (review forthcoming). Beckershoff lays out a devastating case for China's intentional smearing of DPP presidents as "the problem", making it seem as though they aren't open to or capable of initiating or engaging in any discussions, let alone peace talks or mutually agreeable rapprochement. 

In fact, the CCP was able to sidestep DPP presidents, making them seem like bigger 'troublemakers' than they have been, by engaging instead with the KMT directly, as though they were the ruling party even when they weren't. Beckershoff says of the Chen years: 

The DPP's limited success, however, was not for lack of initiative: after first overtures beginning with Chen's election in 2000, the government proposed negotiations on a variety of technical issues from 2004 onwards, but as the party-to-party platform between the KMT and CCP emerged in the same time frame, the Chinese government could afford to stall, decline or even ignore the overtures of the Taiwanese government. 

Beckershoff goes on to give examples of the CCP, with the KMT's help, deliberately undermining all attempts at dialogue with the Chen administration, from tourism (a KMT-CCP Forum directly undermined agency-to-agency talks between Taiwan and China), to agriculture (the CCP directly invited at least one farmers' association to China without talking to the Taiwanese government), to trade (China refused to engage with TAITRA as it framed Taiwan-China trade as international, not domestic) and direct flights (again, a KMT-CCP forum enabled final-stage negotiations with the Taiwanese government to stall). Those are just some examples.

This pattern has continued under Tsai and Lai, with KMT officials, including Ma Ying-jeou himself, visiting China with the purpose of removing the need for the CCP to engage with the DPP, thus undermining the DPP and making it seem as though the KMT are simply 'better' at handling China. The truth is that the CCP wants the KMT or their lapdogs, the TPP, to win elections, and thus makes it seem as though the DPP are the problem. 

If the KMT truly supported Taiwan, rather than being focused on Taiwan-as-China, they would let DPP goverments do their job vis-a-vis China and not intentionally get in the way.

Wang Hung-jen and Kuo Yu-jen also point this out: 

Lung romanticizes the so-called “golden era” of cross-strait relations under former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), but fails to mention that this era coincided with a more benign Chinese foreign policy under then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and the early, still-cautious phase of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) rule....

The conditions that made diplomatic and economic detente possible no longer exist. Xi’s China is now more assertive, more authoritarian and more willing to use military and economic coercion. The idea that Taiwan can simply return to the “status quo” ante by embracing Beijing’s preferred narratives is at best naive, at worst, a prescription for strategic vulnerability.

Many Taiwanese today view the Ma administration’s overly deferential policy toward Beijing as one of the root causes of Taiwan’s current economic overreliance on China and the hollowing out of local industries.

The so-called “diplomatic truce” turned out to be an illusion, one that collapsed the moment Taiwan elected a government unwilling to parrot Beijing’s “one China” principle. Beijing’s punitive diplomatic and military responses were not triggered by provocation, but by Taiwan’s assertion of democratic choice.

Exactly. Ma was "successful" not because he was a great negotiator, but because he was a CCP collaborator and unificationist. The CCP wanted him to succeed in "rapprochement", so he did. It was never about Ma being great at his job (he wasn't), it was always about China supporting someone willing to sell out Taiwan. 

And make no mistake that Ma was and remains a unificationist. He and the KMT framed rapprochement as an economic benefit, something apolitical. It never has been. His vice-president and co-traitor Vincent Siew gave away the game all the way back in 2001 -- it was never apolitical,  but always with the goal of eroding Taiwan's sovereignty:

Siew developed the abstract framework of "economics first, politics later" into a set of concrete initiatives....the mutual trust engendered by this process wouuld also entail the potential for positive integration, a "step by step integration of politics", and thus pave the way for a "sharing of sovereignty" in the long term.

In what way could this ever be good for Taiwan, if it wants to remain self-governing and sovereign, which it does? Is this really adroitness on the part of Ma Ying-jeou, or simply China being friendlier to the administration that wanted to give away Taiwan?

The Ma administration did not respect Taiwan's sovereignty, and the progress made in economic ties and freer travel always came at a price. Ma and his people called them apolitical -- it's just about the economy, they said -- but Siew made it plain long before Ma was elected: this was never, ever apolitical. Unification had always been the goal.

With the KMT, it still is. 

Beckershoff also offers some fascinating dissections of cultural and historical ties between Taiwan and China being presented as a grassroots consensus when it was manufactured by the political and capital class, and the instrumentality of business associations in pushing pro-China policies for their own profit and benefit, not the good of Taiwan per se. Those will come up in my review, but I wanted to mention them here as they're tangentially relevant to this very false idea of what rapprochement under Ma was and most definitely was not. 

Beckershoff points out how so much of this was simply China's doing: 

Preferential policies have been assumed from the KMT-CCP Forum...are merely the announcement of unilateral measures taken by the PRC designed to benefit Taiwanese citizens travelling to or living in China as well as enterprises operating there. Delegating the announcement of preferential policies from the party-to-party channel to the Straits Forum entails an effect of obscuration: while in fact, these unilateral decisions are a double-edged generosity of the CCP that is conditional on upholding the 1992 consensus, their announcement at the KMT-CCP Forum make them appear as the outcome of negotiations between these two parties; their announcement at the Straits Forum, however, bestows on them an aura of inclusive grassroots cooperation, designed to contribute to the universalisation of these measures. 

It's also worth pointing out that if the Ma years were a "golden era" for Taiwan, then the Sunflower Movement would have never happened. It wouldn't have had to. 

I lived in Taiwan during the Ma years, and I never felt them to be any sort of golden age. I worried often about the suppression of true grassroots protests (though these various social movements did eventually overcome attempts to sideline them and promote the KMT and CCP's vision of a shared culture, economy and even sovereignty). I worried about filthy unificationists intentionally buying up Taiwanese media to promote pro-China editorial lines. I worried about black box politics, where China's ultimate control of the KMT was obscured by false claims that economic rapprochement was "apolitical". 

In fact, I would call the Ma years the eight worst years Taiwan has lived under since democratization. I'd call him the worst elected president Taiwan has ever had. All he ever did was undermine Taiwan. It's true that in the last few years, I've grown worried about China (not Taiwan, not the US) starting a war. But during the Ma years, I was worried about something far scarier: that Taiwan's own government would sell out their country, and there wouldn't be a goddamn thing anyone could do about it. 

It was not a good time. It was anxiety-inducing, just in a different, arguably worse, way. 

When opinionators praise Ma Ying-jeou, the other edge of that tends to be criticism of Tsai Ing-wen or Lai Ching-te. That's what Chivvis and Wertheim did in Foreign Policy. Rather than quoting them, here's a big chunk of Yeh Chieh-ting's rebuttal:

Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions in exchange for Chinese restraint, or some kind of brokered one-shot resolution — rest on the fantasy that Beijing wants peace and just needs a polite nudge. There is no evidence for this. For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has steadily escalated its military threats, cyberattacks and diplomatic isolation of Taiwan regardless of who is in power in Taipei or how careful they are with their words. When Beijing says it would use all means to annex Taiwan, “by force if necessary,” it is clear that it sees its goal as more important than peace.

Therefore, Lai’s recent language, including his description of China as a “foreign hostile force,” is not a wild provocation, but rather a blunt acknowledgment of reality. Beijing flies fighter jets across the median line of the Taiwan Strait, simulates blockades and treats Taiwan as a rogue province to be absorbed. Lai is simply responding to years of coercion. If Taiwan stating the facts “angers” China, that is a problem with China’s ego, not Taiwan’s messaging.

Telling the US to “rein in” Taiwan unilaterally does not signal to Beijing any goodwill to be reciprocated. It signals to Beijing that threats work — and that Washington would cave if pushed hard enough.

The recent rise in cross-strait tensions is not a result of Lai’s rhetoric. It is the product of Beijing’s relentless “gray zone” operations — cyberattacks, economic coercion and military harassment that now includes near-daily incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. This is not theoretical brinkmanship. It is real-world intimidation, and it deserves to be called what it is.

Honestly, I couldn't put it better than this. Lai is not a provocateur. He's not wrong about China -- they are an enemy. They are undermining Taiwan. They are a danger. They are threatening war and annexation. He's simply not wrong, and China is the bad guy here. All they have to do is stop. Taiwan has done nothing wrong; there is nothing for Taiwan to change. Or is it wrong to call out Chinese warmongering for what it is?

Lai isn't wrong, either, to take a harder line on Chinese influence in Taiwanese civic discourse, military spies and political influence. It's no secret that China has wormed its way into all of these spaces, and many military and political leaders are, in fact, spies and traitors. Is it somehow wrong for Lai to try and stop this? Is it wrong to do something about collaborators with a hostile force?

As Wang and Kuo point out: 

Lai’s characterization of China as a “foreign hostile force” was not a provocation; it was a diagnosis rooted in empirical behavior. To ignore Beijing’s actions while castigating Taipei’s rhetoric is to invert cause and effect.

As with praising Ma, so with criticizing Lai: all of this has been China's attempt to force Taiwan into annexation by any means necessary. It's no more a fault of Lai's than it is a strength of Ma's that China is horrible to the DPP, and friendly to the KMT (and the TPP -- don't lie to yourself about that). 

Chivvis, Wertheim and Lung all call for Taiwan to bend the knee. From Lung: 

With China growing in strength and the United States turning its back on the world, Taiwan is right to build up its military as a deterrence against attack. But the only way for Taiwan to peacefully secure its freedom is to somehow reconcile with China. Recent history suggests that is achievable.

Reconcile how? With a country that wants to annex and subjugate, end Taiwan's democratic system, and take away its promise of human rights, no less. 

Taiwan would very obviously have to give these things up in such a "reconciliation".  There are no "concessions" (in Chivvis and Wertheim's words) that Taiwan can offer which don't sell out its sovereignty. What can Taiwan possibly offer China that would end these tensions except a path to annexation -- the one thing Taiwan can't give? 

Wang and Kuo have it right again:

As for Lung’s conclusion — that without peace there can be no democracy — we suggest the inverse is equally, if not more, true: without democracy, there can be no peace worth having.

Peace that comes at the cost of agency, freedom and sovereign identity is not peace; it is submission.

I've said this before, but the problem isn't Taiwan's rhetoric, or the US, or anything other than the plain, ugly truth: the one thing China wants -- Taiwan's subjugation -- is the one thing Taiwan can never offer. There simply is no middle ground. Every "concession" from Taiwan will be treated as one more step in the march to Taiwan, Province of China. There's no agreement in which Taiwan can truly keep the one thing it values most -- its democracy, and by extension its promises of freedom and human rights -- if it surrenders to China.

Once that happens, all bets are off. Taiwan would not be able to exit such a future. If it allowed itself to be sucked into that black hole, it wouldn't be able to pull out, any more than Hong Kong was. That's what happens when you become a part of China. You don't get out. 

Suggesting it is basically telling Taiwanese people that what they want is not important, that their democracy is not important, their self-determination is not important, their human rights are not important. Either that, or the person saying it is stupid enough to believe that Taiwan could retain these things in any way, or back out of a surrender. 

Just as abysmal are Chivvis and Wertheim's suggestion that the US force Taiwan into "concessions" and agree to "some kind of One China". The whole point here is that Taiwan doesn't want China forcing it to give up its sovereignty, but somehow the US doing China's dirty work would be acceptable? 

Some critics in Taiwan love to point out that the US also represents a form of empire, and they're not wrong. Some also say that the US is the true provocateur of China's aggression against Taiwan, but in this they are wrong. Taiwan doesn't want a war the US sparked, they say. I agree, or I would, if the US were the villain here. Isn't it the same thing from a different angle -- US as world police, telling Taiwan what to do -- if the US pushes Taiwan to do something it clearly doesn't want to? If Taiwan did want to "make concessions" with China, ultimately selling out their own country, it would do so. If the Taiwanese people wanted it, they would vote accordingly. 

It also implies that Taiwan is unwilling to engage in dialogue. As above, that's not true: the problem is that China only wants dialogue to the end of annexing Taiwan, it doesn't want an open discussion. Yeh points this out too: 

Taiwan wants an open dialogue with China to talk about how Taiwan and China can coexist, whether as separate countries, the same country, or some type of special arrangement. Lai, as well as every Taiwanese president before him, has stated that Taiwan is open and eager to engage in dialogue with Beijing without any preconditions.

However, that is not the dialogue Beijing is interested in having. Beijing’s “dialogue” requires Taiwan to agree it is part of China, therefore agreeing with China’s conclusion, as an admission ticket to the negotiating table. China is only interested in talking about how Taipei is to execute Beijing’s foregone conclusion.

Lung implies that Taiwanese are disillusioned and don't want to fight for Taiwan. The data say otherwise, and her evidence, as Wang and Kuo point out, are a string of anecdotes and one unscientific online poll. This is willful ignorance from a Ma stooge. Even Chivvis and Wertheim understand that this is not something Taiwan wants, which Yeh notes voters have rejected in three straight elections. 

Do they care for Taiwan's democracy as much as China or the KMT do -- that is to say, not much at all?

I don't know if this frequent reframing of China's aggression is some sort of intentional disinformation. I don't think people like Chivvis, Wertheim, Oung and Lung have, say, meetings to discuss how to uplift Ma's legacy and shift the blame for China's threats on anyone but China, whether that be Lai or the US. 

I do think this narrative that Taiwan is the problem and the Ma years were a "golden age" of China-Taiwan relations was created by some entity (perhaps the United Front, but who knows), and I do think some misguided people believe it, because they don't fully understand the mechanics of what those relations entailed. That is to say, these commentators have bought a story that was manufactured for them. Perhaps Lung herself is one of the manufacturers, given her history with the Ma administration.

They don't know or care about the pressure from business groups, or unilateral CCP decisions presented as the outcome of negotiations with the KMT, or that the KMT sought to undermine the ruling DPP at every turn. They think the idea of a shared cultural heritage is some sort of natural thing, when it was an idea planted by the CCP and their collaborators. 

They block from their minds, if they ever really understood, that China was only friendly to Ma because Ma and Siew actively sought to deliver them the annexation they so desired -- all support was predicated on that Faustian bargain. 

And certainly, they bring the US into it in whatever way suits their argument. The US is by no means altruistic or a force for good, but in the China-Taiwan conflict, the villain is and has always been China and their collaborators in Taiwan.

Books by frauds make for the wildest reviews

From Wikimedia Commons

I like to read old books about Taiwan, and it doesn't get much older than this. In 1704, a man named George Psalmanazar, claiming to be a native Formosan and Christian convert, published A Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. It took England by storm, creating what was apparently a "Formosa craze", with French and German editions to follow. 

The first half or so of the book appears to be a long, unscientific and unphilosophical proof about the absolute superiority of the Christian religion. This part is skippable; it's not at all related to Taiwan and it's hardly rigorous. Psalmanazar (not his birth name) keeps self-complimenting the irrefutability of his logic. I'd say it was refutable, but that would be deigning to categorize it as logic at all. 

Following that, a series of short chapters outline what Formosans wear and eat, how their islands and cities are laid out, some very improbable designs for Formosan boats, various customs, money, marriage rites, their relation to Japan, their social classes and their government. He includes some notes about the grammar of "the Formosan language" -- apparently tones signify grammar differences? -- with an alphabet and translations of various Christian verses into "Formosan", which resembles pig latin. 

Obviously, Psalmanazar was a fraud. He was probably born in France, and had never been to Formosa or East Asia at all. It was all completely made up, based on basically nothing -- although he'd clearly incorporated some basic knowledge of China and Japan, even that included a fair amount of fabrication --there was never a Japanese emperor named "Tampousama", for example; the Emperor of Japan during the beginning of their isolationist period was Go-Mizunoo, aka Emperor Kotohito, and he did not die as a Christian exile in Goa. 

But there's something really fascinating about the fraud. Not the expected banalities of why he did it, although he seemed to me unlike a lot of impostors in that he wasn't so much pretending to be something he wished he really had been as simply seeking a false identity almost for the hell of it. His original goal had been to travel to Rome; the fame and society-crashing came later. Still, who cares? 

What interested me was how his fake culture and language, including fake social classes and a fake religion said a lot more about what people really do when they fabricate knowledge about people different from them. In fiction, so many characters are based on people the author knows, tweaked to be more interesting or appropriate to the story. So it was with Psalmanazar, whose fever-dream of East Asia seemed mostly to be based on a twisted representation of European culture, mixed with a heavy dollop of orientalism and finished off with descriptions of Generalized Foreign Lands and a sprinkle of random nonsense. 

Take his descriptions of the social structure and religion: he describes an absolute monarch named Mariandanoo, followed by a series of nobles and their wives, with illustrations of their clothing -- they all pretty much sounded like European-style nobility and their clothing were just weirder versions of things Europeans have been known to wear. The religion seemed to include one God, with a bunch of other gods described more as saints, and a holy book called the Jarhabadiond, is just an odd spin-off of Abrahamic religion with an added pagan element of worshipping celestial bodies. The language sounds vaguely Indo-European: a general is a carillan, a poorhouse is a caa tuen pagot ack chabis-collinos, and fictional cities includes Chabat and Pineto. Marriage is Groutacho. Some words appear to be just weird-ized Asian-sounding things, such as the fictional islands of Peorko and Loctau. The alphabet looks like it sprang from the mind of someone who wanted to create a new writing system but couldn't quite get the Roman alphabet out of their head.  

Other words are just random nonsense: my favorite is the word for one hundred, ptommftomm (though taufb for the number one is fun too). You can read the extremely weird translation of the Lord's Prayer into fake Formosan on Wikipedia.

                           


In his later autobiography, Psalmanazar claims he was a linguistic prodigy in his youth and had considerable intellectual gifts otherwise. Perhaps -- his fake Formosan language does seem to have enough internal consistency to have come from a fairly intelligent mind. But it isn't particularly imaginative otherwise, and he was a known liar in other ways. 

Some elements, including close attention to astronomy and the name of the capital (Xternetsa) appear to be gleaned from what might have been public perception of Indigenous American cultures. A few ideas, coincidentally or not, are accurate to some of East Asia in general at that time, but not Formosa per se. One god-saint, Amida, is basically Japanese for Amitabha. 

Other elements, such as the descriptions of exotic animals and their uses, including the eating of snakes and use of skins as clothing, seems to be just generic foreign and exotic stuff. He claimed that Formosa had camels, lions, tigers, rhinocerots [sic], elephants and sea-horses, all tame and of service to people. Brendan and I agreed that by 'sea-horses' he probably meant hippopotamuses, but the idea of a tame seahorse that serves humans is more amusing. 

Showing that he hadn't even tried to do a little background reading to make his fakery more believable, he claimed that Formosans had "no knowledge of dragons". I'm not sure to what extent dragons exist in various Taiwanese Indigenous mythologies, but for the Chinese immigrants who were settling Taiwan by then, well...it's a bit weird to say they'd never heard of dragons.

So what does a spirited rando with some (but not a lot) of imagination do when he sets out to create a fake culture to pretend to be from? Apparently, it's to exoticize their own culture, throw in some random bits about far-away peoples circulating in the general social consciousness of the time, put the whole thing through a weird-izer and sprinkle some gibberish on top. 

At least, of course, when someone can't be bothered to think beyond what they already know to come up with something truly unique. 

Some of Psalmanazar's fabrications are weirdly true, if only by coincidence. For instance, he describes the capital Xternetsa as being near a large mountain "which abounds with many wholesome springs", which is technically true of Taipei. He describes an extremely sexist social hierarchy in which men can have multiple wives but women are restricted to the home without her husband, except for the first wife. This was actually the way many Chinese settler families operated in Taiwan at that time -- although I'm not sure if even the first wife could go out in those cases -- but that's because patriarchy is a common and unsurprising facet of many cultures. He wasn't describing something unique or exotic so much as pretty basic ingrained sexism. 

Once again, Psalmanazar shows us that most people, when trying to be imaginative, just end up repeating some distorted or lightly fictionalized version of what they already know. It's interesting, I suppose, at least for what that tells us about how we view the world through our own cultural lenses and often don't even realize it. 

The lack of curiosity from someone claiming brilliance was also, well, something. Here's a conversation I had with Brendan about it: 

Me: The thing is, he could have been so much more believable if he'd just read up a bit more on the part of the world he was claiming to be from.

Brendan: Do you think he really cared?

Me: Not rea---

Brendan: Well there ya go.

I suppose what surprises me is that this research, even if he didn't care, would have helped him perpetuate the farce awhile longer. Toward the end he starts discussing the massacre and general kicking-out of Jesuits from Japan around 1614, which did happen. It's so otherwise inaccurate, however, that it not only seems lazy to have not just included something based on verifiable accounts, but that it reads like a ticking time bomb with Psalmanazar's name on it: enough people knew about the Dutch in Formosa and the flight of Christians from Japan that eventually, someone was going to point out that he was talking nonsense.

The thing is, in the early 18th century, Taiwan would still have been predominantly Indigenous, no? While it's a stretch to say that the Austronesian cultures of Taiwan had gender equality, they were certainly more progressive in this way than many traditional societies. You may recall that Chinese writing about Taiwan called it an "Island of Women" for this reason. So of all the places he could have chosen to fabricate a backstory, he picked the one where in many parts, the sexist tropes didn't quite fit. 

I'm not even getting into the stuff that falls under Generalized Exotic Foreign Barbarity Tropes. Think child sacrifice (apparently thousands of younger sons were sacrificed in Psalmanazar's Formosa every year, and it's implied that the priests eat them), wearing metal codpieces, animal skins, being warlike, you know, all that stuff. The most insulting passage in my opinion wasn't about cannibalism or codpieces or the straight-up gibberish language, but the passage on music. It's hard to select quotes because, like many men of his time, he used insufficient periods. I'll try, though:

It must be acknowledg'd that the Art of Musick was not known for many Years in any of the Eastern Countries, neither had they any certain method of singing and playing upon instruments of Musick, though they had then such as resembled the Drum and the Tabor, the Trumpet and the Flagellet, the Lute and Harp: But since the time that the Europeans came thither, they have learn'd the way of making and using these Instruments, which are now made almost after the same fashion as they are here in England.

Which...what?

For when they heard the Jesuits play upon the Organs in their Churches, and sing Musically after the manner of the ROmish Church, they were mightily taken with it, and inflam'd with a desire of learning the At of Musick, which now by their industry and ingenuity they have attained, tho' not in perfection, yet to such a degree as wonderfully pleases themselves; and therefore they commonly use both vocal and instrumental Musick at theur Marriages, Funerals, Sports and Recreations, and at their offering Sacrifices, chiefly when they Sacrifice Infants. 

Okay then.

Thus it is in Japan, but in the Island Formosa, the Natives still observe their ancient method of singing and playing upon Musical Instruments, if their way of singing may be call'd a method; for except some few particular Prayers, which are sing by the Priests only, the People sing all other things, every one after a different manner, according to his fancy; which they do not look upon as ridiculous, because they know no better...

Screw you, dude. 

Oh yeah, I almost forgot -- the entire book claims and then assumes thereafter that Formosa was annexed by Japan and was for all intents and purposes Japanese, and the nobles there went to Japan to pay respects to the emperor. That's quite funny, seeing as Japan did try to annex Taiwan a century or two before, but wasn't successful because they couldn't find a king or emperor to demand tribute from. Ha ha. 

Don't they know they could have just contacted this guy? Apparently he's the King of Formosa!

On the one hand, one of the goals of this book appears to be encouraging missionaries to go to Formosa to "civilize the pagans" (scare quotes are mine). On the other, he treats Taiwan as wholly separate from China. That's honestly a lot more than I can say for some of the analysts today who claim to understand Taiwan. but then write their own fictitious garbage through a completely Chinese lens, and in some cases read as insulting and dismissive of it in a modern sense as Psalmanazar was then. At least this guy's nonsense treated it like a unique culture. 

That might be my most controversial take on this short, weird book. The West knows more about Taiwan now than it did in 1704, but that doesn't mean it understands a lot. A combination of people having their own lives and not a lot of time to learn about places they'll never visit along with relentless propaganda from China have harmed attempts at increasing understanding about Taiwan. Many will therefore read some utter nonsense in, say, Foreign Policy, by people passing themselves off as Taiwan experts, and take it as fact because they don't know better or don't care.

It's a perpetual problem for places that aren't as well-known (or face a well-funded war machine trying to take them down) -- there will always be someone looking to benefit from others' ignorance about these places, or create narratives about them that suit their own ends, rather than the place they're talking about. 

Some of these modern fraudsters are Taiwanese, some aren't. Arguably the KMT has it in their DNA: they, along with the CCP, have been creating twisted or wholly fabricated narratives about Taiwan for their own ends for a few generations now, and don't seem to be stopping anytime soon. They've convinced far too many people that Taiwan is Chinese (it's not -- I'd even argue that it's not just politically distinct from China, but culturally as well) or that the people identify as Chinese (they don't), or that Taiwanese schools are founded on Confucian thought, for better or worse (they're not). 

We can laugh at poor old George Psalmanazar, smart and eccentric but not terribly creative and clearly deeply, deeply racist. But really, British society believed him in 1704 for reasons not entirely different for why people believe nonsense about Taiwan now.